For who ? For ourselves. Did we do something, some ritual that affirmed our faith today ? In what ? In ourselves. Our ability to connect with our inner selves. For if we do not, who is this person that is working, loving, talking etc. It’s certainly not you.
It’s an everyday search for me. For that something that can put me in touch with myself. My connection to consciousness. My connection to loving nature.
Of course many people have faith. Which is a wonderful ability. I don’t have blind faith. I am more of a searcher. Questioner. Good, bad ? I don’t know. No value judgements on any faith or the question of faith. Or on myself.
Some people do it with meditation first thing in the morning. I have never been able to do that. I have to connect to something, however small, however little, to loose my sense of individuality. That’s the daily struggle. Against my own exaggarated sense of myself. I am so used to it. I have relied on it for so many years. So tough to let go now. Not that I have never questioned it before. But now, it is really important for me to be truly ‘active’ rather than ‘reactive’, which is what I have done most of my life. And how do I know what that ‘true’ action is ? Unless I am constantly in touch with something larger, more immense, more universal than myself ?
Yes I know. By letting go. By allowing yourself not to be addicted to the result of your action. By allowing chaos to invade your life. Yes, I agree. All of that. I do allow chaos to prevade in my life. I am impeteous (spelling). But then the individual in me fights back hard.
It’s an everyday battle. This battle to let go of one’s addiction to one’s sense of individuality.
Yet, the smallest of things can provoke the sensing of my flowing into something much much larger. Something infinite.
This morning it was my 5 year old daughter waking me up with a loud ‘Peekaboo’ and the tinkling of an early morning laugh.
Sometimes it;s just getting up early enough to watch the first shades of dark blue brush across the sky. Something deeply stirring about that.
Sometimes it’s unexpected gestures of affection that were not sought. Or given so instinctually that you were not aware of them.
Sometimes, it’s writing a poem. But only if the words are coming from somewhere else. As if something is flowing through you, a river of emotion you can physically feel that flows through your being.
But it is always so unexpected. So much that I am constantly aware now. My senses hightened. Waiting for that unexpected moment.
When something deeper will reach out and engulf me, and give my life, and all my actions, however small, a deeper and all encompassing context. On a daily basis.
So say a prayer for me. And for yourself.
Shekhar
…for the first time in all these years, I had a dream of you, Shekhar.
Much needed for me, as a friend is most needed especially in times of difficulty.
We talked and exchanged smiles…thank you!
Aum
I am find it a challenge to focus on breath…traffic of words speeding through this head…at an immense rate…
Doing what I can to be the observer…even with that knowledge, it seems to slip away so much these days…
Aum
“What is being transfigured here is your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.” — John O. Donohue
Sending love and prayers to my friend Donna, please know you are in my thoughts…with love and light to you and Lee.
Blessings Dear One….Aum
~~~
Dear Shekhar,
Is there something in this physical realm we can do to help Donna?, one of her dreams is to meet you in person, I know it’s an unusual request, seeing you are no where near where she lives…however, I see it as a possibility…if you feel the call to do so…she has such a beautiful soul.
Love and peace,
Cinda
~~~
Donna Sonnenburg:
The Bend in the Road is not the end of the Road
By Kavita Chhibber
She was born in abject poverty in 1956, the fourth child of Ross and Constance, who met in a little silver mining town called Cobalt in Canada and later moved further north to Kirkland Lake to mine gold. “We were a very poor family,” says Donna Sonnenburg, “my father would accept any work offered to him but often spent family money on gambling, his big addiction! Finally, unable to take it any more, my mother who was pregnant with her fifth child at that time, gathered her other four children, all aged five and under, and left.”
Donna says the kids were raised in extreme poverty, and their mother did any form of work she could find, washing floors and walls, ironing clothes, babysitting, cooking in restaurants and at home, for weddings and special occasions. “Over the years, she became an accomplished Chef in her own right! Many sought her out, to make their wedding cakes, and pies, etc. In the 1950s there were very few social assistance programs and we would often live in homes with no heat or electricity. I still remember one time, I was playing with my brother on a floor that was so cold that my bottom stuck to it due to the body heat and mom had to throw hot water to dislodge it. It stung and burnt my bottom and to this day I hate sitting on any cold surface!”
