Who’s the Voice? What’s the Hope?

By Mary Reiman

You might think, why should I care? It won’t happen in my house…or on my street…or in my neighborhood. Perhaps you think no one you know has ever experienced relationship violence or sexual assault. 

Are you sure?  It’s not something we talk about in casual conversation. Not often talked about in serious conversations. Not a topic anyone really wants to discuss. 

During my career, I was invited to speak about the importance of books and libraries and reading aloud with children. Everyone remembered their favorite children’s book. Stories and storytelling conjure up pleasant childhood memories. Those make for comfortable conversations.

There aren’t requests to the Speaker’s Bureau for presentations about how someone survived sexual assault, domestic violence, or incest. It’s not a comfortable conversation for a luncheon meeting. 

And yet sexual assaults and domestic violence happen. And it could have happened to any of us. I often think back to my college days. I was 17 years old, off to a college where I knew no one. I will be the first to admit, I was naïve. Mom said I was sheltered, growing up on a farm, in the era before cell phones or social media or any health class discussions about sexual assault or domestic violence. I look back on moments that could have so easily spun out of control and I would not have known who to turn to for support, guidance, kindness and empathy. 

For 47 years there has been a 24/7 crisis line in Lincoln for those who are desperate to hear a voice who cares, who understands, who knows how to help. In January 2007, the Rape/Spouse Abuse Crisis Center officially changed its name to Voices of Hope.  

Yes, we need to be talking about it. We need to be aware of where to find resources and caring individuals who counsel and advocate and provide support for victims of abuse. Those who will meet a victim in the emergency room. Those who offer support groups in safe, confidential, supportive environments. Those who help fill out protection orders and maneuver through the criminal justice system. 

More than 2200 cases were reported to Voices of Hope last year and yet that is a fraction of the number of actual cases. It isn’t just in college. It is in the workplace. It is in homes. Sexual assault and domestic violence permeate our world. 

Today begins an awareness campaign: Who’s the Voice? What’s the Hope? 

In the next few months, you will learn more about the depth and breadth of Voices of Hope by hearing the voices of hospital staff, community members, representatives from organizations who partner with Voices of Hope, as well as staff and survivors. 

Who’s the Voice?  We are. All of us using our voices to raise awareness of the services of Voices of Hope in Lincoln and the surrounding communities. You never know who might need this information.

What’s the Hope?  Scott Young articulates it quite clearly at the end of the video. “Hope of building a safe and positive future.”

Please donate to Voices of Hope on Give to Lincoln Day to support the crisis intervention which offers hope to those in need.  You or those you love may never need these services.  Consider donating as a way of saying thank you to the Voices of Hope staff for always being available to empower those who DO need help, advice, and legal services.

Also, please ‘SHARE’ this post so your friends on Facebook also have the opportunity to learn more about Voices of Hope. 

May we never need the services of Voices of Hope...but may we always support those who do.

Let us be the voices. Let us be the hope.  

https://www.voicesofhopelincoln.org/whos-the-voice.html

Time to decide: Dog or wolf?

By JoAnne Young

I have been thinking a lot over the past two years about dusk, that time of day when the sun sets but the darkness has not yet fully descended. 

 

The French have a soul-gripping phrase for it: “Entre chien et loup,” the time between dog and wolf, when the two can’t be distinguished from each other. 

 

Are we looking into the distance at friend or foe? The known or the unknown? Hope or fear? 

 

It’s a time when the darkness gathers its forces, when our shadows move into our very beings. The hour of metamorphoses when we go into waiting for the sun to finish its rounds lighting  the rest of the world and then return to us, bringing back hope and luminance. 

 

I used to think of dusk as a poetic time, a time of settling calm, of transition or transformation. 

 

But when I recently set out to photograph dusk on several evenings, I found it was more chilling than calming, more discordant than poetic. More confounding than serene. 

 

It’s something like the turbulence of adolescence, that age between the innocence of childhood and the reckoning of the adult world. 

 

And it’s a lot like what we have been living through the past two years, a time we couldn’t know what or who we could trust. Only worse. Because dusk has a definite beginning and end. The sun goes down, the light fades, the night descends and shows itself. This era of pandemic and politics seems a never-ending cycle.

