George loved life and inspired all of us through this difficult time. He was most appreciative of all the support, love and encouragement that all of you showed him. He was a wonderful man.

Yesterday’s news from his wife. This “wonderful man” lived and died valiantly. His gift was two years of living life fully, making memories and reminding me that it is possible to “accept the things we cannot change” – even the worst of it.

We met 17 years ago, and disliked each other immediately. He and his young wife moved to the adjacent house, we shared a back yard. They were expecting their first child and my girls were 12, 8 & 5. When the baby arrived, one of mine announced: “she’ll be going to kindergarten the year Jennie goes to college”. I vividly remember thinking: “that’s ages away”. It wasn’t.

George and I politely warmed to each other over the years. It would have taken less time had we realised we disliked only the reflection of ourselves in each other. Then life happened. Another daughter was born, his girls grew, my girls babysat; the families grew closer and we shared the wisdom gleaned from parenting. Mindfully we were trying to give better than we got as children.

And we shared Joy; no accident her name. Joy blossomed into the kind of mother George knew she’d be when he’d decided to wait the years it took for her to agree marriage. She is a formidable woman, a well-loved child of parents who modeled patient, disciplined, and unmitigated love. She mothered her children and mine. I learned from her and George softened toward me.

They co-parented my children across the yard, through adolescent parties, romances and disappointments the likes of which you don’t share with your own parents. They delivered friendship, qualified by parental concern. They were the safety net that was once natural in extended families a century ago.

They are what I refer to as “family of choice”. Part of my personally appointed extended family. “You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family”. Wrong! You can create healthy and supportive families – and while George and I didn’t know it in our prickly phase, we shared a common mission: Healthy and happy daughters, well-armed for anything life throws their way.

It took until 2008 – for us to become friends. When I left for Ireland we shared talks about what was important. He spoke of how he loved my girls and he loved that his girls were loved by them. I admitted how hard it was for me to leave my daughters. How important it was for me to compose a life before going to my grave resentful. I wanted a life not characterised by my roles as daughter, wife and mother. He’d already pursued his PhD in History, remodeling his career and composing a life that allowed him to teach, and to have more time just being a husband and father. We talked about death and dying before it was relevant.

Perhaps it is only the Jews and the Irish who are comfortable in this melancholy place, but we were. The dying talk went from “what if” to “when” as I returned home to the heartbreaking news of his diagnosis.

Thank you George, for the honesty and the process you shared in this long goodbye. I am sorry it wasn’t longer. Thank you for arming your daughters and mine for the worst life has to offer. Thank you for giving our friendship a chance.

Thank you, especially, for the gift of Joy in all our lives.

One third of the way through the Artist’s Way with a new group I am once again reminded of the power of the process.

Daily writing, weekly quiet time and assignments are all designed to have you resurrect the creative children once shamed and quieted into the dutiful, responsible adults we have become.

And if you are a happy dutiful, responsible adult, stop reading.

If you ache for something to be better, new or different in your life, read on.

I encourage anyone who wants to rethink where they are now and where they are headed to pick up a copy of Julia Cameron’s work. It’s not for artist’s only. Most of the language and methods outlined here are hers. I facilitate groups based on her work – I owe my own creative recovery to the disciplines learned from her.

Let me share some of the insights from the group now having completed chapters on recovering a sense of safety, a sense of identity and a sense of power. Have we recovered them. No. Are we recovering? Yes.

Creative recovery is ongoing. It’s like living with a chronic disease. Diabetics watch their diets, take insulin if necessary; alcoholics abstain and go to meetings. We are recovering, though never cured, we are vigilant about self care. We learn to exercise disciplines that have worked again and again.

This group has arrived at such a place. We can no longer go back to bad habits and not know we are responsible for being stuck. It is no longer a secret that we keep ourselves from moving forward by being self critical, judging our efforts harshly or believing we can’t have or do what we wish. We know we can create a safe place to nurture our fledgling efforts at a new career, a better way of parenting, or behaving better in our relationships. This is the safe place to grow into the selves we might have been or are choosing to be.

We can, as Cameron points out, choose to “go sane”. It feels like going crazy, because getting unstuck is hard. We can nurture our new identity by banning the “poisonous playmates” and “crazymakers” from our lives. These are the outsiders who reinforce the negative beliefs we have. We can choose to think better of ourselves and support this when we surround ourselves with people who are positive. We have learned to remember that it is our job to do the work of changing – not to judge it.

And in our effort to take back our power – take control over the direction of our lives we learn that anger is our friend. “Not a nice friend, not a gentle friend, but a loyal friend”. We are learning to listen to our anger. We are learning to listen for the good things that come our way – the “answered prayers” the synchronicity that catches us off guard. We are learning that “luck” truly is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. We are preparing ourselves by listening for it with a different ear, believing that if we “show up”, do the work of taking small steps every day, we will move forward.

We are gently coaxing our creativity back from childhood when we knew anything was possible.

This is the work of the first three chapters and I encourage you to read along. Should you feel the discipline of a facilitated group would help your process, let me know. But try it first, take up the morning pages and see how the process works. In the language of the 12 step rooms: It works if you work it!

To join an Artist’s Way Group on-line, or here in Ireland, get in touch via the form to the right.

To learn more about the tools and the process which I call Personal Change Management – follow the link.