Torah of Jenny

Posted on August 31, 2011 by jenny

The “Torah of Jenny” was a project that I started with an art therapist, Lore Caldwell, who I was seeing in Littleton.  She started me with a roll of brown paper, and it turned out to be my life as seen by a fierce feisty part of me.  I really enjoyed seeing each new section develop.  You can see that it’s colorful and has lots of energy.

(The process took from April to July 2006)
Painted all day with group in Marshfield. Really got into the colors.  Except for a pink bunny — and a tree— there were no recognizable shapes.  I enjoyed the process.  At one point I got stuck.  Sue suggested painting details so I did.  Then I began to see what needed to happen with a patch, so that the painting began to refine itself, get more cohesive.  The result was a combination of heaviness groundedness-earthiness and a light bubbly quality.  Reminded me of my mountain with all the tiny helium balloons.  (Too bad I don’t have a picture of it.)

Took the pink rabbit to Lore.  I had gotten a sense that the rabbit represented an irrepressable part of me that is “still going” despite all attempts to squash it.  Behind it is chaos which becomes a primitive sea creature and a tree, backed up by the tree, the rabbit is headed away from the chaos and into new territory.  Lore confirmed this reading.

Saw Lore yesterday.  Told her I’d gotten to “an edge”, the place where if I start to feel beautiful, creative, talented — I shrink in fear of being attacked.  Lore said “Draw the edge.” I said “Nooooo” crouching and rolling like Bella.  Then I conceeded it was worth a try.  She got out a roll of brown paper and a big box of crayons.  I began with an explosion of color, and then it was squashed by “Don’t think you’re so great.”  The story went on in surprising ways.  I hadn’t finished it when time was up, so she cut off a lot of brown paper so I could finish it at home.  I’ll have to get a box of real crayons.  She made me shift to my left hand, tho I don’t think it makes that much difference.  The same one got out who made the self portrait.  Angry, spunky, outrageous — the tough little drip that just wouldn’t quit — I drew a pink bunny under the first round of oppression.  Lore suggested google images, so I went there and got one and printed out a page of 9.  Tee hee.

Went to Lore yesterday and worked some more on the Torah of Jenny.  It was fun.  Whoever that feisty little person inside is, she knows what she wants to say.  I ran out of steam after about an hour.  But I think it’s her liberation that’s creating more energy in my life.

Saw Lore — did another chapter of the Torah of Jenny.  It’s hard work — I’m tired after an hour.  But I know it’s important to keep going — it’s really freeing up that rebellious, obnoxious, feisty energy.  I was wondering who I would have been without the trauma and dysfunction, somebody a lot more abrasive perhaps, without any compassion — and she popped up, said “I am compassionate, I fight for the downtrodden, the outcasts, the oppressed… ”   Right.  I always have been a fighter, at least in my thinking, from seeing how Betsy Dixon was discriminated against in 8th Grade History class to Journey into Courage.

Saw Lore yesterday.  Worked some more on the “Torah of Jenny”.  The Great Depression of 1970.  Could not remember for a while what brought me out of it — but it was my brother Jack saying “Buddha says life is suffering” and I hit bottom with a tangible thump. No longer thrashing in the swamp of depression.

I finished it in the spring of 2007, so it could be in a show at Springfield College, where Lore is a teacher. It’s hard to read, but the clouds of SAD and SCARED are being lifted up by arrows labeled MEDICATION, THYROID SUPPLEMENTS, and SOMATIC EXPERIENCING.  The pink bunny is carrying a green sign that says MAKE ART.

Still Going!

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Guidance

Posted on August 29, 2011 by jenny

(Written in June 2006)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m feeling a little sad this morning.  Please help me.
    Dear Jenny, we love you very much.  Let yourself feel our love surrounding you.  Relax.  It’s OK to just BE.  Let your weight sink into the earth.  All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.  The world is one joyfully integrated web work of life.  Let yourself feel it. How happy the trees are to have you here.  How joyful life is — it doesn’t get discouraged by the poisoning of the planet, it just springs forth in more life.  The energy can be stunted, twisted into odd shapes, but it can’t be stopped.  You are surrounded and carried by this life energy.  You can stop trying so hard and worrying so much.  Remember that when you take a small step in alignment, the great powers are there to reinforce and expand the consequence/effect of your action.  Be of good cheer, dear Jenny.  Let yourself feel all the good work you have done.
Thank you.