 

As I am writing this, I am asking what I choose to see as I squint into the twilight of the early 2020s. More years of the darkness that seems to surround us now? Or is that light, just a few hours, days, months ahead?

 

At this moment, I don’t know. I’m hoping to discover a clear direction by the end of these paragraphs. 

 

Amy Leach, in “Things That Are,” writes that most plants will bend over backwards to cooperate with reality. They will bend and warp toward the light. 

 

Birds make long arduous flights to find the warmth, then make their way back again as the cold departs in their homeland. Or they stay put, and wait out periods of difficulty, knowing the spring and summer will return.

 

The daffodils and tulips and tree buds don’t sit in the ground, complaining about the lingering cold. They show up in all their brightness, in spite of the risks of a mid-April snow. 

 

Now that I think about it, I instinctively ditched the idea of taking photos of the dusk. I turned my camera toward an abundance of pelicans bobbing and flying at Pawnee Lake near Lincoln, despite the wind gusts and 40-degree temps. 

I have welcomed the goldfinches to the feeder outside my front window. 

 

I have planted pansies and watched the clematis I thought had fallen prey to the frozen and dry winter grow leaves of green. And I leave the hope open that any day now I can trust the weather enough to plant more grass and blooming plants. 

 

They have survived. They have decided on dog, friend, hope and the known. 

 

Rainer Maria Rilke says it this way: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going.”

 

I have to think, maybe I can see the light out there somewhere, too. 

March Madness: In Retrospect

By Marilyn Moore

Yes, I know, it’s no longer March…but some moments of March Madness linger, and I must write to bring them to some kind of order in my mind.  This is not a blog about basketball, though who among us was not just delighted with the madness of the men’s basketball team from St. Peter’s University making it to the Elite 8?  A twenty-first century David and Goliath story, if ever there were one.  Bird walk….I wonder, are there any David and Goliath stories where David is a woman?  I know…every single day, just ask any woman…a topic for another blog at another time….

Back to March.  The war in Ukraine, the invasion by Russian forces into the country of Ukraine, dominated the airwaves.  The absolute horror of it all.  Captured by brave reporters, broadcasters, and photo journalists, the images are searing.  I cannot forget the pregnant woman, carried on a gurney out of the hospital that had just been bombed, and the photo the next day of her and her just-born baby, followed by the news a couple of days later that both had died.  I still see, and hear, the video of the woman, preparing to leave her bombed out apartment, but stopping to play one last piece of classical music on the grand piano, covered with dust and debris, but still standing.  The masses of (mostly) women and children and elderly, standing in lines at border crossings, at train stations, leaving their homes and cities, hugging husbands and fathers who were staying behind to take up arms against the Russian soldiers.  The utter devastation of blocks and blocks and blocks of homes and shops and schools and churches and hospitals in Mariupol.  And now, in April, but killed in March, the civilians in Bucha, a massacre, a war crime.  

And I know, peeling back all the layers and seeing this war for what it is, that this is what war always looks like.  The weapons may have changed, but the death and destruction has not. This is what the Civil War, and WWI, and WWII, and the Vietnam War, and the wars in Syria and Afghanistan looked like.  We see it now, because it’s on our screens, almost 24/7.  Journalists who take life-threatening risks (and at least six have been killed), with technology that beams images and words to our screens large and small at all hours of the day and night, reveal to us the ugliness and pain and devastation that war always is.  

And peeling back the layers still further, I look for what may be an end to this…and I can’t see it.  The military and political leaders predict a war that lasts for a long time.  I remember my friend, asking, in the early days of this war, “Can Putin just do this?”  It appears he can…and the world really has no way to stop a bully with a high tolerance for pain and nuclear weapons in his arsenal.  The images of this conventional war are terrible beyond description…and those of a nuclear war a thousand times worse.  I admire the united efforts of the NATO countries, the EU countries, indeed, most of the countries of the world who have applied sanctions to the Russian economy, even at great cost to their own economies and to their leaders’ re-election chances, and to the united efforts to provide military support and humanitarian support to the nation and people of Ukraine.  I just don’t know if it’s enough….or if anything is enough, to stop the slaughter.

