Ann Hisle - My House Burned Down and Now I Can See the Stars: Reflections on Losing and Finding

This book is not only very readable, but also wise and valuable. You will come away from it cleansed and transformed and much better equipped to respond to inevitable life-losses and lead the life that is your potential.

ALAN MORINIS,

author of With Heart in Mind

For all of us dealing with the beauty and brokenness of human living, Ann Hisle presents a wise way forward, inviting us to see integrity in apparent contradictions and hope in deeply felt losses. Relying on stories from her professional experience and own life, she artfully weaves together sound insights that are personal and practical, spiritual and clinical. This book will enlighten your mind, engage your heart and uplift your spirit.

KEVIN OBRIEN,

S.J., author of The Ignatian Adventure:

Experiencing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in Daily Life

Immerse yourself in the pool of Ann Hisles captivating work that is solidly grounded and eminently readable. You will discover new paths in the struggle through heartbreaking loss. Read it and be rewarded.

RABBI DR. EARL GROLLMAN,

author of Living When a Loved One Has Died

MY HOUSE BURNED DOWN AND NOW I CAN SEE THE STARS

Reflections on Losing and Finding

ANN HISLE

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Copyright 2015 by Ann Hisle

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

My House Burned Down and Now I Can See the Stars is a new work, first published by Dover Publications, Inc., in 2015.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-80637-2

Manufactured in the United States by RR Donnelley

79496201 2015

www.doverpublications.com

For John and our children Christine, Beth, David, and Peter and their families with love

For so many generous and good people who have shared their time and wisdom with me, I feel so appreciative and thank God. I begin with Diana Hanssen, my treasured college friend and editor. She went through the entire manuscript with me and asked me to clarify some sentences, add on to others, and put brackets in the middle of other sentences to describe the storytellers actions. We sighed, empathized, and laughed together many eveningsshe was/is an invaluable gift. Mike Slattery was another dear friend and editor, particularly for the Introduction. Jim Miller, my editor at Dover Publications, could not have been more easy-going, open, and approachable; yet another gift for this new author. M. C. Waldrep was also incredibly openshe was my first contact at Dover Publications and agreed to look at the manuscript of a fledgling author who had no agent. Thank you, M. C. And then there were all those friends and acquaintances who so willingly read the work and were encouraging. They often let me know what stories they loved, liked, or didnt appreciate as much. Thank you Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, Reggie Morales, Melanie Weiland, Lynn Mattingly, Judith Reuter, Lilyan Dickerson, Dave Cavanagh, Annilee Openheimer, Tony Tombasco, Ginn Goldsmith, Joanne Littlefair, Carolyn Mandell, Gail Mandell, Mary Carol Dragoo, Jane Coe, Jean Chandler, Sally Bosken, Marie France, Sandra El-Khodary, Sara Perry, Joanne Springer, Rosemary Shiner, Diana Ruth, Rose Mazur, Michael Newton, Bob Neuman, and Jeanne Castro.

Finally, there would be no book if it werent for my faithful, loving, patient, teasing husband of almost fifty years. Thank you, John, for unscrambling all my computer glitches, reading over innumerable sentences or quotes, and, most significantly, for being my loving life companion through all our losings and findings. What joy to look at and for the stars with you.

With thanks for the gift of images to accompany the meditation quotes to Susan Robbins Etherton, McLean, Virginia, www.susanrobbinsetherton.zenfolio.com. A photographer for the transformative Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation in Washington, DC, Susan generously offered choices from her many creative and beautiful photographs and greeting cards. The photos in chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, and 11 are all hers.

Additional thanks to John Pontius for the chapter 1 photo, Jean Johnson for the chapter 7 photo, and John Hisle for the photos in chapters 6 and 10.

Chapters/ Practices:

Each chapter discusses a waking-up spiritual practice to expand our CONSCIOUSNESS.

Each chapter furthers the thesis that we need to lose in order to find.

Each chapter shares at least one story of hope, of a person seeing with new eyesseeing freshly.

The book invites the reader to do the same.

Tomorrow, today is gone. An intrinsic part of daily life is losing: whether it be the loss of our temper, the irritating loss of our car keys, or the heartbreaking loss of a beloved parent. However, on the other side of these losses it is possible, eventually, to make an active, deliberate choiceto find a way to be less reactive, a place for a spare set of keys, a way to be closer to our remaining parent.

When we are ready to look, we notice that both losing and finding are complementary to each other and fundamental to life. In fact, theyre holding hands. When we lose anything, we gradually learn that the loss is not the end of the story.

Significant loss or significant perceived loss sends most of us headlong into shock, into the underneathness of life. It is there in the depths that we often question what really matters and learn some life lesson, such as: control is an illusion, we are all vulnerable. With one telephone call, our planned life can dramatically change.

My planned life changed when I was seventeen. My mother received a callher biopsy revealed advanced lymphoma cancer. The impact of her diagnosis and her death less than a year later was profound. My mothers religious faith and my fathers philosophy of stiff upper lip prepared me to a degree. However, it took years to really absorb the deep impact of losing my mom, and a few years later my only aunt, and twenty years later my dad, all to cancer. My parents deaths would influence many of my choices, one of which was to become a bereavement counselor.

As a bereavement counselor and psychotherapist for over thirty-five years, I have had the privilege to accompany many people coming to terms with heart-wrenching loss. I have observed that their healing arises out of a willingness to break open and ask deeper questions about lifes mysteries. Their healing arises out of a willingness to keep hope alive. A carefully nurtured and practiced attitude of hope can transfigure the very landscape of our lives. With hope, we can see that the dead and dry seeds in the barren fields of winter paradoxically contain abundant life.

How do we nurture and practice this attitude of hope? Well, we might choose to act with hope and make a habit of it! We live in possibility. We can choose to look with fresh eyes at whatever we experienceout of the mud, lotus flowers grow.

So, as we weep over losing a loved one or a fire-ravaged house, we can mindfully choose to be with the loss and hopefully look beyond the ashes to the light of the stars. Little by little we can accept our grieving as part of the universal flow of living. We can hold the loneliness and the missing in the one hand, and the cherished memories and new experiences in the other hand. As we move through lifes stages, adapting to wanted and unwanted changes, we carry with us some hurt and fear,