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172. Navigating Life’s Unfolding Story with Cheryl Grey Bostrom
106 Plays6 months ago
Tyndale novelist Cheryl Grey Bostrom, M.A., writes surprising prose and poetry that reflect her keen interest in nature and human behavior. The author of four books, her most recent include her international best seller Sugar Birds—the winner of more than a dozen fiction awards, and Leaning on Air, endorsed as “a reader’s dream,” and a “cross-generational masterpiece." An avid photographer, she and her veterinarian husband live in the rural Pacific Northwest.
Connect with her at CherylBostrom.com
Contact Kenera Rinaldi for Grief Coaching information or to be a guest
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Transcript
Character Growth and Life's Arc
00:00:00
Speaker
The sweep of a storyline, there's an arc in a character's growth pattern. And so at about the 75% mark, 75, 80% mark in books, is this all is lost moment in a lot of books. At any rate, it's a very pivotal point of turning. And I thought how often we live out our lives and then kind of lock in on that 75% as if that's the end of the story.
00:00:29
Speaker
And it is. It's the 75 percent mark. You know, we're not there yet. And there's, you know, the story is still going to unfold.
Introducing the Podcast: Grief, Gratitude, and the Gray in Between
00:00:42
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Grief, Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast.
00:00:50
Speaker
This podcast is about exploring the grief that occurs at different times in our lives in which we have had major changes and transitions that literally shake us to the core and make us experience grief.
00:01:06
Speaker
I created this podcast for people to feel a little less hopeless and alone in their own grief process as they hear the stories of others who have had similar journeys. I'm Kendra Rinaldi, your host.
Cheryl Gray-Bostrom on 'Leaning on Air'
00:01:20
Speaker
Now, let's dive right in to today's episode.
00:01:28
Speaker
Something I love about recording podcasts is the fact that I developed these bonds with my guests. And the one I have today, Cheryl Gray-Bostrom, is one of these guests that is now back again for a second episode. We recorded a while back about three years ago when her first novel, Sugar Birds, came out.
00:01:56
Speaker
And she is now back with a second novel titled Leaning on Air. And we will be chatting about some of the themes that are in both of her books, but primarily in her latest Leaning on Air.
Character Dynamics in 'Leaning on Air'
00:02:12
Speaker
So welcome Cheryl. Hi Kendra. Thanks for having me back. So good to see you.
00:02:21
Speaker
I am happy you are back. So when you came that time, Sugar Birds was your first fiction, like novel, because you'd been writing before you have several awards, even from other things as well as that one. So how does it feel to have another novel now released?
00:02:43
Speaker
It's kind of a time warp. You know, you feel like you just put one story into the hopper, and then here comes the next one. And so it's great fun, and I really enjoyed being able to continue Celia and Bernabe's story. Even though the book's a standalone, it is a sequel. It starts 12 years later.
00:03:05
Speaker
So Celia and Burnaby are the main characters in, well, there's other characters also in Sugar Birds, but in this new one in Leaning on Air, these are the two main characters that follow in
Exploring Themes of Grief in Life's Transitions
00:03:18
Speaker
their journey. And as you said, it is jumping ahead about 12 years, which I was telling you I was so grateful for, that there was a little bit of catching up at the beginning so that I could remember, because it's been three years since I
00:03:31
Speaker
red sugar birds. But as you said, it is a standalone novel. And within the 12 years, it does even jump a little bit even within there as well. It starts 12 years, then it jumps a little bit more. So it just follows this journey.
00:03:47
Speaker
So let's talk about the themes in Leaning on Air. The reason that we have this book, even though it's a novel in this podcast and have you on the podcast is because in both of these books, Sugar Birds as well as this one, there is a theme of grief and grief not only
Challenges in Love and Relationships
00:04:10
Speaker
after death, but grief of ending of seasons of life, grief of ending of relationship or strained relationships. So let's talk about some of these themes. One, the aspect of immense loss and actual physical loss of death. Let's talk about that aspect of grief and how you were able
00:04:36
Speaker
to weave in the emotions of the characters, characters, not just one experiencing this loss into a reality. Share with us that journey. Sure. Let me give you a little bit of a backdrop on this story. Celie's an ornithologist, and she's very passionate. When they first meet, she's adrift.
00:05:06
Speaker
And she really yearns for affection from her husband or from whomever she's with, even before she marries him. But equine surgeon Burnaby is autistic. He's very principled. But his sensory neurons rebel and her touch makes his skin crawl.
