Journey Girl has Sycamore Friends

There we are — the three of us — Dave, Sue, and John under the big old apple tree in our back yard at 628 Edward Street in Sycamore, Illinois. We had a lot of fun in that back yard. Ball games galore, kick the can, Red Rover, Red Rover.  Snow forts were built, ran through sprinklers in the summer.

We moved there from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, when I entered First Grade at St. Mary Catholic School in ’49-50 and I graduated 8th grade before we moved on to Lansing, Michigan, a move us kids thought was disastrous.

The Jensen’s lived right next door to us in a log cabin type home. Our parents became very good friends with them. Merrill owned a local Tool and Die business his father had started and is still family owned by his son, Dan today. Ruby and Mom set the standard for at-home “mom-ism” and the children of each family knew darn well, just how accountable we would be held for our antics, good or otherwise.

David was the eldest Jensen son; then Dan, then Ronnie, and beautiful Nancy. I began babysitting for them when I was in 7th grade and got the most wonderful summer of my young life, being resident “sitter” at their wonderful home on Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I learned to waterski, palled around with the “big” high school kids. It was all a serendipitous time at my becoming a teen phase.

The lake-life really stayed in the family kids as grown-ups. I reunited with David through Facebook and came to know he resided in Fontana on the lake, serving law and order as a magistrate. I also came to enjoy his humor and rantings via Facebook. I am so sorry, he passed recently at too young an age, as did Ronnie, who had been away but returned to Sycamore with the sweetest white dog I ever saw. In one exchange we had on Facebook, he said he always liked that my dad gave him a special name, other than Ronnie. My dad did that for special kids.

I also got a glimpse into Dan’s life as busy business owner, but in love with his boat on the lake, his happy spot for sure, surrounded by his wife and children, and the parties they would have together. Ruby, the matriarch of the family, remains in their midst and gives them “the eye” when needed. Daughter Nancy, keeps good oversight on the going’s on and the health of her mother and also keeps me informed which I like.

Two other friend relationships that go all the way back to the ’50s I have also renewed through Facebook. While there are many hurtful communications that transmit these days via the Internet and Social Media, my gratitude for it is centered in the fact it keeps me in touch with friends and family.

Jean Virtue Ehman is one of those friends. She and her sister JoAnn were friends of mine just down the street a few homes. We played with dolls together, roller-skated on the rough sidewalks together, and colored on the front steps of our large front porch on many occasions. Her mother also made many of my 7th and 8th grade clothes, a fine seamstress from her own home front.

There’s the front steps that served me as “playhouse” many times. That’s my Grandma Heffron, who lived with my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, but came for month long visits at a time. In Journey Girl, I talk about the special times we shared as grandmother-granddaughter.

So another Sycamore friend I reunited with was Jim Tomlinson, who I think saw this photo in one of my Napkinwriter posts, and connected with me about it. He was really my big brother, Dave’s best friend, and was around us a lot.  He remembered the player piano that sat on the far wall of the dining room just inside this door and all the fun they had pumping out music to the “oldies” and John Phillips Sousa marches. The “oldies” in the 1950s meant songs from the ’30s and ’40s.

When we met up again through Facebook, I was still living in Michigan, but Jim lived in Berea, Kentucky not far from Lexington where Tom and I lived the first 12 years of our marriage. So we had things of interest to chat about on-line. Even more interesting to me was he also was an author and his wife Gin Petty a renown artist. It came to be, that our oldest daughter made a professional switch in her Optometry practice and low and behold, we all ended up moving to Lexington once again.

My memoir, JOURNEY GIRL, is truly about several themes, but one of them is — connections. I find throughout my life how sacred, mysterious, and fun these are. And how connection is important to me. These connections that lead back to Sycamore, Illinois, for me and still pop up as meaningful in my life today, I feel are life-giving and grace-filled. I treasure these people.

About the Book

Journey Girl is a story about motherhood and a memoir about secrets– more specifically, it is about breaking them. First-time author Hajec unfolds her journey of becoming a courageous family secret breaker and defeats her fears that she will pay a price to do so. Her quest is to disintegrate the generational silences that surround the death of her mother shortly after her own birth and explore the mysterious childhood memories that still linger as she reaches adulthood. As the author unwinds a tightly-held but harmful family silence, she also introduces to the reader simple, ordinary, and helpful types of silences they can use in their everyday life to bring them peace and balance, not harm and mystery. These are the Islands of Silence that begin each chapter before continuing her own story.

