Gratitude

I’m just about to set off for Indianapolis, IN to conduct the last INELDA training of 2016. Then on to Columbus, IN to help start an end of life doula program for Our Hospice of South Central Indiana. This has been an exciting year for INELDA; a year of growth and discovery that solidified our position in the emerging field of death doula education. We trained a little over 200 doulas this year in six public classes. We also taught just about the same number of doulas in programs we created at hospices and hospitals. In 2017 we’re expecting to double those numbers with 12 public trainings and new programs starting up in a number of hospices.

Our success is something that we are all deeply grateful for. We thank all those students, and the administrators of the programs we started, for answering the call to serve the dying. With your help and the help of all those who will take our trainings next year and the years after that we will transform the way people die in this country and elsewhere.

So, in gratitude I offer up this poem by Mary Oliver:

Messenger

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird –

equal seekers of sweetness.

Here the quickening yeast, there the blue plums.

There the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?

Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me

keep my mind on what matters,

which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be

astonished.

The phoebe, the delphinium.

The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.

Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart

and these body-clothes,

a mouth with which to give shouts of joy

to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,

telling them all, over and over, how it is

that we live forever.