Celia's Journey with Grief
00:05:27
Speaker
So think about that. Here's this relationship where these two have a whirlwind summer and they elope on a whim.
00:05:35
Speaker
they plunge into this most unusual romance, but it's profoundly affected by how they can or can't give each other what they need. And so there's a setup right there for the sorrow of broken relationship or injured relationship or a place where there are just ships passing in the night. And so she is on a research trip and she's hiking a hill and
00:06:05
Speaker
and makes a decision that sends her life and his into this devastating tragedy. And she doesn't believe that Burnaby is going to be able to forgive her choice. The grief riddles her and she just decides she can't.
00:06:24
Speaker
abided anymore, and so she flees to kindness at this farm where she's convinced that she wants to start over. And it's through the course of all the stuff that happens to them when she's out in the country and as Burnaby's pursuing her, that she really has to come to terms with how her prior life, how the people who have played into her life have given her a way
00:06:52
Speaker
a flawed way of dealing with sorrow
Love Languages and Relationship Expectations
00:06:54
Speaker
and dealing with grief. And I don't mean to say that there's a right or a wrong way because grief comes at us from all sorts of angles and some of it's long-term from ruined relationships or relationships that we just can't understand and other times from a tremendous trauma. And so she has both of these going on. But when trauma strikes, she's unable to remember
00:07:22
Speaker
love. She's unable to remember how Burnaby loved her and how she loved him back. And so then that propels them into the heart of the story.
00:07:32
Speaker
You touched on a couple of things. In their relationship, one of the things that, as you mentioned, is very common is that they have different love languages, not only love languages, but also just different abilities, right? Just because of who Burnaby is and who Celia is. And in that, it's something that a lot of us in relationships are constantly trying to figure out with our loved ones.
00:08:02
Speaker
And whether I've been married 20 years, you've been married how many years? How many years Cheryl? 48. 48 years you have kids, grandbabies and trying to figure out these ways in which we communicate
00:08:22
Speaker
in that aspect of even just love can be challenging.
Burnaby's Neurodivergence and Relationship Dynamics
00:08:27
Speaker
And then there's the aspect of two of the, in the relationship of Celia and Bernabe and the novel. And then that also carries on into any of us and any of our, in our relationships and dynamics is the different ways in which we grieve. They both experience something that causes a lot of grief and how they each
00:08:47
Speaker
navigate the grief is differently and understanding how each of them responded to that incident is something they have to figure out in order to figure out if they're going to come back together or not. So let's talk about those two things in relationships. Sure. I like that Burnaby is neurodivergent in this story because
00:09:18
Speaker
Most of the ways that he expresses his love for her or is unable to express his love for her are exaggerated in a way that make us who are what they call allistic, non-neurodivergent, better able to see where that relationship has gone awry.
00:09:37
Speaker
in patterning Burnaby after people that I have loved, students that I've had, people in my family that I've loved, and my scientist husband, who's not autistic, but he's still very much a scientist. I just thought, through the course of our long marriage, just how often my expectations
Personal Insights on Grief and Expectations
00:09:59
Speaker
um, created the difficulty, not his difference, you know, um, not his difference from me. And his expectations for me would cause him to misunderstand me. I mean, he, as a scientist, a highly focused man, who's, who can be very, who in our early years when we were raising our kids, um, was very intent on his work. I would tell myself the story that, that he was disinterested.
00:10:28
Speaker
And that would tie into just the sorrow of abandonment, the grief of abandonment that I had from my own mother. And so all of these relationships start to smear. They all can run together based on how, whether we recognize it or not, we've chosen to see the world. And so for me, a huge task in my faith walk has been to come to see myself as beloved
00:10:58
Speaker
and then too long to treat my husband as my beloved. But here's the kicker when you talk about these love languages. I want to give him what I want and he wants to give me what he wants because we both tend to think that if
00:11:17
Speaker
I want it, then he will too. Or if he wants it, then he will too. But there's a scene in Leaning on Air where this old woman
Analogies of Grief and Relationship Dynamics
00:11:24
Speaker
is talking to Burnaby and she says to him, give her what she needs, Burnaby. Don't bring her dead rodents. You're like a cat bringing her dead rodents. She doesn't want dead rodents. And when you tie this in, it's not a stretch really, but you've got to take in the whole picture of it. So much of it is born of the sorrow
00:11:47
Speaker
that grief can propel in us to be trying to meet our own needs in a relationship. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah, expectations are what let us down. It's not the other person. I've always said that. It's not that someone let us down. It's our own expectations of what that someone was to do, say,
00:12:08
Speaker
act, whatever, that is what lets us down. So that what you said is so key. Human relationships are just so complex, because like you said, like a lot of times, like, we think that we're giving love in the right way, right? Like our
00:12:25
Speaker
animal bringing their dead rodent you know to show how much they love us and so forth and that for us we were like screaming it's happened already we you have puppies I know my dog one time brought one of them brought a bunny and she was so excited and doing all her routine that all of a sudden I'm like
00:12:46
Speaker
And she's probably like, but mom, I was like bringing you like the
How Grief Translates into Love
00:12:51
Speaker
catch of the day. Like I saved our backyard, right? So in that same way in our relationships.
