Harbor Pilots

And we're live. I had to reschedule myself for 15 minutes later. 30 Eastern. My name is Kathy. My cadre handle is SpeakWonder, and I get to show up here with you every Thursday for Caregiver Day. I live in Erie, Pennsylvania. within easy driving distance of our harbor and our peninsula. And our peninsula or Presque Isle is a National State Park. It's beautiful. It has 11 beaches. Right now, all kinds of pleasure boating, fishermen, new wildlife. We're seeing baby goslings on the peninsula. The beavers are busy doing their thing, making dams in the in the moving water that's in the interior of the peninsula.

And it's just a lovely place to be. I love living in this area. Sometimes I do wish I were a Minnesotan. So before I launch into today's topic, which is our deep ache for silence, I thought I'd show you this really cute picture of my grandbaby who just turned two. His name is Oliver. We call him Ollie. And with his developing speech as a toddler, he calls himself ah-ah. He'll thump his chest, he's saying ah-ah. And my name is Oma to the family, Oma, and he calls me Oom-Oom, which I love. So here he is with a look of complete rapture on his face because he was just given a whoopie pie, which the Amish make.

A whoopie pie is basically a great big cookie with cream in it. And this one is chocolate chip, Ollie's favorite. So when I say to the boy, do you want to go to the Amish store? He says, yeah, yeah. And we go there and we get his cookie and I get my groceries and produce. Right now they have just an absolutely stunning greenhouse with hanging baskets. And I'm thinking of going to get one very soon. Today, again, I just, I feel like what echoes from my heart might be echoing back from yours. And so I thought I'd talk about our ache for silence.

As we experience, I don't know, some people call it white noise, and actually white noise helps many individuals go to sleep. White noise could be a fan or constant worrying, worrying, not worrying, a constant sound that kind of lulls you into this. sense of wanting to go to sleep. What I'm talking about today though is noise. Cacophony. How's that for the word of the day? Cacophony. Hi Sarah. Thanks for joining. Great to see you. Cacophony, according to Webster's, is a harsh discordant mixture of sounds and it's used in a sentence a few times here.

A cacophony of deafening alarm bells. A cacophony of architectural styles. So the noise could be what we see. We could say it looks busy or noisy. Songs of unrelieved cacophony. It's almost poetic, isn't it? So that was on the dictionary description. I have played songs in an orchestra setting as a violinist that have intentional cacophony. An American in Paris is one of them. There's sounds of horns blaring because it's a street scene. So there is intentional cacophony. And then there's just the stuff, the noise that swirls around us.

Getting back to my little grandbaby, who's two now, Oliver, it occurs to me that every time I describe my journey in caregiving, each and every time, 100% of the time, I tell you about my mom, June. She is a delight. She has just observed the occasion of her 95th birthday. And she lives in a skilled nursing facility, is in a wheelchair, has to have constant safety guards as far as people making sure she's okay. And she needs help with everything. I used to be her hands-on caregiver when she was still living in her home until that became impossible.

And then I have kind of morphed into her emotional caregiver. I'm also her power of attorney, financial and physical. And I am her Barnabas, I am her encourager. I'm the sibling, there are three of us, and I'm just saying it, I'm the only girl. I'm the girl and the youngest. with two brothers and the boys don't really do the kind of nurturing that I'm programmed to do. And so I find myself pretty much every night calling mom on the phone and then I visit her on the weekends. And when I call her on the phone, I read her poetry.

I read her some of my poetry. She loves Mary Oliver. She loves Robert Frost. She loves a bunch of different poets. There's one I read about out in the fields with God that she loves, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And so I am her emotional support system. You know, I love that. I love that that's my caregiver role. I feel like I'm in a season where in many ways I'm thriving. I'm learning from mom and I am enjoying that she's still with me in her, you know, advancing age and advancing difficulties, including some onset of dementia.

I don't usually say that I'm also caregiving little people. Now, Ollie has a big sister named Tilly. That's our nickname for her. She's Matilda. She's four years of age. And I had both of them yesterday as a caregiver. Yeah, I'm Oma and I'm family. But my whole job yesterday and once a week with those two is to keep tiny humans alive. Oh, man. Oh, okay. Here's just a quick, for instance, I took them to the park yesterday, which is alongside a busy parking lot because it's on a college campus and it's next to a road.

And there are college students. There are delivery trucks And my dear sweet Ollie kept running toward that venue. he had the slide and all of the things in the playground, but something about kids, they want to go exploring. So my whole job was to go and make sure he was safe and then drag him back to the playground. I'm still tired from yesterday. So caregiving is incidental. It is intentional. It is something we do as a reflex, and it's not always official. You know, we call this Caregiver Thursday.

