Supporting Community Member with Debilitating Illness

Greetings CG Community,

We would like to pass along a request from a CG community member, Kathilyn, who is struggling with a debilitating, life-threatening illness. She could use support in the following ways. She writes:

I would appreciate your time and presence for a half hour, an hour, or more:

1. Clear all stuff (papers, tools, clothes, tech stuff, junk) from basement, for garbage, plastic bins, free listings, into garage. Easy to breakdown tasks.
2. Help w/organic garden & yard.
3. Be w/me for plethora of options: w/clean or org. stuff in house & on mac, complete docs like will, medical org. spread sheet, etc.
4. On drug treatment Mondays: healthy soup/root and green veggies/food/bone broths, all Common Ground retreat menus/no vinegar – and love dessert but no sugar…
5. Starting with a brief sit, a song, a prayer, a hum, a connecting moment for us.

To get in touch with Kathilyn, you can email her at kathilyn@gmail.com.

A poem by Kathilyn:

Yes But No

You suggest that I say yes to this illness – but I won’t keep it.

I say yes to this illness – but not that it’s mine!

It’s not my illness.

I don’t and won’t own it.

Okay, so I say yes to “my” illness — but what if that gives it permission to grow??

I say yes to dying – but not yet, not yet.

I say yes to losing all my dreams.

It hurts.

You told me there is a freedom of the heart I might experience

saying yes

Rather than saying no to all of it so tight in there.

But I don’t know how to say yes in my heart.

So, I try this:

Yes to the mold in the house

Yes to the dying car

Yes to the basement flooding

Yes to the chaos

Yes to the money stress

Yes to betrayal, the pain, the bitterness, the ache of loss

Yes to friends who moved far away this year

Yes to my three living sisters not being part of my life

Yes to not in this life having a soulmate singer, someone who loves spirit as much as me, someone who I get to love, too.

Yes to the ambiguities never resolved, the uncertainty

Yes to goodbye dance, mountain climbs, work, play, all of that

Yes to all the complications and layers of my life – a tapestry I cannot begin to fathom

Yes to what I will never understand.

I counseled my clients that to heal, we must accept what is — right now, in the present moment. So much easier to advise than to live it myself.

And the spring rains fall,

heedless of the 21-year-old boy-man who murdered 10 people

heedless of my pain

heedless of all those things, except the running of the waters on the earth, bubbling up and unfurling life with every drop.

Yes, to that keen glory, the surprise like a child for the first-time feeling mud in toes and undersoles of feet, yes, to the tapestry of who is this me, so different, each time I look at my life when I allow — yes.

© Kathilyn Solomon 2021