Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 50

Summer isn't over yet!

Contrary to the ads in the Sunday newspaper for school supplies and the store aisles filled with folders, paper, and pens, summer isn't over yet. It's only July 24 yet the bombardment has begun because in many places, school will begin in a few weeks.

While many of us still remember the days when we didn't start school until after Labor Day (my family didn't go on vacation until the first week of August), with it starting so early and also having ended late in many places this year because of the extreme winter, it feels as if summer has flown by.

It always feels like summer zips by leaving us looking back wondering why we didn't get to accomplish everything we wanted to do.

Making time for prayer

A few months ago a friend said to me how we work backward in our lives. While these weren't her exact words, she said that if we spend some time in prayer each day, we are actually practicing prevention in our lives because usually we run to prayer in times of need because we feel like our lives are spinning out of control or something has happened that we fear the outcome. 

She suggested spending time in prayer each day, along the lines of thirty minutes. While I do pray each morning while I am run-walking my dogs Chaco and Hattie, I decided to add this extra prayer giving it a different twist. I also wasn't sure I could do it for thirty minutes so I started with fifteen by setting the timer on my cell phone.

Traveling as Time of Renewal

I just spent a month away from home, a length of time I have never traveled in my entire life. I have gone away [image error]
for three weeks but saying "a month" feels much longer than "three weeks."

At the final Mass we attended, this one in Washington, DC., before pointing the car west toward New Mexico, one of the prayers for the faithful caught my attention. It was that "travelers may find their time away one of renewal" because they aren't in their routines and are free from the worries of home.

That's exactly what this trip has been to me. I honestly wasn't hugely excited to leave home for a month because it meant being away from all the traditional things I love about summer in Albuquerque– the dry heat, my pool. And it meant a month away from my dogs.

Attending Church on the Road

I always thought that people who made the time for church while they were on vacation were...weird. I remember when my maternal grandmother told me how they would always find a church for Mass when they traveled with my mom and her two younger sisters. 

This was a vacation, I thought. Why would you go to church?

But now that I am older and someone who likes to go to Mass, I have a different perspective of it. I see now how it's a way of becoming part of a different community even for a short time.

The first weekend of the trip we went to the church in my hometown of Naperville, the one where both my parents' funerals were held. The priest who presided over my mom's funeral was doing the Mass and I appreciated that when I spoke to him after he said he remembered me when he saw me in the communin line (I gave Mom's eulogy so I'm sure that was helpful– and the fact that he acknowledged when he talked about her at Mass the cigars and Maker's Mark in her casket). St. Thomas is a very modern church and I joked later that we were rocking and rolling with the music at that one.

Water: The Anxiety Reliever

We each have something different that helps us to relieve our anxiety. What works for me is water. I realize this might sound like a contradiction because I live in the desert but having a swimming pool in my back yard is probably what makes it work for me. I am not a fan of humid climates and I have been reminded of this because I've been on the eastern half of the United States for almost four weeks.

Because I'm not home, that also means I haven't had much of a chance to spend in water like I would in Albuquerque this time of year. I did get in a few swimming pools and also got a short time to surf in Rye, New Hampshire. 

What can I learn from this?

It annoys me when I can't make change about certain aspects of my life. For instance, I have a second home that I own that is on the market. There is a point at which I can't do anything about selling it. I prepare it as best I can, I hire a realtor; but what I can't do is know the day someone will arrive who wants to buy it and when the sale will close. In the meantime, it's easy for me to get frustrated and ruminate about it.

Because one of my goals is always letting go, I work on letting go. I try not to think about it. I tell God I am giving it to him yet I must not being doing a good job of that because nothing is happening. I remind myself it's on God's schedule and not mine (often he likes to laugh at my schedule).

Being Present is to Live Without Regrets

I was surprised that my neighbor Basil was so affected by my mom's death. He was just a few years younger than[image error] her and about a week or so after she died, we met up on the driveway of house between us (one of our usual meeting spots) and he told me that he wished he could have done something more. 

Basil had invited my mom to lunch and also to Frontier Restaurant for coffee in the morning (where I joked he held court with his friends) and she always turned him down. Basil was one to live in the present so what surprised me was that he felt as if he should have tried harder to get her out.

Letting Go at Church

We all go to church for different reasons but I realized not long ago that what works for me are not necessarily the reasons why I was raised to go to church. The idea of “worship” doesn’t work for me. What does work for me is having a place to let go of what I can’t control, a sacred space to ask for help and guidance. When I go to Mass, I always ask God to bring me the messages that I need on that day for my life.

I don’t recall anyone ever saying to me that church was a place to let go of my fears and concerns. I always thought it was a painful hour filled with ritual that was boring and made no sense. However, now that ritual is important because it’s also part of the process of letting go. I have some idea of what to expect when I go to Mass no matter where I am in the world. While things might be slightly different, there is still a string of similarity that runs through every Mass in those rituals.

Dilly Bar Golf Outing

I have traveled the world talking about not just the after effects of suicide but also how to prevent it. I have [image error]watched families with money and resources lose someone to suicide. And I also have spent time with people who have dirt floors on the Navajo nation, who live paycheck to paycheck, lose a loved one to suicide. The bottom line? Suicide doesn’t care what you look like or what economic bracket you fall into. Sure there are protective factors, ethnic groups that overall fare better than others yet nothing is a guarantee against suicide.

In my years of being involved in the field, one of the biggest challenges I have seen is to raise money to provide education and resources for suicide prevention (and mental health issues). The reality is that it does take money to educate people and also to create and sustain services for people who are suicidal.

Niagara Falls Family History

My parents, like many parents of people my age who grew up in the eastern part of the country, honeymooned in Niagara Falls. They were married in late April 1963 and there is a photo at Fort Ticonderoga, another place they visited, of Mom looking cold as she sits on a cannon with sunglasses on her face and a scarf covering her head.

They took us to Niagara Falls twice as children. The first time it was the whole brood, all six of us, and the second time just my parents, my younger sister, and I.

While the Falls are obviously an integral part to a trip there because that’s why we went there, it was really about Lundy’s Lane for me.

Lundy’s Lane is where all the motels once were. Today it’s mostly fast food restaurants with a few motels, but for me it’s the most important memory of Niagara Falls.