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A Letter from God

Posted on August 26, 2011 by jenny

For a while now I’ve been hanging out with “lost the will to live.”  Paying attention to the feelings but not acting on them.  I notice that I don’t have a lot of energy, and it’s hard to summon up enough focus for a creative task.  That’s partly why there have been so few posts in August.  But I have managed to go on preparing food and eating it (and eating a lot of things like blueberries that don’t require any preparation) walking the dog, dancing when there are people to dance with.

A couple of weeks ago I got an email  from my friend Beverly Decker.  She was asking 8 dancers to come to her house to do a new dance so Bob could video it and send it to the singer.

She told us she doesn’t really like country music, but her husband dragged her to a concert and she heard a wonderful song and wanted to make a dance to it.  The singer/songwriter, Angela Kaset, said she had dreamed it.  Beverly went home and dreamed the dance.  To me this is evidence that they were both clear channels for Spirit.  I wanted to go, but my car had to be in the shop.  So I asked my friend Barbara, who was going to give me a ride home from the shop, if she wanted to go learn Beverly’s dance.  She said yes, and we got there late, but in time for teaching, and made up the 8 dancers needed.  It was a lovely dance, and we practiced many times, each time I heard more while tears were streaming down my face.   “…I felt you giving up, so I thought I’d get in touch…”   “I’ve got faith in you, don’t give up on me…”

I could feel God reaching out to me through Angela, Beverly, and Barbara, through a carefully choreographed set of steps to get me there, to hear the song and learn the dance.

I came home, and found myself again sliding into “loss of the will to live.”  I ordered the CD, it arrived on my birthday.  I had forgotten the steps so I called Beverly and she walked me through them over the phone.  I had both song and dance back.  It brought me back to wanting to live for the God that needed me to “feed the hungry, help the poor, love your enemies, and please remember to forgive…”

Here are the words of the chorus:

This is a letter from God
I know it’s out of the blue
But I’ve had my mind on you
And I’ve seen you struggle lately
With the way the world is going crazy
And I’ve felt you giving up
So I thought I’d get in touch
There’s not a moment you’re alone
I still love you like my own
I know there’s work to do
But I’ve got faith in you
So please don’t give up on me.

I love you all with all my might
Red and yellow, black and white
And I need you more than ever
To bring my children back together
Just remember that it starts
In each and every person’s heart
We’ve been through this before
Feed the hungry, help the poor
Turn the other cheek
Love your enemies
And please remember to forgive…

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Five Stages of Trauma

Posted on August 17, 2011 by jenny

Reading Levine again, I see that he actually defines 5 stages of trauma.  Most of us know that we have an instinct to preserve life that manifests as “fight or  flight.”  Not many people realize that there’s a “default”instinct that comes into play when fleeing and fighting are both impossible.  This is “freeze,” sometimes called playing possum. But the possum isn’t playing, it’s truly paralyzed.  There are many people who feel guilty because they failed to act in a crisis, and don’t realize that they were frozen by instinct, not will.  My picture of the instinct to preserve looked like this:

fight <—> flight
freeze

Since rereading that chapter by Peter Levine I see that it’s more complex.  He actually defines 5 stages: arrest — flight — fight — freeze — fold.  He uses the word “arrest” for the first move, the “defensive orienting response” and reserves “freeze” for the paralyzed state.  You see this first action in people  or animals who have been quietly munching or reading and hear a strange noise.  They become very still and alert.  They may move their eyes or turn their head to scan the environment for danger.  If they see no danger, they go back to what they were doing.
I believe that the “defensive orienting response” is behind the phenomenon known as “whiplash.”  Imagine yourself driving through an intersection.  Suddenly you see, in the corner of your left eye, a vehicle moving toward you.  Before you have a chance to turn your head to see if it’s dangerous, the car hits you.  “Whiplash,” that frustrating injury that doesn’t show up on X-rays, that has medical people cruelly telling you it’s all in your head, and your insurance cuts off after 5 visits to a chiropractor that haven’t helped…   This is a symptom of PTSD.  Instinct is still trying to complete the defensive orienting response.
The defensive orienting response is also behind the phenomenon known as “hyper-vigilance.”  For a person who has been traumatized, when they’ve been startled, look for danger, and don’t see it, they don’t go back to relaxation.  Their body continues to tell them that there’s danger around, so they keep looking, searching frantically, because there’s nothing to see.  The real danger was in the past.  This happened to me the first time I read Waking the Tiger.  I got to the chapter on the mechanism of hyper-vigilance, read with fascination, only to find myself in a hyper-vigilant state.  The book is full of warnings like “if you start to get upset, put the book down and find a therapist.”  But I didn’t really get that my experience was evidence for the fact that I had been traumatized.  I took the book to my regular therapist, but she didn’t have the skills to help me.  I was in that hyper state for months.  What finally calmed me down was medication, a tranquillizer in addition to the anti-depressant I was already taking.
The untraumatized reaction to danger, when the defensive orienting response has shown that there is a real danger, is to run.  If you can’t run, you turn to fight. If  fight makes no sense — say the predator is much larger than you, or the danger is in the form of an abusive parent who your life depends on — then you freeze. This may result in the predator going away, in which case you survive.  Or you get eaten while you’re unconscious, which isn’t too bad as deaths go.  If the reptilian brainstem, which is responsible for instinctive behavior, concludes that you are going to die, you enter the fifth stage which is loss of the will to live.  Levine calls it “fold”, I call it collapse.

Arrest  —>  Flight  —>  Fight  —>  Freeze  —>  Fold

Books that helped me understand this:
Peter Levine, Waking the Tiger
In an Unspoken Voice

Robert Scaer, The Body Bears the Burden

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The Collapse Phase

Posted on August 12, 2011 by jenny

Written yesterday
Hard to get out of bed.  Feeling — not exactly depressed — but some sense of no future, or of getting through the day being a chore.  Lonely?  I know I didn’t feel like this at Dance Camp.  I really need to connect with someone I love.  There are people I could call and I’ll see Cory for lunch today.
O gosh.  I feel tired and demoralized.  I have no energy for the projects I’d like to work on.  I really want to just lie down and give up.   and die?  that’s not what I want.  If it could be any way at all?  I’d really like to know that breakfast will be waiting in the Community Hall, and there will be friends to greet.  And then either I’ll join in a community project or do one of my own, until lunch.  And if I wanted to dance, I could do it, with or without other people.  And when my morale was low, I could talk to a friend, or go meditate in a chapel.

I called Lynelle and asked for a hug before she left for the day.  She came and  I talked about how I’m feeling, waves of discouragement, everything I think of doing feels like an impossible chore, I just want to lie down and quit.  She said “This is the core of trauma.”  She said she’d just read it in Peter Levine.  She brought me the book.

    In an Unspoken Voice by Peter Levine, p 49
“In freezing, your muscles stiffen against a mortal blow, and you feel ‘scared stiff.’  On the other hand, when you experience death as being unequivocally imminent  …  your muscles collapse as though they have lost all their energy.  In this ‘default’ reaction (when it has become chronic, as it does in trauma) you feel that you are in a state of helpless resignation and lack the energy to fuel your life and move forward.  This collapse, defeat and loss of the will to live are at the very core of deep trauma.”

Friday
A little easier getting up today.  Lynelle was a big help.  Just understanding that my discouragement was not me being morally weak, but the last stage of trauma that happens when you expect death.  I remember describing the collapse to Karen, like one of those toys on a platform.  You push the button underneath and the whole thing collapses.  I saw that I was being triggered, and at that time I had started doing S.E. but I was not yet convinced that I was dealing with PTSD and didn’t have any understanding of the process.  I also remember seeing how easily I went from reading one of R’s invalidating letters to wanting to die.  I couldn’t find any cognitive connection, so I made up a phrase “worthless-and-rotten-and-should-be-dead.”  I thought, because it was so all of a piece (that’s what the hyphens are for), not reasoned from step to step, not describable in words, that it must be something from infancy.  I didn’t really understand that it was one of the stages of trauma, and was determined by the physiology of trauma, had nothing to do with the mind or the will.  Writing it out, I see that I have never understood that those collapses were determined by trauma.  Every time, in some subtle way, I thought they were something I could overcome by will power.  So I always saw them as me being morally weak and/or wrong.
The collapse happens to me, I do not choose it.  But I thought I had a choice to pull myself out of it.  Many times I’ve bullied myself through it — sometimes it turns out that if I get up and move my body, I do come out of it.  Especially if all I have to do is make breakfast, or wash the dishes — something where I have an established routine and don’t have to make choices.  Other times I’m simply unable to do anything.  I look down the list of things I “should” do and things I want to do (or did when I wrote them) and feel no motivation at all.  I’ve learned at these times to treat myself as a convalescent.  I play Solitaire on the computer (it’s one activity where I can actually get a sense of having completed something successfully) I read or type journal.  Sometimes I even curl up under a blanket and listen to a comforting tape.  Writing this out, and coming to a better understanding of the degree of paralysis, I can bring more compassion to myself when I’m in the collapsed phase.
Yesterday morning was hard.  I could not possibly have gone over to Neskaya in such a vulnerable state.  I thought I would type up what I wrote yesterday and expand it into a blog post, but I simply couldn’t do it.  I wasn’t exactly angry with myself but I wasn’t able to be compassionate or comforting.  Though I think seeing what I was feeling written out in Levine’s book, I was able to stop pushing myself.  Also I would be having lunch with a friend and knew that would help.

