Seasons of Solace: A Story of Healing through Photos and Poems

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My husband, John, and I were working with a Mennonite organization in Thailand for most of our four and a half years of marriage. He worked with a micro economic development program as well as helping in leadership development for an AIDS program.

I was mostly involved in English teaching as well as some leadership development in various areas. One Sunday morning in July , we were going to join a church gathering in a remote village about an hour away from our town. I and our month-old son went in a car with a Thai friend. John had decided to take the motorcycle because he would be staying overnight for a meeting in the village the next day. Everything happens late in the village, so we had only begun to wonder why John was late when we got the phone call.

He had been hit head-on by a drunk driver passing a slow vehicle on a two-lane highway. He was killed instantly. My son and I came back to Pennsylvania where I have spent the past few years trying to figure out how to go on with life. My natural bent in life is for learning. When life gets hard, I gravitate toward places of learning.

So I enrolled in a graduate program as well as began attending monthly retreats at Kairos School of Spiritual Formation. While in Thailand we experienced conflict in various groups, so I wanted to learn about constructive ways of working through conflict. This program also had an option for a concentration in Trauma Healing.

I naturally moved toward those electives in my own need to work through the trauma of the sudden loss of my husband. At Kairos I began receiving spiritual direction.

This was a new thing for me to receive on regular basis. If you are unfamiliar with it, please read the page about it.

Spiritual direction was quite transformational for me. I am a private person who tends to stuff all my feelings inside.

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Spiritual Direction helped me bring these emotions to the surface and explore them. Then I was able to explore who God was for me in this midst of these swirling and confusing feelings. Eventually I decided to also be trained as a spiritual director.

Between these two educational programs, I began to play around with some creative ways to express my grief. As you will see on this site, I began with memory book making, which lead to scrapbook journaling. Then to my complete astonishment I began writing poetry. Writing has always been an important way for me to process life, but I had not written poetry before.

Caring for Carleigh: Seasons of Solace

And photography just started to happen in the midst of this. I never imagined myself as either an artist or a poet, but this is not about becoming famous or being published. As Donald Hall has said, "Poetry enacts our own losses so that we can share the notion that we all lose--and hold each other's hand, as it were, in losing. Shop Independent Bookstores Indibound is an organization of local booksellers that allows you to search local stores for any book. This link takes you to a page that allows you to enter your zip code to find the closest store that carries Seasons.

Preface Read Seasons of Solace preface. Reviews from Websites and Blogs As we have just passed the publication date of March 2, there are starting to be some blog reviews.

Seasons of Solace by Janelle Shantz Hertzler

Read the first blog book review. Reader Reviews Read reviews written by readers of this site.

First Two Poems Read the first two poems. Author You can read more about me on the about me page. Return to Journey-through-Grief homepage.

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