The book is available at http://www.amazon.com and http://www.balboapress.com

About the Author

Susan Heffron Hajec finds her happy place in everything that has to do with words. With an early start of faithful letter writing to her grandparents, she began to play with themes and stories on paper and loved all English, writing, and theater scripts throughout her school years. After her college graduation, marriage, and motherhood, her personal life followed a natural path to quiet ways of life, contemplative prayer, holistic health, soul writing, and the arts. She then served these interests well in her professional and business life which included: being regional newspaper correspondent, becoming founding editor of a religious newspaper; being an international video spirituality producer; owning A Way with Words consulting and workshop production company. She accomplished extended training and practice with the Masters in SoulCollage®, Labyrinth facilitation, Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, and Reiki healing arts. With a newfound passion for watercolor art, she states her purpose in life as being faithful to the small things and giving glory to God for the largeness of the gift of life. And most of this is centered in her loving life with family and friends.

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Birdwatching

Reflection

Are You My Mother?

You are being held in a wider embrace, one more ancient than your own understanding.

Celeste Snowber

In 1957, P.D. Eastman wrote Are You My Mother? which was—and still is—a popular children’s book. Parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents all liked to pick up this book and read about the antics of these magical and fun animals and people featured in the stories and read with a lyrical rhythm.

In this story, a baby bird is born while his mother is on the ground just below the tree branch where her nest sits, hunting for food. He begins to look for his mother. He looks up and down and all around. Not finding her, he steps out of his nest and plunks on the ground after a long fall. He could walk but not fly, so he decided he would now go and find his mother.

He begins his quest not knowing what his mother looks like. He doesn’t even know what he looks like. I read the story to my children often and to myself, alone, many times. I knew I was on the same quest, having so many unanswered questions about my own birth mother in the early 1970s. On a page in the book I saw an illustration of an eager baby bird on a search for his mother where he was often sad and alone, or afraid and brave at the same time.

The newborn bird is puzzled. He must find his mother and he does not know that he walked right by her at the bottom of the tree when he first began his search. He does not see her behind the rock pulling up a worm to feed him and he doesn’t realize she is close by all the time.

Asking a kitten, a hen, and a dog if they are his mother, he becomes somewhat discouraged because, of course, they are not his mother. He begins to question if he really does have a mother, but he is sure he must have one and is more determined than ever to find her. He begins to find mechanical things like a bulldozer, a boat, and a plane.

“Here I am, Mother,” he called out. But each thing goes on its own way, with no response. Except the bulldozer which makes a loud “snort” and picks the baby bird up in its shovel basket. The bulldozer lifts him up in the air and returns the frightened baby bird back to the nest from which he came. Just then, mother bird returns with the worm to feed her adventurous, hungry infant.

“Do you know who I am?” she asks baby bird.

And baby bird did know because she was not a kitten, or a hen, or a dog, or a cow, or a boat, or a plane. She was a bird.

“You are my mother!”

The pages of the story of this baby bird summarize the same quest I had been on for many years. I felt the uncertainty and the search of the small bird was like my own. I realized in small bits that it was all right for me to search—even necessary—to make me whole with my mother.

I felt the loneliness within the search that I needed to identify, wrangle with, acknowledge, hurt with, and eventually come to accept and make peace with. It did not pit one mother against the other. They each had their own space within me.

I had a mother, different from the one I called Mom. I was a daughter who became a mother. I would bring my mother, now a grandmother, back into our family-fold.

 

 Bird Watching

She lays

Hidden for the most part

Waiting and watching

With her beating heart

Her feathered body spread

Wide in the nest, an act

Of full creation.

One Mother

Bird, two eggs

Pulsing new life

Of wing-tipped grace

Into the world

And their own special place.

Procreation and expansion

As the fragile shell

Gives way

To life seeking life.

The rhythm of life

And love goes on,

     goes on

          goes on.