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Hope

Posted on August 5, 2011 by jenny

I continue to be surprised that telling the truth about how I feel and sharing it results in me feeling a lot better.   Once I wrote a letter to my brother about how depressed I was feeling and the same thing happened, even before I got a kind reply.  I think perhaps it works as “observation without evaluation” which is a key concept in NonViolent Communication.  Just describing objectively what’s going on for me sidetracks my tendency to make myself wrong for how I’m feeling.  The other lovely thing about the blog is just publishing what I’m going through is like reading my journal to a friendly witness.

The other thing I did hoping to help myself get past my discouragement with the political idiocy was to read again Sharif Abdullah’s  Creating a World that Works for All. The first part is painful because he describes what I call the “ongoing disaster” and he calls “The Mess” with intelligence and concern, and forces me again to see how bad it really is.  And how intertwined the pieces are.  Then I got to Part 3 where he talks about what we can do about it. It starts with this marvelous quote:

What is hope? It is the presentiment that imagination is more real and reality is less real than it looks.  It is the hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts that oppress and repress are not the last word.  It is the suspicion that reality is more complex than realism wants us to believe; that the frontiers of the possible are not determined by the limits of the actual, and that in a miraculous and unexpected way, life is preparing the creative events which will open the way to freedom and resurrection.           — Rubem Alves

Ah yes, this is what I so easily forget when I get triggered, that Western Culture’s idea of reality is so limited, that the realm of spirit does exist, and that miracles happen every day.

The quote is from Earthspirit: A Handbook for Nurturing an Ecological Christianity, by Michael Dowd.

Also see my post on The Shamanic Realm

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Depression/Demoralization

Posted on August 4, 2011 by jenny

I was pretty much in low-grade fear all day yesterday.  I was able to cry a little, sitting with Eleanor.   I can feel a pain and coldness in my heart right now.    My heart really aches.  I feel sad and need some sense of hope.  I feel like I’m helplessly watching the decline and fall of Western Civilization.
I haven’t done a blog post in  a while.  Partly still processing the shock of Evie’s death, also having some difficult conflicts in my personal life.  Being asked to do things that are too much for my still fragile emotional state, and not knowing how to explain to people who I don’t feel safe with.  The recent idiocy in Washington left me feeling like I just wanted to drop every effort in the political direction.  Stop signing petitions, contacting congresspeople, sending money.  I feel like I’m watching a huge house of cards beginning to collapse in slow motion.
Yes, I’m demoralized.  It’s been hard to do practical things and there’s so much that needs to be done.  I did do a laundry (good for me!) and I did shine the silver frame of the picture of Dad as a little boy (good for me!)  I also dealt with two bank statements (good for me!) and see that I spent very little in July (good for me!) but I’m still at the edge of my income.

I’m hoping to give away a lot of family pieces: Granny’s desk, the silver teapot, the picture of Daddy, etc.  Families in the next generation might like having some of them.  It occurred to me that I’m trying to lighten the load.  Wanting to die on a regular basis for nearly three years has left me feeling like I’ll welcome death when it comes.  I read in Animals in Spirit: “Death means wanting to be peaceful; it’s knowing that your work is done.” (Posted February 19, 2011)  I feel that I’ve done what I can to make the world a better place, and I’m ready to lay down the burden.  Even though I’m basically enjoying my life — well, I’m not today, I’m really feeling depressed/demoralized.

