Harbor Pilots

Good morning, Cadre. It's your girl, Kathy. I go by Speak Wonder on the Cadre, and I love to come on here, Thursday's caregiver day and talk about harbor pilots, those vessels who come alongside us and help us safely into the harbor. We're all traveling different journeys, and we're in the caregiver picture. We're struggling through different seasons. So I have the flu, and it's been rough. I think the worst is over. It's the intestinal kind, the really not good kind. Started out with a head cold yesterday and a little bit of vertigo.

I thought, what's this about? So I sat down lots of times during my day yesterday, and then last night, it hit me sideways and laid me flat. I'm feeling pasty, not quite up to speed. My daughter called to see how I'm doing, and she said, mom, are you going to be on Cadre today? I hadn't even considered it. I lost track with what day it was. This was about half an hour ago. So I've had, like, zero time to prepare for my Cadre. But I loved that she knows how much it means to me to be in the Cadre community as a contributor and as a consumer.

And, you know, not too long ago, she and her sister, my other daughter, would forget that I'm in the Cadre, and they'd say, let's make plans. And I'd be like, no, it's my Cadre day. Now they know. And so it's something that they embrace and respect about me. Hi, Ms. Shannon. Hi, Jules. I'm not feeling too good at all, truly. I live in a tiny. I want to say 700 square feet. It might be more like 800, but either way, it's small. My tiny house with my dog, Gracie. I love it. It's got everything I need.

It's cozy. And excuse me, but I did figure out last night that it's a long walk from my bedroom, which is on one end of the apartment, to the latrine, which is on the other end of the apartment. You probably didn't need to know that, but it's a long walk, and it was a very long night. As soon as this Cadre presentation is over, I'm going to crawl under my weighted blanket. Hey, y'all, if you have not had the experience of a weighted blanket, they're. They're wonderful. They're good to reduce anxiety.

But I think they also immobilize you in a way where you just need to let all your molecules slide down and rest. So I have this book. Look how big it is. It's, like, so super thick, and it's got lots of papers in it. This is little essays I wrote during COVID and somewhere along the way, I got the notion I should probably print them out and just have them, you know, because things sometimes get murky electronically trying to find things. And I thought if I had hard copies, it would be good. Came in handy today.

I thought, you know, what did I write during COVID that might be apropos today on caregiver day, on what will be kind of an abbreviated presentation since I don't feel good. Thanks, Ms. Shannon. I angels. I do hope to feel better. I. You know what? All I can manage is ice chips, and now they've turned to water, but I need to stay hydrated. Oh, Jules, your son with ADHD loves his weighted blanket. They're just a wonderful innovation. Wonderful. People have asked me, well, in the summer, aren't you hot?

They don't produce heat. They don't. They just produce comfort. I don't know how to explain it. So on we go. What a unique situation for me in a government agency working with the court system. As a court secretary for my supervisor during COVID to tap on me and say, I think we need your writing chops to encourage the troops. Would you be willing to write a short little pick me up and Send it to 200 outlets? 200 people were receiving each of my emails with an essay or a blog, for all intents and purposes, and in a very curious way, during a very intense season of the coronavirus, where many people were home working from home and some were in the building here in Erie, Pennsylvania, I was actually writing on the boss time, creative writing to encourage the troops.

How lovely that my supervisor, Carolyn, recognized something I can do well and a communication that I enjoy rendering and said, why don't you send this out to the group? Email the time I was working from home. So I give you this. I wrote this April 20th. Let me see, April 21st of 2020. And I started it with a little paragraph from a writer named Rebecca Solnit. She says, when all the ordinary divides and patterns are shattered, people step up to become their brother's keepers. And that purposefulness and connectedness bring joy even amidst death, chaos, fear, and loss.

So I went on to say, all our ordinary divides and patterns have been rearranged. The edges are watery and undefined. For many of us, there's not a building. It's an Internet connection. It's not an elevator ride. Coffee cups, Jostling and cell phones buzzing. It's a short commute in pajama pants to make to a makeshift desk. Who remembers that? Who's still doing that? You know? Truly, Covid shifted our paradigms and our ways of getting things done. It's still good morning. But these days the greeting is sent via email, phone or zoom.