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Our Family Soul

 

During this time of Covid-19 and our attempt to begin both to return to our working world and our social and cultural pastimes, we are reminded often to pay attention to “safety” for ourselves and others. In fact, not only to pay attention to this safety but to feel our responsibility to be faithful to safe practices, like mask-wearing and social distancing. We hear often, and it is reinforced in commercial ads that “We are in this together.”  And “We will get through this together.

While there is some dissention about  clinging to our individual rights and freedoms, the larger picture and message is one of concern and even some fear of the unknown and left-over effects of both the Pandemic and our individual actions.

There is an upturn of care and thoughts of our family and neighbors; our health care workers; our first-responders; our grocery personnel; our food supply chain truckers who have kept food on our tables. Things could already be so much worse without the bravery and commitment of these people who work daily among the invisible enemy of this disease.

In my soon to be published memoir, Journey Girl; Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary, I reveal how an invisible birth mother, who was never fully explained to me, nor honored in my home growing up, affected me to the point I had to “complete her” in my adult years and make the truth of her a present part of my ancestry and my children’s and grandchildren’s lives going forward. While there was no ill-intent in the secrecy, it was bound and complete, until I could figure out who I could question and where I could search for answers. She was part of my Family Soul. Just as we are now gaining more insight on: We are all part of the Human Family Soul. The call is for each of us to build that up in the way for us most open to do it.

Journey Girl

From: Chapter Eleven,  — Island of Silence:  “Remembering Your Birthright

Science recognizes that we have a family soul. It is evident in our reliance upon DNA. It is required that we give our family medical histories in all new patient interviews. This gives the medical professionals pertinent information they may use to compile a profile of who we are based partially on what was present in our mother and father. They can then use this information to help them determine a satisfactory physical profile of their patients and make medical decisions of treatment with an awareness of possible threats to their physical wellness that arise from history. Science and soul are not at odds.

The fields of psychiatry and neurology and writings in classic literature suggest a longstanding belief that we are more than what we think we are—and this points to our relationship with who came before us in more than a nostalgic sense. Noted psychiatrist Carl Jung said “our souls, as well as our bodies, are composed of individual elements which were already present in the ranks of our ancestors.” This is a partial description of what I mean by a family soul. We often read that the eyes are the mirror to the soul in religious text. Author Ralph Waldo Emerson sounded his agreement by writing, “the eyes indicate the antiquity of the soul.”

Jung also advised, “Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.” Maybe our whole human being-ness is a theory that evolves along with the miracle of the soul. You sound or look like your mother (only I did not). You notice he stands just like his father or you see your own likeness in a newly discovered photo of your grandmother. Through spirituality, psychology, and science, the miracle of the soul is full of new discoveries.

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Stepping Stones

 

Stepping Stones
                Susan Heffron Hajec

By the water’s edge, she sheds her shoes
and steps toward the stone path
winding just off shore.

With no turning back I mind, she releases
the safety of ground beneath her feet
and any doubt that holds her back.

Moving forward is what she intends.
Turning the old version of herself into
the new vision of dreams, ripe and ready
through the soil of her new springtime.

Just as the seedling engages with the soil,
sunshine and rain spins its path
to the light of day.

She mixes risk with courage to bring her plant
to bloom in a world hungry for the sweetness
of flowers and green promise of hope.

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The Way to Emmaus

 

The Way to Emmaus

Susan Heffron Hajec 3-31-18

How many times, Lord
have I walked
the road to Emmaus
like your disciples?
Distraught over what
has happened.
Afraid of what lies
before me.
Confused that things
didn’t work out
as I planned.

Many times, I
must confess,
many times.
How can I so
easily forget
it is you, yourself
who told me—
“Behold, I Am
with you always.”

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It’s Heart Time on the Planet

 

Couple jumping dolphins, blue sea and sky, white clouds, bright sun

 

 

“The full potential of the heart and its intelligence has is yet to be fully unfolded and understood. Much like the electricity changed the outer world, learning to harness the power and intelligence of the heart can change our inner world.”  