The family would go without proper food for days surviving only on a piece of bread or the kindness of some friend or neighbor who would bring in a picnic basket or food, but these experiences didn’t scar her. “My mom made it all seem like an adventure turning every adversity into a game, so we didn’t really see what we didn’t have. All of us were born sickly-probably because our mother never had proper nutrition. My brother Ross was the most sickly of all and was taken away as a child to be treated for tuberculosis. When he returned many months later one winter night, mom said – here is your brother; we thought it was a Christmas present and she had bought him at a store for us. I think she went through very tough times-any other woman would have given us up to an orphanage.”
Donna remembers how once when they were looking for a place to stay, her mother was turned away by landlords who didn’t think a single woman with that many kids could pay the rent. Donna and her family ended up staying in a public park that summer, hiding and coming out at night. “That too became an adventure-some times mom’s friend would bring over a picnic basket and we would eat; if we didn’t have food, we stayed hungry. I remember my eldest brother, catching me and my youngest brother eating leaves, and sucking on rocks; we’d get so terribly hungry and thirsty. He gave us a good scolding, and warned us about the dangers of doing that. I remember the bitter, dry taste of leaves and the sandy tastes of wild potatoes or carrots or turnips we’d find. We’d pick berries which were pretty abundant, until our little hiding place was picked bare! I do not think of that time, being homeless as bad personally, but, it must have been a nightmare for my darling Mom! Mom didn’t even have her own bed, until I was about age ten. She slept on the bare floor, or couch, and often went through winter without winter clothes, or boots, but she never complained or cried.”
Things started getting better for the family once they were a little older, and their mother could find better paying jobs. Every one did all kinds of work, from baby sitting, to shoveling snow to other odd jobs. “Our mother made sure we understood that family came first and whenever we brought in money, we were given a small amount to buy candy. The rest went into the savings, and was used to pay for some dire need of one of the kids.” Every one dropped out after high school, though later Donna and her sister were both to return to college.
Donna recalls that as a child she was always coloring and her favorite past time was to read the dictionary. “I would take one word and then use it for the whole week., Soon my friends would start using the same word. I preferred reading the dictionary to television and developed a very good vocabulary.” When Donna was 10 she wrote a poem which so impressed her teacher, he bought it from her for 10 dollars. “I went racing home with the crumpled ten dollar bill feeling like the richest girl in the world, thinking, this is what I’m going to do-I’m going to be a rich poet! But no one ever bought my poem again!”
Being part of a small knit community and living in the poor side of town meant facing rejection and being labeled permanently as poor. “It was tough to find jobs. We were raised near the French speaking Quebec border, but our mother though of French descent didn’t want to confuse us and only taught us English, and so we couldn’t find work.”
Donna decided to move to Kingston to be with her sister. She met her husband there and got married rather young. “It was the strangest thing to see that as soon as I got married, I gained respectability overnight. It didn’t matter if I had been poor or from the lowly part of town, marriage gave me an exalted status.” The couple moved to Alberta when the oil industry was booming and did very well. “Those were great days-we traveled and collected antiques. I think having been homeless and going from place to place I somehow didn’t like being tied to one place. The couple adopted a newborn boy in November 1988, “We had to drive from Brooks to Edmonton to receive our son Lee and drove home with him in a blizzard! We were driving so slow, we got stopped by the highway police! When we told him of our precious cargo, he was more than happy to escort us down the highway.”