00:13:02
Speaker
If we're giving love the way we wish, we would be giving it, but that's not how the other person receives it. It can feel like we're like lost in translation there in these communications that we have. And then this translates also into then the grief component. There was, I did a screenshot and I, again, we're trying to be really careful without giving away the novel, but here one of the, actually the same, the old woman that you mentioned,
00:13:31
Speaker
the character that is there said, death like that cloud out there must have blocked her view of the two of you. The aspect of what grief and things like that can block like these clouds. I love that.
00:13:50
Speaker
visual. Explain to us, even for you in your own experience, what grieving a death and a death of, it could be a death of a relationship, a death of a person, what has it meant for you to then translate it into these type of words for the characters? It's been a lifelong journey for me to come to terms with
00:14:19
Speaker
the limitations that my
Cheryl's Personal Grief Experiences
00:14:21
Speaker
mother had on her ability to love me through some mental illness and just a variety of things. Every year as I always carry my yearning for a relationship with her and yet my recognition for the boundaries that I've had to set and my longing for her to be healed, I'm always carrying with me this grief because she's my mama.
00:14:48
Speaker
you know, and effectively I don't have a mama. And so then there's this sense of being orphaned, you know, and my faith has convinced me and told me and assured me, my God has assured me that even though, you know, a mother forsakes a child that he won't. And so then that shaped me and brought me into a greater place of belovedness.
00:15:15
Speaker
But it's still, in this life, it's still something that I always have to be aware of, that that's going to affect how I receive love from others, that broken sorrow, that grief, that realization that even in a relationship as intimate and as primal as the mother-daughter relationship,
Grief's Impact on Memory and Perception
00:15:42
Speaker
that in this world those relationships can break. And so it's affected my trust then going forward. And in Leaning on Air, Celia has a lot of issues with trust. And you'll read it in all of my stories. There's always a grappling with mother-daughter stuff going on. But I'll just give you a little example of how I, if I'm not alert, how my core grief will
00:16:10
Speaker
play out in my relationships going forward. So I've been married to my sweetheart for a long, long time. And he really is just, I mean, the guy's a keeper. He's just great. But when he was, he too, like Burnaby in the story, he was a veterinarian and he's retired now, just works a few hours a month. But in those early years, when we were raising our kids, he was gone a lot and he was very,
00:16:35
Speaker
very focused on what he was doing, which involved some highly technical work. He did a lot of work with embryos in cattle and just had a lot of balls in the air. And it was not uncommon for me to feel like he had just abandoned me, wasn't available to me. And he did his best to be available to me. But the other day, he was out in our garden and we've got a huge garden. And he was tilling and
Past Grief and Family Dynamics
00:17:02
Speaker
working in the garden, doing all kinds of things.
00:17:04
Speaker
And in that season, but it brought back memories to me that kept me from just delighting in him working in the garden. And instead I went back to that season of loneliness for me. And I made a comment to him and I said, oh, I just love it so much that you're engaged now. And I mean, it's just like, I wish I could just grab those words and pull them and stuff them back down my throat. And I said, because you just weren't engaged like that back then.