During this time of rapid and massive changes, due to the presence of the world-wide Corona virus, Covid-19, we all have a chance to look outward into our external world and inward to our soul, heart and value system. Many people from different backgrounds are experiencing an impetus for positive change in ways they never had before. Other people are desperately sick with the virus itself and very near their last breath. Many families are encased in a private grief of lost dear ones and distanced from others who could give them physical comfort.

These are enormous changes — over a time span of which we do not yet know.. What do we do with this rapidly changing world in our food and goods delivery systems, our at-odds and feisty political parties, our religious worship practices, our education and health systems, our jobs and financial structures? All of these things touch us daily and will be changed forever even when the virus is gone.

One of the most important aspects of the changes taking place is a rediscovery of what’s been hidden in plain sight all along…its the heart. Along with the chaos, there is a new emergence of heart-based awareness and intelligence. I studied some of this in 2012 with Barbara Marx Hubbard, an evolutionary visionary and with the HeartMath Institute.

A unified message is emerging in public service announcements because of the gigantic way of delivering help, services, and companionship.  “We’re all in this together,” and never has it been more clear how inter-connected we are to one another throughout the world. There is a human presence of using the vast internet programs and platforms to build up the human and the human spirit from its loss of many things including free mobility by air, sea, or car. There is a recognition of the sacrifices and struggles of all of the world health care systems, and the nurses and doctors closest to death on a daily basis.

There is singing. There are thank you’s.. There are pep talks, “We will get through this, together.”  There is a remembrance of forgotten populations of our society, the poor, the sick, the elderly and individual efforts to give where it is needed. The commercials from the banking systems, retail, personal services all point toward, “we’ll be back” but in the meantime , “take good care of yourself.”

All of this points to a fundamental fact. Goodness and health is based in the heart. And the heart knows what is best in both our actions and our thoughts. I have signed up for a short course summary of the HeartMath Experience. It will be a good precursor for my cardiac evaluation coming up this summer. I intend to put some of the summary reminders on Napkinwriter so my readers can attune their hearts to wholesome practices and communication. Good nutrition is a great baseline, but there is so much more your heart is asking for.

 

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Right Now Normal is Abnormal

 

Today is a special day in Spirituality. No matter what I’ve claimed and left behind in the traditions of Catholicism today IS Palm Sunday. I am in a dress with makeup on and I will bake something special. I am playing old CDs with the musical doxology and other songs of a spirritual nature and I will create here at home and the nearby outdoors for I am grateful for the gifts of faith and family freely given to me.

Today also begins what the scientists and CDC is also the beginning of two of the hardest weeks of sickness and death due to the pandemic virus COVID-19 attacking the world, and has been focused on the United States of America for the past four weeks, having arrived here earlier than that.

Healthcare in NYC, the epicenter, of the disease in America, is scrambling to provide adequate hospital space and the necessary PPE Personal Protection Equipment to the growing need. Healthcare professionals are coming in from other states to help the overburdened system. Ventilators are in such high demand and number needed so high, they are in a race to get one before a patient dies from the respiratory virus that shuts down the lungs.

And I know I shall rise and persist upon my own path of life. They say we have an unknown future. But we have always had an unknown future as those so fully know when an instant tragedy bested them. What we have is now and our actions and thoughts in this day.

I don’t know. And becoming friends with “I don’t know” is grace, itself. This is the second set of words that confirm me today. The first was another writer/artist speaking and she brought a quote in that said, “You can’t make the abnormal, normal. It is NOT normal.” I think therein, I give up the fight. I do not try to trick myself by doing “what is normal” to do. What I do is what rings true for me within this abnormal time. My interior world feels fairly normal. But as my gaze and my hearing focuses in on the outside world-wide — it is anything but normal. And that is what it is.

I do not know the future, but then I never have. A normal future is palatable. An unknown future leaves so many questions in its wake. Most of us try for the most normal we can manage for this abnormal time of Covid–19. We are plagued with the big question— how long? Someone tell us please when we can return to normal

With a return to normal, will survivors (because that is what we all are now) go back to the jobs they had? Will they, once again, work from an office rather than home? Will small businesses be there for the employees to return to? Will the economic structure hold for ourselves and our families? Will we bring the good, bad, and ugly back with us in our ways of life, or has this forced “time-out” reshape us in ways that we want to continue with and shed other stuff we would see as of no value?