The tasks we're each used to performing once locked in muscle memory, are now done through a maze of new patterns demanding more of our brains, pulling on our creativity. I'm going to reread that paragraph because I think that's what caregiving is. It's rewiring our brains, adapting, shifting, taking a life. That was done in muscle memory because it may have been predictable in some way and it's gotten totally rearranged. What do you do? The tasks we're used to performing once locked in our muscle memory, are now done through a maze of new patterns demanding more of our brains pulling on our creativity.

Enter Cadre. What a supportive group. Truly. When my daughter said, are you going to be on Cadre? My first impulse was, no, I'm going to write a little note in the chat, not feeling good. And I said to her, you know, I need a Cadre hug. I need to be in the Cadre sphere to get my virtual hug. I'm glad I'm here. Glad you're here. What we've witnessed is the wonderful human capacity to reach out, to help, to problem solve, to come to the end of a day and say, it was productive. It was productive because we gathered our collective gifts and wits and poured them out and said, here, what do you need?

Would this help? Day after day? We are a network, a safety net, a labyrinth of individuals coming together to serve each other and the community in spite of our constraints. At the time, it was the COVID 19 constraints. This sequestering has become a proving ground and we have done each other proud. Here's another gem from my gratefulness collection. We feel like separate water droplets, but we are also ocean. So let's keep merging and showing up and bumping into those watery edges as we together tackle every task one at a time.

Pulled it out from about five years ago and I believe it's still relevant to the times we're in. And as caregivers, some of us in the sandwich generation. I've got my 93 year old Ma and I've got my two grandkids and I come alongside their mama to help manage a three year old and six month old, two ends of the life spectrum. What a beautiful place to be in, but also a very intense and challenging season. Later today on the Cadre Comedy through the chaos. Yes, Ms. C. and I got to interact there and Cadre family, go to the replay.

Oh, my goodness. Go and find Shannon Paul with JC from yesterday. Play it again. I'm gonna play it again. There's so much content in there. And I've been replaying most of the interviews if I didn't catch them live particularly. And then Rachel's room later, Rachel Havocost. And then another interview with jc. I keep calling him in my mind. I keep calling him my favorite dj. I don't think he's truly a DJ in. In the strictest sense of the definition, but he's a dj. You know, he gets on there with his morning lives and he's playing music.

He's relating to us. He's essentially a dj. He's just great. C. lippold and J. Petrono later on today. I don't have the times. It would only confuse you because I'm in Eastern standard time. We are having an old fashioned ice storm here. I'm looking at my pasty complexion and saying, I'm crawling under my weighted blanket. I'm gonna get some more ice chips and I'm gonna be okay because you're here because we can get through this. I'm not the only one who's gotten sick this season. It's running rampant and I do feel like the worst is over.

I looked up the word endure. If you've been with me for any length of time, you might know that my favorite thing to go to is the thesaurus and the dictionary. So this is the thesaurus. That's such a hard word to pronounce. Meh. You know, find synonyms or different ways of saying things. Endure. And I was thinking, I endured a very difficult night. I was awake more than I was asleep. From this illness. Endurance is survival, bearing it without resistance. I love that. I wrote it down in my journal.

It's. It's bearing up under something without resisting it. That is endurance. And I thought about it and thought about it. And to patiently endure is to will yourself make a conscientious decision. You're going to survive. But in order to survive, you must rest. And you must allow the conflict, the illness, the challenge, the grief to weigh upon you without resisting it. Because you will learn from it. You're not fighting it. You're learning from it. And to do so without resisting is truly to endure.

And it invites rest, it invites sleep, it invites more rest and some hydration and a whole lot of doses of the cadmosphere. Love you all. Peace out. Shannon, can I just ask you a quick question? Did you really say you're a beautiful onion yesterday? Because I love that you were talking about layers and I don't know if I heard it correctly. You might have said you're a beautiful human when you were talking to JC about the Cadre. But I thought you said beautiful onion. And I have a little thing that says life is like an onion.

It's on my refrigerator. Life is like an onion. You peel off one layer at a time and sometimes you weep. A lot of truth there. So I heard. Beautiful onion. Because we are multi layered and as we peel back the layers, we discover new truth, new beauty, new ways of survival. I hear.