00:17:35
Speaker
And what he said to me really brought me up short because he said, I don't think you're remembering that correctly, Cheryl. He said, I did a lot. And he went through and talked to me about all the ways that he had been involved. And we were just talking about the garden. And then those memories came back to me. But it's like I hadn't nourished those memories of him loving me in the garden back then because I was so focused on
00:18:04
Speaker
how I was reliving my own abandonment from my childhood and applying it to him. He was a busy husband who was splitting his attentions necessarily, but I applied all kinds of other meaning to
Enduring Nature of Grief and Finding Joy
00:18:22
Speaker
that. And so here I am, we're almost in it 50 years, almost 50 years, and I am still doing it. And so just to be aware of how grief can color our current happiness,
00:18:34
Speaker
how it can color the immediacies of joy and our inability to enter life fully present. If we're carrying this shadow of grief that's unacknowledged or unaddressed, that's not saying that we squelch it or outsource it or bury it. But if we're not aware that this comes along, our history comes along with it, we're likely to reinterpret or misinterpret our present. And then we're going to miss out on joy.
00:19:05
Speaker
I don't know, can you relate to that?
00:19:08
Speaker
Yes, I absolutely can. And the way that you say it, it's not that you're trying, it's just acknowledging that it's there. We're not trying to necessarily erase it, but to acknowledge that, like, let's go back to what you were saying with the cloud. If it's clouding your perception of reality, because you're carrying this grief even right with the clouds, to acknowledge that it's not the reality that's
Faith's Role in Perception and Joy
00:19:35
Speaker
probably bothering you is because you're looking at it through a lens that comes with either trauma, grief of relationships that might have not worked, abandonment, all that, and it's not necessarily what you're viewing that is the issue or causing you the pain. Yes, is that somewhat what you were trying to per se?
00:20:01
Speaker
Exactly. And you had talked about the immediacy of a traumatic event. And I believe then, depending on how we have couched our own prior experience, what kind of statements we make about it? What do we tell ourselves about our prior experience or our prior losses? And depending on how much we recognize that cloud and acknowledge that it's there and know that we can still
00:20:31
Speaker
ultimately experience joy in spite of it and sometimes even because of it. If a cataclysmic tragedy comes into our lives, the death of a loved one, the loss of something very precious to us, it can throw us all back into that cloud without even knowing where we are or which end is up and then we can start repeating those patterns and it can make the whole thing worse. And so it really requires a discipline
00:20:58
Speaker
You know, for me, that's a discipline, you know, just of prayer.
Therapy, Grief, and Generational Trauma
00:21:01
Speaker
And when God asks me to think on things that are true and lovely and pure and right and noble, admirable,
00:21:10
Speaker
I recognize that not just as a, hey, you know, think happy thoughts because it's not about that. It's about a shaping of our perception so that we can still find good in the world in spite of these awful things that have happened, you know, and that, and then that fortifies us to move forward. So pushing down grief or, you know, it's like a basketball. You try to shove it underwater. If you try to pretend it's not there, you don't deal with it. It's just going to erupt someplace else. And usually in some unexpected or
00:21:41
Speaker
hurtful way that continues the damage, that stretches the scar or opens up the wound again. Suppressing it, squelching it's not the answer. We've got to experience it in all the different ways it comes to us, but still to hold on to that core recognition that this grief is shaping our reality.
00:22:03
Speaker
And to understand that if that's happening to us, to know that another individual is also living and viewing life also being shaped by their reality and whatever clouds have been in their lives. To know that with everybody that we interact, we're interacting not only with that, but again, with whatever perception or perspective we have of the world,
00:22:32
Speaker
because of what we've brought to the table with it. Now, in your journey, so faith is a huge part of that awareness. And did you also have therapy as well at any point in order to shift your viewpoint with your dynamics with your own mother, or was it always just more
Emotional Healing through Therapy
00:22:55
Speaker
introspective and searching for faith?
00:23:01
Speaker
No, I did a lot of work. I did. Tell us about that journey.
00:23:07
Speaker
Yeah. You know, when I left home, you know, naively, you know, when I left for college, you think you're just going to leave all that behind, right? You're going to go start this new life, but you're carrying, you're carrying it. But it wasn't, and so then I met my husband, we just had this terrific life, you know, much like Celia and Burnaby have sorted through their differences and their similarities and figured out what works for them. The birth of our children, while
00:23:37
Speaker
you know, that was a great joy, not a great trauma. It still threw me back into my childhood because I'm hunting things in my cupboards for parenting that I want for these kids. And I wasn't finding what I needed in those cupboards. In fact, my eyes were opened to a lot of things. And so in my
00:24:02
Speaker
In my early 30s into my mid 30s, you know, I did a lot of therapy with this wonderful guy who really took me back into a healing of memories and it was beautiful and it was profound.
