A Life Lived Fully

The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 
by Molly Peacock 

Mary Delany was 72 years old and mourning the death of her second husband when she began assembling detailed, realistic flower mosaics (one mosaic contains over 230 individual pieces of paper). Failing eyesight forced her to stop at 82 (although she continued with her needlework), by which time she had created 985 flower collages. At the same time, she maintained a busy social life, cared for a young grand-niece, maintained an extensive correspondence, and worked on other crafts.

Mary Delany’s life had many parts – a childhood designed to obtain a position at court, a first marriage at 17 to an old, drunken man and a second, happy marriage in Ireland. Creativity and handiwork were the common strands, weaving together a life lived fully and graciously.

The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 by Molly Peacock reminds us of the value of every stage of our lives and the importance of valuing women’s handiwork as art.

You can view some of Mary Delany’s flowers in the British Museum’s online collection.

The Art of Stillness

“If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.” Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz 

“To me, the point of sitting still is that it helps you see through the very idea of pushing forward; indeed, it strips you of yourself, as of a coat of armor, by leading you into a place where you’re defined by something larger.”

“talking about stillness is really a way of talking about clarity and sanity and the joys that endure.”

“You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.”

“Buddhists explain the nature of our mind: there may be clouds passing across it, but that doesn’t mean a blue sky isn’t always there behind the obfuscations. All you need is the patience to sit still until the blue shows up again.”

“So much of our lives takes place in our heads – in memory or imagination, in speculation or interpretation – that sometimes I feel that I can best change my life by changing the way I look at it.”

“This is what the principle of the Sabbath enshrines. It is, as Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish theologian of the last century, had it, ‘a cathedral in time rather than in space’; the one day a week we take off becomes a vast empty space through which we can wander, without agenda, as through the light-filled passageways of Notre Dame.”

“The point of gathering stillness is not to enrich the sanctuary or mountaintop but to bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.”

“In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

Quotes from The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere by Pico Iyer

Photos of Abkhazi Garden, Victoria, BC

Learning to Walk - Understanding Pain

Learning to Walk
If you take walking for granted or have never lived with chronic pain, I highly recommend reading The Man Who Learned to Walk Three Times by Peter Kavanagh to gain insight and compassion. If you struggle with mobility problems and/or pain, read this book and you'll know you're not alone. And if you’re a CBC Radio fan, you can find out more about the author who was a long-time CBC Radio employee.

Understanding Pain
I’ve had two hip replacements and back surgery in less than two years. The biggest problem isn’t the physical pain – it’s my emotional response: fear and anxiety, a sense of worthlessness, and social isolation.

Kavanagh explains it well in his book:

“The dirty little secret of every encounter with a health problem or the medical system is that no one likes to talk about the social and psychological aspects of being ill, experiencing pain, limping or simply struggling to walk. One thing Buddhists know and attempt to deal with is how much the characterization of the self gets caught up in and twisted throughout with each and every aspect of our day-to-day lives. We can use any aspect of life to somehow convince ourselves how special we are. My pain, my limp, come to define me, and I can use them to beat up on myself, to distinguish myself from you and others, or even as the reason why I can’t be happy.”

“As the Buddha once wrote:

when touched with a feeling of pain,
the ordinary uninstructed person
sorrows, grieves,
and laments, beats his breast,
becomes distraught.
So he feels two pains,
physical and mental.

Just as if they were to shoot a man with an arrow and,
right afterward,
were to shoot him with another one,
so that he would feel the pain of two arrows.

“Or, in a less poetic sense, mindfulness guru Jon Kabat-Zinn writes: ‘Physical pain is the response of the body and the nervous system to a huge range of stimuli that are perceived as noxious, damaging, or dangerous. There are really three dimensions to pain: the physical, or sensory component; the emotional, or affective component – how we feel about the sensation; and the cognitive component – the meaning we attribute to our pain.’ ”

See also: Bibliotherapy for Legs that Don’t Move the Way They Should