In our own country, the madness of March played out in the Senate hearings on the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson for appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court.  These hearings are a relatively modern-day invention, not required by the Constitution.  But they have become a tradition, and now seem to be an opportunity for the Senators to generate media minutes for their own re-election campaigns, and for nominees to demonstrate grace under pressure.  This one, however, reached a new height, or depth, of absurdity.  A senator, asking a nominee for the Supreme Court, in a nation whose constitution specifically says that Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion, about her religious faith, and the depth of that faith.  A senator, asking a nominee for the Supreme Court, about a book found in the library of a private school on whose board she serves, a book that dares to tackle the subject of racism, and bringing the book, in a larger size than any teacher ever needed to use to read to a group of students, to use as a prop at the hearing.  More than one senator implying that there is something umseemly and disqualifying about serving as a public defender…seeming to ignore the Constitutional guarantee that all persons are entitled to legal counsel if charged with a crime.  That public defender role is one that is essential in assuring the system of justice is indeed just…a requirement that some senators, even though they be graduates of schools of law, seemed to have forgotten.

Peeling back not many layers at all, it’s clear to me that we were watching racism and sexism in action…again.  The nominee, highly qualified by every standard, including the evaluations of conservative organizations, subjected to irrelevant questions and uninformed opinions.  Judge Jackson was harassed, shouted out, interrupted, and treated as the launchpad for some senators’ sound points.  Seldom do I agree with Ben Sasse, but I think he was accurate when he said the presence of television cameras lead to a display of jackassery behavior.  (Not sure that’s a dictionary approved word, but everyone who reads it knows exactly what he meant.) It was demeaning, insulting, belittling behavior; it was racist.  And I have to wonder, in the years to come, when those senators (47 of them) who voted against her nomination are asked what it was like to be in the US Senate when the first African American woman was confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice, what will they say?  

And then, of course, there was the slap heard ‘round the world, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock for Rock’s comment about Smith’s wife’s hair at the Oscar’s award ceremony.  I have nothing to add to the millions of words written about that, but the best words I read were those written by Leonard Pitts, columnist extraordinaire, and Marthaellen Florence, wise woman of Lincoln.  Lots of layers on that incident; Pitts and Florence pull them back well.

The hopefulness of March madness, if I look closely enough, comes from looking for the very core of strength within those layers.  President Zelensky is a sterling leader of his country under siege.  He brings together the best of encouraging his people, organizing the military and the very human resources of the Ukrainian people, advocacy for Ukraine in the global community, strong and clear language about what is at stake, and relentless persistence in pursuing what the country needs to survive.  His language is clear and compelling, and his is now a recognizable and face and voice around the world.  And the world responds, from the billions of dollars of military aid given to Ukraine from the US, to the literally countless donations large and small to organizations aiding the now more than four million Ukrainian refugees.  And it is my hope that those godawful images of war are such that as a human race we figure out a better way to live with one another, a better way to manage bullies.

The core strength of the Jackson hearings, of course, is Ketanji Brown Jackson herself.  We witnessed a demonstration of knowledge of the law, commitment to the Constitution, resolve, patience, determination, and grace under pressure that certainly is what “judicial temperament” looks like.  The sheer joy and admiration on her daughter’s face, seated just behind and to the left of her mom during the hearing, is an image that lives in my mind, also…and is one of strength for the moment and for the future.  Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson gave tribute to the sisterhood, her group of friends formed as first-year college students who remain her close friends today, for the role these women have played in her life…and by extension, the role that friends play in all our lives.  Strength, indeed, to and through the core.  

March madness.  The month has passed for this year, but not the madness.  March will reappear in 2023, and basketball will be right there; perhaps there will be another St. Peter’s University to enthrall us with hope for the underdog.  All of that is good.  It is my prayer, though, that we shall not still be viewing the utter madness of war, unleashed by a bully on a neighboring country, and that the shameful hearing will be a part of our history, but no longer of our present.  My understanding of prayer is that usually prayers are answered because good and caring people get up and do the work...and I hope I have the strength and the courage to recognize the work that needs to be done, and to do it.  