00:24:17
Speaker
you know I learned a lot cognitively but also at the heart level that really allowed me to you know to to love better and and to know myself better and it was funny not funny but before I started I'd had a friend who had who had shown me that healing was possible she had been through a trauma far more severe
00:24:42
Speaker
than anything I could conjure. But her character, her
Parenting and Breaking Cycles of Grief
00:24:46
Speaker
life, her beautiful way of loving just really convinced me that if I did this work, that I would be able to develop a deeper understanding and a freedom from the entrapments of this lifelong, generational sorrow that I so- Sorrow, trauma.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. And so I saw the same guy. I saw the same guy she did. And it was just really a beautiful, very difficult time. But before I went into him, before I went in to see him, it's like my subconscious started sabotaging everything. I was late for the appointments. I would forget the appointments.
00:25:39
Speaker
I would be all of a sudden just overrun with busyness so that I would cancel the appointments and finally I just had to come to terms with the fact that I was just dodging dealing with this heartbreak. I had tried to hold that basketball underwater and it just doesn't work. You can't move forward if you don't turn
00:26:02
Speaker
and not only face your griefs, face your sorrows, but you need to move through them and you need to feel them and then figure out how they're going to inform your life.
00:26:15
Speaker
That is so powerful and it's so important to be able to be aware of these things in our life that are blocking our view because even when you were saying generational sadness, generational trauma, generational trauma is one that's used often.
Complexities of Parenting and Communication
00:26:36
Speaker
But that theme is also in the book.
00:26:40
Speaker
And in your case, you were able to address these things in your 30s while you're raising your kids. And I like what you said, the fact that it brought up all these things with you. There was joy, but there was also this aspect of like, oh my gosh, because I actually, I've said this even before that for me, I did experience grief when I became
00:27:06
Speaker
a parent because of the fact of, for me, was more of the aspect of identity. It was more like, where was the other person? Where am I prior to this? How can I re-find parts of myself that I don't see anymore as I'm in this role of parent and trying to dig up more of that aspect? But the part of breaking then this cycle
00:27:34
Speaker
What then does this relationship look like now for you as being now the role of the parent with your own children? It's been a long road of learning for me. I have two kids who are, my husband and I have two kids who are, they're very strong personalities and they're very
00:28:02
Speaker
They're sturdy, they're sturdy people. And so I had to come to terms with my own fears about parenting.
Fear, Control, and Parenting
00:28:14
Speaker
And for me, the more fearful I became, the more controlling I became. In the extent of wanting them
00:28:27
Speaker
It's funny, but it's like I wanted to hand them memories that would make their childhood beautiful. Almost as a protection against them ever feeling what I had had to feel.
00:28:47
Speaker
And we're compensating. Yeah. And it's always salt and pepper, right? It's like you have these kids that you love more than yourself, more than anything you can ever have imagined. And you want life to, you want heaven on earth for them.
00:29:07
Speaker
And even as a Christ follower, I know you can't have heaven on this earth. And so for them, I think it made it harder for them to talk to me about hard things in their lives. Particularly our daughter is very perceptive and I think she
00:29:24
Speaker
She would sense that if she was going to be talking to me about something painful to her, how much that would hurt me. And that's, we haven't talked about that. It's only a guess, but I know that I was off balance enough because I didn't want her to hurt.
Grace and Self-Awareness in Parenting
00:29:43
Speaker
That it put some barricades about how to help her
00:29:49
Speaker
deal with when things were challenging in her life and I was able to do that in other ways it's not all black and white but you know and none of us as parents can do it perfectly even close to perfectly if we can hit the 50 mark we're doing pretty well right but by God's kindness you know she's just grown into this beautiful woman and beautiful mother and she's really brave she's way braver than I was when it comes to you know addressing hard issues of the heart and you know as I've
00:30:17
Speaker
You know, another few decades have passed. I've learned how to do that. Much better, I think. But yeah, so it absolutely affects your children. And then when they hit, you know, when they hit their teenage years, and I responded in my teenage years by just kind of going off, I just, you know, I was rebellious and just a couple of years in there. But still, even though I realized I was guarded from things,
00:30:43
Speaker
my sorrow, my grief, my loss, you know which
00:30:49
Speaker
is at the core of sometimes anger or, you know, carelessness or whatever. It propelled me into behaviors that I was really afraid of for them, but those kids were different from me. They weren't me. They weren't driven by the same things. They weren't, you know, it was just, and for me to assign my life to them and to try to protect them from my life, but that's poor kids, right?
Journey from Self-Condemnation to Grace
00:31:17
Speaker
Oh no.