I need some kind of jump-start.  That would mean someone from outside giving me a boost.  I remember Kayla saying that the Reiki training really helped her get going again when her life had been feeling stagnant.  I need something like that.

I think about the sacred calendar.  Kayla got very excited about the idea of presenting it as an Elderhostel program.  So there’s a little boost.  But the slide show being stalled leaves me feeling demoralized in that direction.  A friend told me yesterday that Mercury has gone retrograde.  No wonder the wrong car parts were sent.  In some ways a perfect time to convert out-of-date documents, and get rid of stuff I don’t need.

Talking to some friends yesterday we agreed that the most important thing was to stay centered, focus on what we can do to create positive energy — in my case that means keep dancing — and hold my discouragement gently & with compassion.  “Quiet my mind, open my heart, and offer compassion to the beings I see before me.”

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Resilience

Posted on July 30, 2011 by jenny

I want to write about how different this time is from all the other times when I felt good for a while and said things like “now that I’ve finally made it” or “now that I’ve fought my  way through” only to find, two weeks or six months later that I’m back in the Pit, “feeling as bad as I’ve ever felt” and complaining “I’ve worked so hard for so long and still haven’t gotten anywhere.”  When I read through my old journals and come across one of these statements that I’m “all better now” I feel a little embarrassed knowing what’s going to happen.  I’ve posted some of these, but with a warning from the future. (See March 3, 2011 and February 23, 2011.)
This time I haven’t felt like I “finally” got somewhere, that’s such a simple idea, that one could be “all better” from PTSD, or from any major wounding.  Now I have a much better sense of what might be called “normal ups & downs.”  I know there was a point, actually not that long ago (see April 17, 2011) that I had a sense of getting to the top of the cliff, not having to “climb” any more, and being able to walk around and explore new territory.

Today I’m feeling a little blue, and I’m just hanging out with it.  I’m not afraid that it’s the start of a long slide downhill.  I’ve had enough experiences of coming out of this sort of mood in a few hours or a few days to be able to hang out with it with compassion.  I’m not angry at myself for being down again.  Instead of tensing my body in resistance, trying to hold myself up out of the quicksand of depression, I’m relaxing, letting my weight settle down, being here in the present with it.  I have faith, based on experience, that I will come out.  This is different from telling myself “You’ve come out before and you’ll come out again” which is only an intellectual knowing, not the visceral knowing that results in real change.  Instead of imagining “I’ve finally made it,” I’m using words like “resilience” and “self-regulation.”  “Self-regulation” essentially means I can trust my body to restore equilibrium when I become activated.  Instead of the illusion that “I’m fine now and nothing bad will happen again” is the reassurance that I can handle almost anything that comes at me.  If I can’t “handle it” I’ll surrender and pop up on the other side.

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The View from the Present

Posted on July 27, 2011 by jenny

Yesterday’s post, from 2005, gives me a sense of how far I’ve come, how much I’ve healed.  Events have taken place at Neskaya that were a fulfillment of my vision that was so far beyond any expectation that I had been able to imagine.  Times when I would look around at this amazing group of people, co-creating community right before my eyes, and I’d suddenly realize — if I hadn’t built Neskaya, these people would never have met each other.

At this point, I’ve healed so much from trauma, I’m basically self-regulating which means when my nervous system gets activated it doesn’t stay in that state but calms down after a while.  I’ve learned to be with uncomfortable emotional states without getting bent out of shape about them. In the last few months I’ve had periods of depression, and I’ve been able to say “Here you are, old buddy. It’s fine with me if you hang around for a while.”  Then, sometimes in a few hours, sometimes in a couple of days, I’d realize that the depression had faded while I’d just gone on with my life.  What a gift!  I’ve been able to actually enjoy the ordinary things I do every day: feed the dog, take her for walks, wash dishes, go to the dump which is actually a recycling center and the guys are friendly and helpful, and so on. My creativity has also been blossoming, and the most exciting thing is I’ve been able to sustain working on a project for a long period of time.  In the past, all too often, I’d get discouraged and quit.