This all remains to be seen. But for today, Palm Sunday, I am raised up, in the spirit of Resurrection, because others have reached through “social distancing” and touched me with their normal thoughts and actions. And for me, today, that is enough. It is normal.

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A Total Eclipse of the Heart

 

When I studied SpringForest QiGong with Master Chunyi Linn, he gave us a very beautiful meditative and healing verse to repeat:

“I am in the Universe.
The Universe is in my body.
The Universe and I combine together.”

 

So there are many spiritual and faith traditions and ancient learning that come from long ago that teach us to know there is union between all. I and the Universe are One. In God, there is only One. In God, I live and move and have my being. The Universe lives, moves and breathes as ONE.
I just recently caught up with the fact that there is a solar eclipse today on November 13. I was looking forward to this date for another reason.

In December 2011, I, with Sara Houseman, presented three workshops based on the writings and work of Barbara Marx Hubbard at Unity of Kalamazoo, Michigan.  The purpose of the meetings were to simply acquaint others with the life and the work and the grand vision Barbara Marx Hubbard had for Conscious Evolution.

She, too, in her pursuit of the “pulse of Evolution” came to the conclusion that there is only One and our earthly time is spent within that One. She has studied the history of Evolution and says whenever crisis and chaos appeared in the chain of evolution, that the species has always moved forward. That has been true, she says, since the time that the first single cell needed to grow into two cells to survive. It did so, and it did it again and again changing species along the evolutionary timeline to today.

With the global pandemic of  the Corona Virus – Covid – 19 racing across the globe, claiming thousands of lives in it’s wake, and in a way we never thought possible disrupting our lives, work, family interaction, school and business closings, and social isolation, we are at another crisis point of evolution.

Marx Hubbard calls these current times a “chaos point.” Things are broken. There are many things systems-wide that need change. The way we communicate and lead needs changing, in order to grow past the chaos today into what she calls a “Universal Being” — a species we homo sapiens are all capable of being.

But first, we need to become more familiar with our heart. Indeed, we must learn to breathe through our heart. We hear the beat of our heart, and without our heart, there is no breath. This is the exact muscle, we need not only strengthen for fitness, but for our very life, itself.

All outward appearances point to this being the type of change — Universal change — that she foretold in 2011. A global happening which required a global response. A response that was heart-led.

And as we await the eventual physical cure of this with a vaccine, the American health system is overrun, food suppliers are over-worked, first-line responders are over-taxed, children are confused with the changes and not being able to go to school, and businesses hope that in the long run, they do not lose their business, and people are generally stressed to keep on time with their bill paying, while they protect their families as best they can.

Amid these catatrophic changes, the human heart is out in front beating just for the present moment with love. Also concern and attention to who needs help and how to give it. This is the prediction of the Universal Homo Sapien being born right in this troubled and unprecidented time. Our hearts are beating as one. Our eyes are tuned to the needs of others. Even when groups cannot come together, the actions of one are spreading out over and over into this world of need. The common question is How Can I Help? What Can I Do?

HeartMath Institute, under the direction of Doc and Sarah Childre has studied the workings of the heart and the effect it has on ourselves and others. We are encouraged to “lead with our heart”, to become aware of heart resonance, which beats with the pulse of the Universe – with all that is.

They have a measured Science with convincing data, that our hearts produce an electro-magnetic field of about eight feet extending from the center of our being. When filled with heartfelt peace, acceptance and resonance, this field CHANGES the interaction and the space it is holding – for the good.

Long ago, we heard the story of “one little candle” at a time being able to light up the whole world. The same is true with heart resonance. It is a practice that benefits us physically (it is more than just being calm, it is a frequency that the Oneness in which we exist recognizes and beats in harmony with us).

I will write another blog on the actual practice of Heart Coherence and how you can easily put it in practice and accomplish immediate results with it.
An old tune comes to mind. (by Dusty Springfield or Rusty?)
“Once upon a time I was falling for you
Now I’m only falling apart.
Nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart.”