00:31:19
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Okay. But they are important. They're great kids. So with this too, that aspect of awareness is important. And how about the aspect of grace? Like having grace with ourselves in this journey as we're discovering and also as we're kind of going back and in this case for you and even in the
00:31:44
Speaker
characters themselves, right? The choices that they made, again, one of the main characters did a choice that carried some guilt in, in, well, I'll just say her, like carried, you know, Celia makes a choice that she feels is the cause of this major situation. And
00:32:09
Speaker
how having grace with ourselves and our actions, even just what you were saying, that plays a huge part in our journey and in our healing. Can you touch on the aspect of grace? Yeah. Yeah. I love the verse.
00:32:32
Speaker
no condemnation for those who are in Christ, you know, and that was when I first heard that verse. And I realized the level of self condemnation that I carried part in a beginning childhood because I because
Grace and Forgiveness in 'Leaning on Air'
00:32:46
Speaker
part of my mother's condition was that she could not own
00:32:52
Speaker
She could not own things that she had caused and she would put it onto us children as if we were the source of her unhappiness and the source of everything bad that happened to her. So you get trained at an early age to carry things that you shouldn't be carrying. And so when I first heard that, I just realized that, what? You mean I can be free of this? I do not have to pack this
00:33:19
Speaker
this sorrow, this grief of wrongness about myself any longer. I don't have to do that. And that was just life changing for me. But in the story, Bernabe extends that same grace
00:33:35
Speaker
to Celia when she's blaming herself for what had happened. And he says to her, it could have happened with you sitting in a chair, you know, and he lives out this view that life is for us. You know, they're sure there's rotten, rotten stuff that can happen, but life is for us. You know, God's for us. And she just doesn't get that she just, you know, she, she's experienced so many sorrows along the way that she just can't see it. And
Life Beyond the 75% Mark
00:34:03
Speaker
And yet for him to keep setting that before her, he's really setting before her the choice that we can, what are we going to choose about how to celebrate this treasure of a life that we've been given? Well, okay, so as a parent, you know, hindsight's always pretty spectacular, right? But we're always moving forward. And I think about books or these novels, when I first started writing fiction,
00:34:32
Speaker
and realized, and even reading as a former English teacher, you know, talking to kids about the sweep of a storyline, there's an arc in a character's growth pattern. And so at about the 75% mark, 75, 80% mark in books is this all is lost moment in a lot of books. At any rate, it's a very pivotal point of turning. And I thought how often we live out our lives and then kind of lock in on that
00:35:02
Speaker
75% as if that's the end of the story. And it isn't. It's the 75% mark. We're not there yet. And the story is still going to unfold. And I believe in happy endings. And my God has convinced me again. And I say convinced because
00:35:27
Speaker
I'm a slow study and I've been very mistrustful in my earlier life and I'm digging my heels to what he's teaching me. But if we're looking at the 75% mark, our vision isn't long enough. And so
Distinguishing Bad Moments from Bad Days
00:35:44
Speaker
when I lost someone very dear to me and my gaze for some time landed on her death,
00:35:55
Speaker
I stayed there for a while, you know, and that all is lost covered my life for a while with that cloud. But eventually you lift your eyes. Eventually you move through that cloud and it is just, it is a cloud. It's not a solid wall and you can move through it and you come out on the other side and then you're past the 75% mark. And that doesn't mean there won't be other traumas that won't be other,
00:36:24
Speaker
heartbreaks, but we're through that one. So I like that 75% view. And now in this season with our children, they're grown, they're married to people we love, they have beautiful children, and they're going through their own arcs. They're growing into their places in life and we're all moving forward.
00:36:51
Speaker
I love what you said regarding the character development and sometimes us being stuck there. And you mentioned children, and I remember having this conversation with my cousin's son, he's little, he's only like three, we were talking on FaceTime, and I said, how was your day?
00:37:10
Speaker
It was bad. You know, at school, how was your day at school? It was bad. And I was like,
EMDR Therapy and Integrating Grief
00:37:15
Speaker
was it? Or was there like a moment of the day that was bad? Right. So these things of how it is in our lives and with kids, right, they go to school and then they just have one little thing that happens and not just kids, ourselves, one little thing that happens in our day. And we're already saying that we had a bad day. Did we really or did we have a bad moment?