After living in Alberta for almost ten years, the couple headed home with their six month old son to Ontario, in 1989. But life changed suddenly for the couple. Donna was exposed to boiling, toxic steam mixed of industrial strength bleach and ammonia, while at work and it burnt her throat all the way to the tip of her lungs. A month later, her husband ended up with a herniated disc at work, nearly severing the nerve, causing paralysis. He’d spent ten days in the hospital only to find the surgery they performed was on the wrong disc. Pain and unemployment soon began to take its toll and their once happy marriage began to crumble. In 1991 Donna returned to Kingston and the couple divorced. Today the two remain friends. “He is great dad to our son though he doesn’t live in the same town. We are in constant contact; we were able to put our differences aside, and focus on our son instead and what was best for him and that helped us heal.”
Donna never fully recovered from her exposure to the toxic chemicals, and after many years of seeking legal council, spending huge amounts of money, trying to prove how the accident led to her health crisis, she gave up in 2003 realizing the corporation she was fighting was too big and too rich. Being uneducated at the time, she was unable to secure work in such a small, rural town. Her health began to crumble as she struggled to try and create a better future for herself and her child.
By mid-eighties, Donna’s health declined drastically. She went through the removal of a tumor, a hysterectomy and removal of her appendix. “To this day, I am always cold; it could be ninety degrees outside, and I might still be found with a sweater or two on.”
Donna still would not give up and went back to school, in 1997, at age 41, to become a certified Graphic Designer. “I never would have thought, I’d be a college student in my forties!” Only six weeks into the course, upon a routine breast examination; she was diagnosed with a very large breast tumor! Just a week or so after graduation, and having spent the winter months seeking three opinions about the tumor; it was decided it could be cancer; and it had to come out! “I told my Mother. She was afraid for me, but she became a solid rock during the following weeks. I remember waking up after the surgery, in a room alone, with a friend sitting beside me; and my Mom, just walking through the door. I was still groggy; and the first thing I did was to reach to touch my breast! I thought it was gone, as there was so much thick bandage, and I started to cry. Mom reassured me, the tumor was benign, but it was very big, and was growing into the chest wall, so it had to go.” Donna had a catheter in the breast for quite a while after, to drain the blood, lost a portion of her breast, but she rejoiced at the fact that she was cancer-free.
In 1998, Donna returned to college, to take a Teacher Assistant-Aboriginal course; the two-year course had been condensed into one and was very strenuous. She remembers having very little sleep, her eyes often swollen from crying because she would feel overwhelmed at times. During this time she was also the editor of the college newsletter. Just as she was finding her way, a few weeks into the course, she found she had an ulcer and was given antibiotics, but mutant bacteria, known as helicobacter pylori that can cause cancer erupted inside her. The treatment given to her could not eradicate the bacteria and within months, her stomach had become atrophic. She was told she could develop stomach cancer within two to five years, and possibly die.
Donna refused to give up, stayed in college, kept printing out the monthly newsletter, and raising her son alone. She’d learned just weeks prior to graduation again that year, that a health crisis would claim another piece of her body. Weeks later, Donna and her son Lee who was, then eleven years old, ended up in a car accident, hitting black ice, which literally speared them into a post at unbelievable speed! Not one person stopped to help her push her car out of the bank. While pushing the car she sustained injury to her left hand, requiring trauma surgery. Still, not one to be undone, she finished college and graduated with a 4.0 GPA making the Deans List!
In spite of her academic achievements, Donna remained jobless. “I was still that poor woman from that lowly part of town so no one would give me a job. I begged the high school to let me work for free for a month so they could see my ability, teaching graphic design to students, but was told they had no budget. At the most I would be allowed to come in for 2-3 days in a year to teach when every one was sick and they had to find a substitute teacher.” Donna tried to apply for a dish washing job only to be told those jobs were for the uneducated. Falling apart physically, emotionally drained, jobless with twenty-seven thousand dollars in student loans debt, Donna lost her car, her credit, and was bankrupt by 2001-02!