I’d been wanting a writers’ group for at least a year, so when I saw a poster for a “Memoir Class” to be taught at our friendly local bookstore, I signed up.  And I had a lot of fun! We were given assignments that we could complete, or work on something else, and in class we would also do “free writing” which is basically timed writing, the only rule is “keep the hand moving.”  When I first started doing these, back in the 70’s, I would often be writing nonsense, but there would sometimes appear something I liked a lot after I got going.  I used to call the nonsense part the “peanut butter” stage where you might be writing “I can’t think of anything to say. I can’t think of anything to say. I can’t think…” that you just had to write through.  Most of what I wrote for class was pretty ordinary, but at the last meeting she gave us the prompt “It was all or nothing,” which called out of me a piece of “left-hand” writing I liked a lot.  Here it is:
“It was all or nothing”  —— sounds like a co-dependent or Child of Alcoholic statement.  Back or White, Good or Bad.  Nothing falls neatly into two categories.  It just doesn’t work that way.  There are all kinds of shades of grey.  If you take Good & Bad, Black & White, then you can have Good Black, and Bad Black, and Good White, and Bad White.  What happens if you add red?  there’s good maroon and bad maroon, good pink and bad pink, good red, bad red, green, blue and how about putting some oranges in the mix?  then we could go for a walk across the bridge, across the Ammonusuc, and go down by the river and watch it flow.  I really love to watch water flowing.  And I love that weird thing that happens when you’ve been watching for a while and then you look at the shore and it’s flowing the other way.  I like to watch a leaf pass by, up & down, sometimes caught in a counter-swirl or ending up stuck behind a rock.  I like to watch the wave form that shapes itself between two rocks and it splashes up & then runs smooth & then splashes up & runs smooth again but it never makes the same shape twice.  And if you could move in closer and closer, with your camera and then your microscope and see how on each wave there are tiny little waves along the surface and on those tiny little waves are more curly shapes and the closer in you go the more complex and beautiful until you find somewhere deep inside, 10,000 magnifications down, you start seeing similar shapes again.   Similar but not exactly the same.  If a butterfly flaps its wings the weather will change.  It’s truly Great White Elephants all the way down.

Becky Cummings was our teacher.

For the image of things that get smaller and more complex the deeper in you go, see the Mandelbrot Set.  Click anywhere on the image and you will go in closer.

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Guidance

Posted on July 26, 2011 by jenny

(Written in July 2005)
Dear Guides and Guardian Spirits, I’m feeling very sad about my wrecked life, about all the things I never got to do that would have brought satisfaction and pleasure, and that my chances of being able to widen my life to include more satisfaction and pleasure look very slim at the moment.
    Dear Jenny, nine years ago, when you opened Neskaya, you were profoundly depressed and terrified.  You were afraid that you might not even be able to teach two hours of dance a week.  Since that time, you have tackled and succeeded with a number of things: all-day dances, workshops with British teachers, Dancing the Sacred Calendar, painting with Aviva Gold.  You tried a number of things which didn’t last for a variety of reasons.  You’ve made a lot of new friends.  Even tho people move away, new ones have come.  You have incorporated, applied for and got tax-exempt status and set up an endowment fund.  You have changed your investments to socially responsible ones, and built yourself a house.  You have made a positive contribution to the lives of many people: some you know, and others you don’t know about.  You got on medication, weathered a painful divorce, and have done major healing work with Somatic Experiencing.  This is all a tremendous achievement.  You have trouble seeing it because the amount of healing you have done has made it easier to see the empty places in your life, and to see how much work and confidence and support is needed to be able to do some of the things you want to do: the Winter Solstice Pageant for example.  You are seeing more clearly how badly you were damaged in childhood.  You also have many fears: when your ankles hurt, or your energy ebbs, or only a few people come to dance — that this is the beginning of the end, that whatever it is will not recover and come back.  You have suffered many losses, and haven’t had much chance to learn that things do return.  But they do: your ankles are fine now, your energy will come back, and people will always come to dance.  We suggest you use this low time to relax and rest, practice doing nothing, spend time with darkness and silence.  This will nourish your own life, and even as you nourish yourself, you also bring healing to the planet you love.  Rest on this dear Jenny.  For all the pain and misery in your life, you are not adding any pain to the world.  Even this is a tremendous achievement.  Let go, let down, be at peace, rest on the Everlasting Arms, they are there for you.  We love you, dear Jenny, and you are doing fine just as you are.

 

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