00:37:36
Speaker
And in our lives as well, yes, there's been lots of different bad moments and seasons. You mentioned the word season earlier in relationships. It is not that it's all been bad. And when we shift that again perspective in our lives, it changes how we
00:37:59
Speaker
go through these moments of hardship, of trauma, of grief, because we know that it is a moment in life. And yes, the clouds, those grief clouds, those can come back, even the same one of the same recurrence. I know grief is not, it just kind of changes. It transforms. We transform as well. We change. So how we perceive them and that grief changes. But yeah, like not being so stuck on that
00:38:30
Speaker
hardship knowing, like you said, that there will be another moment within our time that the clouds will part and the sun will shine again. You said that so well, to put a hedge around a bad day, a bad moment, a tragic
00:39:01
Speaker
terrible season to put a boundary around it. It was actually at a service where a woman spoke and she was involved in a ministry working with kids, but her husband had betrayed her in a way that was just earthshaking.
Grief as a Bird on the Shoulder
00:39:26
Speaker
And when she was talking about that season,
00:39:30
Speaker
She said, it was a bad time, but it's not a bad, mine is not a bad life. And so we can, there's a counseling process called EMDR and there's Rapid Eye Movement and there are some things that they do where they connect hemispheres. I don't know if you've ever talked about that on your show. You know, we have these events that
00:39:55
Speaker
occupy certain, I mean, physically occupy places in our brain. And they've done brain scans where if, if a person is triggered, and they have this notion compartmentalized, not a notion, but this experience compartmentalized in their brain, and not integrated into their flow of life, that part of the brain will illuminate. And those hotspots are ones that say when we're triggered can throw us back to that moment in a heartbeat. I mean, like
00:40:24
Speaker
something can happen and boom, then there we are. And we can become the age that we were back then with the way of reasoning. And it's as if that experience then has invaded all the rest of our timeline. And so this EMDR is a process by which those experiences are integrated into our timeline. And in the process, they shrink on the timeline to become part of the life that we're living.
00:40:52
Speaker
not the whole determining factor in how we approach life, experience life, in a way that robs us of the now. Because the now is really all we've got. I mean, that's what we have. So how are we going to live it? And we can talk theoretically about how we should do this and should do that. But those feelings are so powerful. They're so intense that it's not like you can just say, well, I'm not going to do that anymore, because it's grief.
00:41:23
Speaker
It's here with us. It's like the bird on our shoulder, and it's on our shoulder until it flies away, but then it can come back and land again.
Nature's Role and Stewardship in 'Leaning on Air'
00:41:32
Speaker
So yeah. So beautiful. Yeah, I love the analogies of nature to be able to understand these concepts, the clouds, the birds, and of course all of these aspects of nature are very much a part of your books as well, because you're a lover of
00:41:52
Speaker
nature yourself and live in nature and the characters are there. And you can see that in the different ways in which like there's, you know, the birds and then there's the horses and all these, you know, other, other characters that also help the characters themselves be able to view.
00:42:14
Speaker
view life. Is there any other theme that you'd like to talk about, about the book or any other thing about the book that you want to share with the audience before we wrap up? There's a little boy in the story. Actually, there are some twin boys who
00:42:32
Speaker
play a pivotal role, but they're coming kind of at what we're talking about from another direction. And something happens in the story. Actually, a series of things happen in the story, which are very hard, that this little boy ends up experiencing. And in the process, he becomes selectively mute. Now, when I say this about the story, it's not
00:42:58
Speaker
I'm sensitive to this stuff. It's readable. It's not like you're going to just plunge into this horror show in reading about these, but they are traumas to this little boy and there is some death involved. So I'm not minimizing it by just saying the way it's couched has to do with what I'm going to say here with this theme. So he experiences these four things and he
00:43:26
Speaker
interprets them as a five year old who turns six might. And it's very flawed thinking. And yet as I wrote him, I had to acknowledge that or had to ask myself, so how do I view things that have happened with either too much culpability or not enough culpability?
Caring for the Land and Natural World
00:43:54
Speaker
And when life happens,
00:43:56
Speaker
how much do i blame myself for what has happened and how much or or do i look at it as something as life as a wave to be ridden and that i'm going you know that that that i can learn from or whatever but when you look at this little boy and you and you realize just when they realize what he's thinking when they learn what he's thinking it's really a little mind boggling because
00:44:24
Speaker
It could be any of us, not just a five or six year old in how we interpret life. So a lot of it's about worldview and about perspective. But another theme that comes in too is just the care for the land. And you mentioned me as a nature lover and I care very deeply about the natural world. I believe that it teaches us about the character and love of God.