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A simple blog about spring

 By Mary Kay Roth

Birdsong dazzles on these early mornings at Holmes Lake with the trill and tweet of a dawn choir calling out over an enchanted land newly baptized and rebirthed.  

The glories of April days are upon us, mystical days, when we watch the world around us move from iron-gray to fairyland green. Or parsley green.  Glade green. Emerald green. (I can never get the description of that color quite right.)

Pairs of red-tailed hawks court, robins twitter and bounce through the boughs, skeins of loud-mouthed geese punctuate a high blue sky. Resilient worms wiggle across our path.  Grasslands start to whisper their intentions.  

And the rhythms of earth throb with the pulse of spring.

Yes, I know, so many exquisite words, poems and songs have been written about this season – from the likes of Thoreau to Mary Oliver to Simon and Garfunkel. 

But that doesn’t matter to me on this luminous Sunday, walking around a lake I love on a morning that feels like a love song drunk on dew.

Because – it’s just this simple – I want to write a blog about spring. 

Despite the embarrassment of a shotgun-toting governor’s race. Despite all the lingering variants of the ongoing coronavirus.  Despite the shock of Ukraine.  

Spring still shows up, like a fizzy tonic that drizzles fresh, warm rain upon us, opens blossoms, thaws the land and greens the grasses.    

And the light, oh god, the light washing over us, “a light that only exists in spring,” says Emily Dickinson – as we track the arc of the sun creeping across the equator line, shifting toward the north. 

And the smell, oh god, the smell, equal parts grass and earthen breath, rain and dirt, a fragrant balm that no measure of scientific genius can reproduce.

Admittedly, we live in a collectively exhausted world, overextended, and stressed.  Life is messy with the inevitable dichotomy of good times and bad.  Who cares that while the planet spins around at more than 1,000 mph – it tilts.  

And yet – despite the weariness of our world – our plains and prairies and forests and parks are all shaking off winter’s frozen grip, business as usual.  “Come in, we’re open…” 

Some call this season a quiet awakening, but I find it rowdy and busting out all over. Woodpeckers are drumming to the beat of an orchestra playing sweet harmonies of cardinals, purple finches, song sparrows – and, just this morning, a meadowlark.  

Anytime soon we’ll hear the spring peepers who sing from every wet patch of ground in the woods – marvel at determined dandelions sprouting practically everywhere – witness the bare, leafless branches of maple trees beginning to cast their reddish glow. Soon every living tree in our town will burst into leaf. 

Spring is green and tender and shockingly alive. 

It is bike racers and marathoners in training.

It is muddy ground and flowing creeks and sandhill cranes dancing in the Platte.  Lawnmowers roaring out of hibernation while flannel-lined coats pile high in the back of the closet. 

It is saying goodbye to those little grayish wonders, the juncos – hello to robins and wrens and warblers.

Spring is balmy breezes – sunlight on our skin – cotton sheets and chimes and barbecue grills – the first crocus poking up – hands in the dirt dug deep down.

So, by god, I will write-sing-shout about spring, because I believe we lose something essential if we fail to celebrate the stunning fact that life is fiercely jump-starting all over again. 

Please join me today as I climb a tree, sow seeds, spring-clean the heck out of the cobwebs, curl bare toes deep into the beginnings of fresh grass – as I open my windows wide and holler to the heavens, “welcome back.”

Join me at dawn … as I turn my face skyward, on this most glorious of all spring mornings, feel the grace of the sun and offer a joyously noisy, deafening, riotous prayer of thanks. 

Because in this most sacred season of dreamers and imaginers – this season of those who still believe in silly wonder and those who still believe in hope – we have been given a precious gift. Despite the darkest of dark days, yes indeed, light and life do come around again.  