In the movement of Birth 2012, we wanted to get beyond the feeling there is nothing we can do to fix the things in the world that are now falling apart. We believed we could do something, within ourselves by recognizing our soul Essence, our Oneness, and joining what Marx Hubbard calls “our genius” with another or others and then — see what wants to be born within us in the new year as a new world.

Now, in 2020, eight years later and one year past her death at the age of 89  on April 10, 2019, the woman who is credited with “the birthing of the human” over the long, long time of evolution, would see for herself the appearance of joining “our genius with one another as scientists, business leaders, entrepreneurs and   philanthropists and common citizens indeed “join genius” to make forever choice of evolution to MOVE FORWARD, and birth a new reality. Most serious commentators agree, life will no longer be what it was, something new is coming, but we are working in a time unknown for that something NEW to be GOOD for us and our neighbor.

 

In times of crisis and chaos, we have ALWAYS moved forward. We can move forward into the world, leading with our hearts, within the spheres of family, church, community, and even bigger stages. It all depends on what “is waiting to be born” in us.

A new moon….a solar ECLIPSE…..a TOTAL eclipse of my heart.

Namaste.

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A Pause in the Air

 

The loss of Kolbe Bryant is so sad on the sports scene where he excelled. A family life with those loved left behind. A rough road ahead, no doubt to lose husband and daughter and children to lose their father and sister.

It sounds like before the crash, they had a delay “in the air” while fog could clear or safe routes could be found. It amounted to fifteen minutes, at least. Tom and I experienced that kind of “in the air” delay on a flying adventure we undertook in the Hawaiian Islands.

 

 

On our 40th anniversary, the very date of June 19, Tom wanted to celebrate with a helicopter ride on Maui and we did so, boarding a two seater, right behind the pilot flying machine and away we went in perfect weather. He flew us back into the green valleys and hills to see beautiful interior tall waterfalls you could not get to by foot. He intended to fly us over the top of Mt. Haleakula.

But a breeze came up and he had to turn back. Flying back into the valley, the breeze turned to wind and the wind turned to rain storm that began swaying the helicopter sideways and tilted. The pilot had to mount height to get up and over a low mountain top (like the one that always opened in M*A*S*H) and he had his hands full, radioing what his attempts were and what he could/could not try — we heard it all (I was into my Hail Mary’s). He told us to stay quiet and was a wonderful pilot that finally pulled up over the ridge and headed out to follow the water’s edge back to the airport.

That night, we feasted and enjoyed the best lulau food and entertainment in Hawaii, and were called down to dance under the stars (feet on the ground) to celebrate with others who had anniversaries. The gift of grace as we continued life through our 50th coming up on our 55th this year in a few months.

I realize the news will be endless about the professional star Kobe was. My thoughts and prayers are with his young widow and mother of two other now fatherless daughters. God bless them one and all.

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Grandparent Blessing

 

Reprinted from text of Journey Girl, Steps in Secrets and Sanctuary, a Memoir planned for release in 2020.

Grounding and Flow – Supported in Mystery

Native Americans refer to the moon and the sun as Grandmother Moon and Father Sun. The great gifts my grandparents bestowed on me were both connection and flow. They provided me with loving touch and experiences and connected me to both the earth of my daily life and the skies where future dreams formed like puffy white floating clouds.

I am a child of the Universe, stretched between two worlds of living and passed parentage. I am supported in mystery. Love leads me and grace lights my way.

I wish to thank my grandparents
for providing the daytime seeds
that anchored me to the ground
and for supporting me with the spiritual lattice-work
that helped me seek the wonders of God.

I shared wide-open days with my grandfather
who produced the miracle of planting seeds
in the spring-turned sod and reaped wholesome harvests
after a season’s care.

He, the laborer in the vineyard,
answering to the God he called
the Man Upstairs
with the faithful, daily rhythm of his day.

I learned from grandmothers who mentored
the worthiness of female in me
and taught me to ponder the delicacy of Irish lace
and the strength of good-will and persistence.

I treasure my grandparents who helped me touch the stars
and roll around in the grass,
secure in our snuggles
and whispered secrets in the night.

I bless my grandparents with a grateful heart
for I absorbed mystery in the midst of love
freely given, if not explained,
by their being present in ancestral place-holding.

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