00:44:48
Speaker
time and again. You can't look out the window. You can't look at the natural world without seeing the hand of God or His truth in it. And so in the story, there's a wild prairie that hasn't been touched and that natives used to travel through to get to the Snake River. And all around in the Palouse, you know, 99% of it, of that Palouse prairie has been developed, turned into wheat farms. And they're
00:45:12
Speaker
beautiful. They're just beautiful, you know, or they raise sunflowers and canola, but mostly it's wheat. But you'll go into these draws or these islands, these tiny little acreages, and you'll see the native prairie the way it once was. And so into this story, into this canyon that's in the middle of this wheat field, I've inserted an imaginary prairie that's close to 400 acres, and it's a little microclimate with a stream running through it. And it is
00:45:41
Speaker
Vaster expanse of what my husband and I see when we roam that country every year and he's usually hunting birds But I'm hunting with my camera, you know There's a real conflict of interest there because he's a bird hunter and we have bird dogs and I am a bird lover But but just just a sense of the created world and of of it as an ecosystem not something that
00:46:08
Speaker
to be exploited, but it's something to be worked with, for us to be stewards of. And in the book, I take the stance not that wheat fields should go away because we
Power of Storytelling in Personal Reflection
00:46:22
Speaker
need to eat. And these people are, you know, the people that we know who are wheat farmers, there are beautiful stewards of their land and they care for it deeply. Most of them do. Some of them just, you know, rip up the land and let it erode, but most of them don't. And so how can we
00:46:39
Speaker
meet human needs and care for the land in terms of commercial agriculture while still preserving
00:46:47
Speaker
this wild beauty in the way that God intended it or you know first made it so that we can remember and so that we can know and so there's that whole thing in there too and silly has decisions to make about this farm and you know so it's all interwoven into the story it's I don't go into I don't go into a you know a speech on ecology or anything but but but hopefully it'll give readers pause and they'll think about it
00:47:16
Speaker
Yeah, there's a lot of aspects in the book that are self-reflective. I mean, that's what novels do. And that's why I do love having novelists like yourself be on the podcast, because I think that sometimes when we read a novel and we know that it's fiction, yet we can relate to certain aspects of the characters' lives,
00:47:37
Speaker
It can help us in our own journey in a way that it's kind of like when you hear music, right? It touches a different chord than sometimes when you're reading a memoir, because with a memoir, you know for sure those things happen.
00:47:57
Speaker
and or facts and you can still relate but they hurt you differently than in a novel so in a novel is that the subtle way of being able to touch on topics that are hard in the character's lives but then within ourselves in order to reflect
00:48:16
Speaker
And just have perspective of our own lives. So I think you've done that beautifully. A lot of different topics touched in both your books that will give the reader, the listeners who will be the readers, give the readers of your novel a lot of insight about their own life.
00:48:37
Speaker
So thank you Cheryl for sharing that with us and sharing aspects about your own life. Again, we tried not to give it away, but basically it's a love story, but it's a love story. This one's not coming of age type story. The other one would have been this one. What other topics would it fit into? Love story, a brief journey, relationship. It's a love story.
00:49:04
Speaker
Yeah, and it's just about the power of love to overcome anything, and not in a sweetie pie way. Life's hard, but I hope this book, I just think there's some beautiful moments of relationship in here that the value of staying the course and waiting to get past the 75% mark. It's the power of story to give us courage to move forward in our own journeys.
Conclusion and Call to Share Stories
00:49:32
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. I am grateful you were on and people can find you on your website and that is CherylOstrom.com and we look forward to seeing you know how people feel about when they read the book too so feel free to reach out to Cheryl once you've read the book or reach out to me and
00:49:56
Speaker
Give us your insights. Thank you once again, Cheryl, for sharing your own life and Celia and Bernabe's life as well on this podcast. My pleasure. Good to see you again.
00:50:14
Speaker
Thank you again so much for choosing to listen today. I hope that you can take away a few nuggets from today's episode that can bring you comfort in your times of grief. If so, it would mean so much to me if you would rate and comment on this episode. And if you feel inspired in some way to share it with someone who may need to hear this, please do so.
00:50:43
Speaker
Also, if you or someone you know has a story of grief and gratitude that should be shared so that others can be inspired as well, please reach out to me. And thanks once again for tuning into Grief Gratitude and the Gray in Between podcast. Have a beautiful day.