On Ambiguous Loss - Things We Didn't Know We'd Miss

by Penny Costello

March is Brain Injury Awareness Month, and our Dear Readers may know from past blogs I’ve written that I experienced a mild traumatic brain injury, aka a concussion after a fall I took in November 2014.  While I’ve learned much in these past seven years about living with an invisible injury, a recent presentation by Dr. Kelly Tamayo in Omaha on OvercomingAmbiguous Loss provided a construct and opened a portal to a new dimension of understanding and awareness.

Dr. Tamayo’s talk was geared to family members of people who have experienced traumatic brain injury. But the term can describe any situation where a relationship is lost or significantly changed, but the person is still there.

Dr. Pauline Boss, Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, coined the term 'ambiguous loss' in the 1970s, when many families had fathers and brothers in the military, missing in action or being held in prisoner of war camps in Viet Nam and Cambodia. Ambiguous loss is a loss that has no resolution, no finality.

When a person dies, they are no longer physically present, the body is gone, and there is usually closure that comes with acceptance of the loss. It's not as clear-cut when a person experiences an injury or illness that alters their ability to function as they previously had, which happens with brain injury, addiction, mental illness, and dementia. That person and the people in the family and friend circles experience ambiguous loss. The body is still present, but psychologically, the person is absent or significantly changed. It’s a loss without closure.

In learning of this concept framed by my experience with brain injury, I gained a new level of acceptance and understanding. Someone put a construct around something I’ve been living in for years, and when that happened, that construct “Clicked” into place, bringing epiphanies that helped clarify things I’ve struggled to make sense of. There’s a feeling of  "Yes! I knew this all along, but I didn’t put it together like this. Click. Now it makes sense!"

There more I absorb it, the easier it becomes to reconcile the abilities I had before the injury with the loss of some of those abilities or the lack of ease in accessing them now. And it’s not my struggle alone. It extends to my wife, my family, and my friends, who have experienced the changes in aspects of who I was before to who I am now. They have had to adapt and adjust as I have.

But in the face of loss, much has been gained. Since learning of the concept from Dr. Tamayo’s presentation and after talking about it with my wife, Kate, it has opened a new door to communication and conversation that we didn’t have before. We’ve both experienced ambiguous loss - for her, living with the impacts of my fall and subsequent post-concussion syndrome, and for me, living with her past battles with depression and continued life with a chronic pain condition. We each have challenges that drain energy and focus that we’d prefer to channel into our relationship, but some days we just can’t.

I describe ambiguous loss as missing the things you didn’t know you’d miss. But, the newfound ability to articulate it and talk about it has deepened our mutual understanding, compassion, and acceptance.

While Dr. Tamayo’s presentation is geared toward family members and caregivers of brain injury survivors, she opens her talk with other sources of ambiguous loss. Divisive political views, opinions, and beliefs about vaccinations, masking, rants on Facebook about any number of issues – all of these can shift the axis, causing changes or loss in relationships that are difficult to navigate.

In this 10-minute video on YouTube “The Myth ofClosure-Ambiguous Loss In a Time of Pandemic” Pauline Boss, echos these sentiments. Through the pandemic, we’ve experienced clear losses of life, loss of income, loss of certainty, and predictability that define our comfort zone. She also describes the losses of trust in the world as a safe place, trust in our leaders, trust in science, and loss of our ability to move freely about. Going into our third year of the pandemic, there is no definitive end in sight, no clear path to closure.

Dr. Boss explains that we live in a culture that exemplifies mastery over our challenges. The achievement of closure is the goal in a culture where resilience means never letting a loss or challenge get you down. We must prevail, we must recover, we must get over it. Anything short of that reflects a weakness or a character defect.

But when someone is living with their own or a loved one’s mental or chronic illness, addiction, dementia, or traumatic brain injury, encouraging them to find closure and get over it is not supportive. And it’s not kind.

My intention here is not to focus on grief and loss, but rather to shine a light on a path forward. To move beyond loss and grief we must first acknowledge and accept that a loss has occurred.

In a culture grappling with the mayhem of a pandemic with no end in sight, with political divisiveness that some refer to as a cold civil war, and the escalating conflict in Ukraine, maybe one piece of common ground we can share is the acknowledgment of our ambiguous loss of certainty, predictability, safety. Not to mention the weariness and fatigue that accompanies all that. We need to find our better angels, to dig deep, and come out with kindness and compassion toward ourselves and others.