Donna had to re-apply for disability benefits, and as she waited for sixteen months she realized how the country treated the poor and those on disability differently from the tax payers. Donna became an activist for women, the disabled, single parents and the aged. She researched and tackled many social policies and saw that at that time, every person on assistance, was robbed of 21.6% of income a month! From 1999, to the fall of 2001 Donna and her son, , lived on a paltry welfare income, of $365 dollars a month, and less than two-hundred dollars a month child support from her son’s Dad! “We lived on that, for sixteen straight months; I ate toast only on most days, and a meal every three days; I was literally starving myself, to feed my son adequately; I lost everything that year – car, credit, my sense of self-worth.” In 1999 Donna started requesting the system to sanction a paltry sum of 69 dollars per month for a special diet for her stomach. That request was finally granted 6 years later. The same thing happened with her son when his kidney shut down and that took pretty long to be sanctioned too. They are feeling better health wise, but now the department wants to review their case to see if they really need that diet. “I guess the fact that I put on 10 pounds after six years is an indication that I’m in peak health for them.”
After a few years of advocacy work, and successfully having many of her political articles published across Canada and in the USA, Donna began to face opposition on her views including death threats and had her car destroyed in front of her eyes one night. As the flames rose into the night, she burnt her advocacy efforts with them. She continued to publish articles about the defunct and shameful political policies being imposed, under a pseudonym, condemning an apathetic society and a political system that turned its back on the, poor, disabled and the aged among them!
In 2001, Donna was appointed on a board of directors, of a Literacy Council. The council had just experienced a major fire that winter, and lost everything! She offered to use her skills as a designer, publisher, and poet to help. She designed four books of poetry written by her, with all proceeds going to the council for supplies. “My father was illiterate and I thought if I could help in making someone else literate it would be of great satisfaction to me.” While she was working on the project she hurt herself again falling through the frame of a window she was trying to fix, hurting her ribs. She still gamely finished the project and then resigned due to bad health.
Donna and her family were to receive another crisis; at the age of thirteen her son lost one of his kidneys and his remaining kidney only functions at 70 percent. “He faces possible dialysis one day, if not also a kidney transplant. He looks like a normal, but thin young man; nobody would guess he is so ill. He graduated that year from grade school, with honors, receiving many awards and medals. I have noticed however that today at seventeen he is very cynical and has lost his faith in God, but he remains a wonderful level headed human being.”
The year 2001, shattered the family with deaths- Donna’s favorite uncle passed away and then her brother Ross, who died of a massive heart attack at home. “My family, to date has not fully recovered from their loss; and grieves in silence, each in their own way, trying to come to grips with life’s trials and tribulations. I have never seen my mother so heartbroken and full of tears. In all our years of adversity, she had never cried, but today she refuses to celebrate New year and Christmas.”
From 2000 to 2004, Donna battled kidney problems herself. Her body ravaged by pain, due to a blocked kidney, that went undiagnosed due to the doctor’s apathy, urinating blood, Donna finally underwent emergency surgery in December 2004 to unblock a ureter to her left kidney, which was filled with kidney stones. Donna returned home within 24 hours by bus; where she was robbed of almost two-hundred dollars in cash. “I had to wait for my bus for four hours, so I spent it at the mall, still high on morphine from the surgery, and the shot they gave me when I left; just walking around, with about four dollars to spend. I drank juice, water and chewed gum, that’s all I could afford.”
Three days post surgery, Donna was going downstairs to do laundry; and fell down the stairs. After returning from the hospital she tried hard to resume her new found job, but it soon became obvious that she could not work again. “I lost all hope in that moment, and became deeply depressed. My body wracked with pain, I went further into debt, as I was told that it would take at least 2 years before my body would heal fully. Well I managed it in sixteen months.”
Donna had moved twice within a few months and now as she was recovering, the house she had rented was sold again. “We faced a third move, in less than eleven months! I was still recovering from the kidney surgery, the two falls, and fatigue; this was the last straw! It took a long time to find a suitable apartment, and on unpacking we found out the movers had robbed us of a large part of our belongings. The police were called and could do nothing as it was our word against that of the movers.” Friends rallied around, offering old clothes, her mom gave extra pots and pans! “Within months, all that was taken was replaced; but, it just wasn’t the same. I felt violated and realized what it feels to be powerless.”