I think in some capacity, you entering this live stream with me are also a caregiver by virtue of being a human being. I love to talk about harbor pilots on this live stream. And a harbor pilot is a real job. And we have a beautiful harbor here on Lake Erie. I've seen the harbor boats go out and the person who drives that harbor boat, that smaller boat, actually goes out to the large vessels coming in and gains access to the steerage and steers them into safety. Harbor pilots are important in the symbolic realm of helping each other make it into safe port.

And so we are being harbor pilots for each other on all of the layers of cadre in the mental health picture. And on caregiver day, we're helping each other find safe port after a tiring day or journey being at sea in caregiving. There are some things that we don't know yet and we lean on each other for help and support. Our deep ache for silence. Somebody calls it noise fatigue and that's when we have this general undefined anxiety and it could be related to the noise that's always buzzing around.

us. In the technological world in which we live, we have reminders on our phone. We have alarms that go off. We have devices in our homes. We have the news, the weather. There are ambient sounds. Mine right now are birdsong. Yeah, I know you guys like it when I go out to my patio to do my cadre, but today the landlady is coming over with her lawnmower and I thought she might show up while I was out there and then you wouldn't be able to hear me. So I'm inside with the window up and you can hear.

Oh man, there you go. You can hear the birds and see there's my hummingbird feeder. I've had one lone hummer coming to my feeder and I'm told that's a scout. Sarah, you still with me? Thank you. A scout is a hummingbird that scouts out the territory, finds the food, and goes and tells the others. Noise fatigue. So there's something about the human experience, and I totally include myself when I did a little bit of research and I read that we avoid noise. No, we avoid quiet. Excuse me. I think I'm about to sneeze.

Scarf serves a dual purpose. We avoid quiet. Sometimes it's scary to sit in the quiet. It's something unknown. We're uncomfortable with it. And so we avoid quiet. We avoid silence. Not because we love noise. We avoid quiet because it's uncomfortable. You know, in radio, If there's too much silence in between talking or music, we call that dead air and it's something unwanted. But silence can be uncomfortable, especially in delicate things like in funeral lines at the visitation. People want to just fill that heavy air of grief with words when silence might be the better choice, but it's uncomfortable.

When we Avoid silence. And when we constantly dwell in that buzz of noise or that noise fatigue, we forfeit our chance for healing. In the silence there is healing. I have five ideas that I came up with for mitigating noise. Number one, say less. Conversations can be filled with meaningful pauses or even just pauses, nothing meaningful about them. In music, if you're an instrumentalist or a musician, you know that on the musical score, there are rests built in and those are pauses. Those are intentional silences where your instrument, your section, mine would be the strings, doesn't play.

Because it's a place for her breath. It's a chance for the music to breathe and then come back. And it's artistic beauty. It's a pause. There's my landlady. Okay. Can you stay with me? Sarah, stay with me. Count. Count. Hello? Absolutely. I was. It's cool. It's fine. I'll be done in 10 minutes. Hello. What did I tell you? We're going to another part of my tiny home. You'll still hear the buzz of the lawnmower, but my lawn is also very small, so. Sarah, are you still there? And those listening on the replay.

Oh my goodness. Say Less was my first one on mitigating the noise. Sit in silence in nature. You know, I find this really funny that my topic today is is our human ache for silence in It's anything but quiet here today right now. Number one, say less. Two, sit in silence in nature. Three, develop a sense of awe with silence. Number four, walk away from your phone for at least 5 minutes. Number five, pray if you pray. Pray with no words. Pray in silence. So I have not one but two Mary Oliver poems and I hope I'm not going over my time.

I don't think anybody's scheduled for noon, so here I go. I'm going to continue. This one is What Can I Say from Mary Oliver. Okay, Gracie, you're good. You can be quiet now. Gracie's not a big fan of lawnmowers. What can I say that I've not said before? So I'll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river, there is an unfinishable story. And you, you are somewhere in it, and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy heart to the art museum and the Chamber of Commerce, but take it also to the forest.

The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. Gracie May. And that's the poem What Can I Say? The other one is a very pithy poem, again by the same poet, Mary Oliver, and it is Instructions for living a life. Let me get my dog out of here because... Sorry. You didn't need to see my skin up close. I might have to retitle my cadre comedy in the chaos. Oh, that's already taken. Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. Let's look for less noise today and in the days to come and address our craving for calm and quiet.

Let's address our deep ache for silence. So coming up, we have The Fixer Trap with Carrie Heimer. She'll be talking about fixers. And then we have Comedy Through the Chaos. That title is taken and it's so apt for Miss Shannon Paul, who is a stand-up comic among many, many other hats that she wears. And she's a caregiver and she'll be coming on the cadre later today. So I just want to wind this up, this silence which has been filled with cacophony to remind you that you are more than a caregiver, you are a human.

And as a human, You are somebody's safe harbor. You're helping somebody navigate their way into less noise, into the familiar and safe waters of home. Drop anchor right here next week at 11:30 Eastern on Harbor Pilots with me, Speak Wonder, and my feisty corgi, Gracie.