Dr. Boss suggests that a key to living with ambiguous loss is to develop the skill of “both/and thinking.” Allow for the possibility to both move forward in a new way and remember the person/situation/relationship that is missing.

In listening to Dr. Boss, I’ve gained a new appreciation for and understanding of resilience and ambiguity. She defines resilience as the tolerance of ambiguity. “Click.”

Dr. Tamayo encourages us to focus on our past accomplishments, to trust in our ability to endure and achieve resilience, to focus on the things we’re doing right, and on our basic daily care.

She encourages us to explore these questions:

•       Who do I want to be? 
•       Where was I going before this occurred?
•       Where do I want to be in (x) years?
•       How has this loss changed me? Does it have to? Has it changed my desires, beliefs, values, or plans?

While pondering these questions, accept the loss, embrace your wisdom, strength, courage and confidence.

You’ve got this. We’ve got this.

_________

In these times of Mayhem, there are a couple of songs that I find very uplifting, and I’d like to share them here:

Resilient, by RisingAppalachia – “Power to the peaceful…”

Rise Up, performed byJordan Rabjohn and Katherine Hallum (mother and son duet – A-Mazing) – “All we need is hope. And for that we have each other…”

 

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March Musings

 by Mary Reiman

March seems to be such an in-between month. Not winter, not spring. Not warm, not cold. The sweet aroma of spring after the rain last week, the bite in the air from swirling snowflakes this week. March zigs and zags and so do I... 

So, with thanks to those who send me on the quest to read and reflect and ponder … 

March Musings... 

It’s been two years. The CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline (who knew there was a CDC Museum, let alone that they had such a concise timeline). Here are several of the highlights from the timeline: 

* March 11, 2020    The World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic. 

* March 13, 2020    President Donald J. Trump declared a nationwide emergency. 

* April 13, 2020      President Trump announces that the U.S. will cease funding to the WHO.

* January 21, 2021  President Biden resumes funding to the World Health Organization. 

We have learned so much...about ourselves and about others...in the past two years. 

March 8th was International Women’s Day. This day had even more meaning this year as we pay tribute to women around the world. There is truly no more important time than now to acknowledge the courage and tenacity we see in the faces of the women leaving their homes, their husbands, their communities to take their children to places of safety. Hopefully, to places where kind and generous citizens of the world will open their arms, providing food, shelter and love. 

 

March 4th post from Heather Cox Richardson (thanks Ross) 

“Every day, people write to me and say they feel helpless to change the direction of our future.  I always answer that we change the future by changing the way people think, and that we change the way people think by changing the way we talk about things. To that end, I have encouraged people to speak up about what they think is important, to take up oxygen that otherwise feeds the hatred and division that have had far too much influence in our country of late. Have any of your efforts mattered? Well, apparently some people think they have. Last week, President Biden’s team reached out to ask if I would like some time with him to have a conversation to share with my readers.” 

Follow the continuation of this post along with her daily updates (free or paid subscriptions) at Letters from an American. 

March 7th ‘You Should Be Weary Right Now’ (thanks Susan) 

As we read and watch and pray about the issues in front of us this month, I find myself exhausted. And then I feel guilty. I have no reason to be tired or whine about my headache, so I found solace in these words from John Pavlovitz, in his post You Should Be Weary Right Now. “...That weariness is confirmation that your heart is working properly. It is your humanity responding to so much inhumanity around you.” 

February 27th Lincoln Journal Star asked for our thoughts. Have you filled out the survey yet? You must, you must! They want to know what issues are most important to us. If there had been a comment section, I would have asked that the next governor work to bring people together, not tear us apart. But alas, the survey focuses on key issues and it is well worth the 10 minutes it takes to fill out the form. Do I believe the gubernatorial candidates will actually read the results of the LJS survey? Hope springs eternal! You have until Tuesday, March 15th (the ides of March). Please fill out the Nebraska citizen survey and share your opinions. If not now, when?