As she was again putting together the pieces of her life, Donna hurt her almost healed exposed nerve in her elbow again hearing a rip in her shoulder! “Agony, is the only word to describe it. I cried, screamed; and not just from the excruciating pain; but, because no matter what I try to do in my life to improve it; I take one step forward, and three steps backward, it seems.” Donna cannot take pain medications for her pain. “They make me shaky and my body sick and toxic.” So, she endures all these diseases and more afflictions like painful arthritis in most joints, thoracic outlet syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome, without pain management aides. She still manages to joke about it and quips – “Gel, ice-bags and a good electric heating pad, are my new best friends!”
Donna was President, of the Legion Ladies Auxiliary, from May 2005, to January 2006, just two months shy of elections for 2006-07; where she was under pressure to resign, due to health reasons. From 2004-2005, in the same ladies group, Donna held positions of: Executive, Chaplain and Sergeant at Arms; and stresses that “one must never allow their disabilities to stop them from participating in life! Maintaining social capitol (contacts) is crucial for a middle-aged woman on disability; if this cannot be maintained, a woman can fall easily, into a life of isolation, community deprivation and bitter loneliness.”
Currently, Donna is facing life on a social disability, multiple discs degeneration and atrophic stomach ailments that have drastically limited her capacity to work full-time, and be self-supportive. Ever the one to persevere, Donna designs brilliantly flavored pictures of artwork, all constructed by hand-drawing PC tools, or using multiple transparency layers of photographs, which can create a brilliant backdrop combining pictures of breathtaking nature, making a complete journey unfold in one picture.
Her talent has landed her three book cover assignments, which will be released globally. She has also been diligently building a website as well, to host her designs in albums. (http://groups.msn.com/SpiritsoftheFourWinds).
Currently, Donna and her son, Lee live in Northern Ontario, Canada. The town when gold mining was booming was up to 27,000 people but now its down to about 7,000. Many buildings are run down and empty. Even the apartment complex that was designed exclusively for senior citizens and where her mother lives, is home to much younger men, some of whom are drug addicts, some smoke and drink and party all night shattering the peace and quiet.
And yet the idyllic beauty, the greenery and the vast tract of land, keeps her attached to the place. “I have often come close to bears, but they have never attacked me-this is a piece of heaven on earth, a lot of the land still untouched by commercialism.” Donna adds with a wide-eyed wonder of a child, “Here you can see breathtaking views of nature gracing the daily and nightly skylights. During northern lights seasons, I look out my window- if the night is too cold, I stand just outside the door to absorb the magic of God’s Universal Kingdom! I don’t want to miss even one of the northern lights show!”
Though still struggling financially, Donna has high hopes of designing one day for a living; if she could find the way to get new equipment! “Trying to be a designer of PC digital art without a good PC, printer or scanner, is like trying to drive a car, missing three wheels. But, I’m still driving regardless, as fast as I can; there is no place for me to go, but ever forward!”
Dear,
More than ten years ago, North and I met on Deepak’s Prayer Circle.
We were part of a bigger circle of friends, online only, since all of us were
miles and miles away from each other. As the years went on and Deepak
evolved his websites…the Circle of Prayer transformed into other forms.
North and I kept in touch online, from time to time. Many months had passed by, since we’ve connected.
We are at least 500 miles away from each other…and never saw one another in person.
Yesterday, I was thinking about her. Today, as I sat down to read through some sites,
there was a familiar energy about a certain green icon on Shekhar’s tweeting page.
I thought, “Could it be Donna?”
and with some surfing through stuff…upon seeing her beautiful designs, I thought for sure it
is Donna. One thing led to another and … voila!
There is my online friend!
Seems like many are experiencing great hardships lately, more than usual. Juust so so so many!!!
So for all who are in need,
Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti Aum
with
Love and Peace and Light of what is going on all around us…that we remember to be
grounded
in
faith…with a warm loving comforting hug from the protectors of this universe.
Blessings to you Shekhar,
Thank you for already helping Donna, in so many other forms…
Loving all of you,
Cinda
~ Aum ~