Donna Vande Kieft
Rev. Donna Vande Kieft
One of the best things about working with people and their caregivers in hospice as they were faced with a limited amount of time left was to sit with them and hear them reflect on their life experiences—history, accomplishment, family, friends, work, travel, joys, regrets, hopes, and dreams. Life review is a rich and productive developmental task for all of us in the season of aging, retirement, and living our best life for as long as we’re given.
October in Iowa is harvest time—getting the corn and soybeans combined, gathering the bounty of that year’s crop, looking forward to a season of fallow time and rest as fall turns to winter. In my training the metaphor of harvest was introduced as a tool to help us engage in the life review process for ourselves and with others.
As we get older and face limitations in our energy and health, I want to encourage us to use this time for a bit of reflection, contemplation, and gratitude. Harvest is a time to separate the wheat and the chaff, to embrace abundance and let go of regret, perhaps allowing the regret to transform into gratitude for lessons learned as we look at plans and hopes for the future.
My life harvest involves writing a memoir about my life. After completing the first draft and getting an honest appraisal from a good editor, I am invited back to the revision process. Revision simply means to look again, perhaps with another perspective. My first response was one of resistance that was a combination of discouragement, judgment, and frustration with myself and my writing ability. The follow-up coaching session with my editor was helpful but it’s taken effort to look again at the first draft.
I discovered that my memoir is about my spiritual pilgrimage and that some of the hard parts—forgiveness, acceptance and surrender—were about circumstances being the path of suffering, growth, and transformation. Revising my memoir is about looking again at the bounty of my life and harvesting the richness and beauty. I cannot change the circumstances of the past but I can see them with new vision and make choices for the future based on writing a new narrative about who I am, what I have done, what is left undone and what I still want to do. As a person now going solo, I want to leave a legacy, something to say that my life mattered with hopes of being remembered in a good way. Honestly, it’s for me to finally be able to say it doesn’t matter what other people say or remember about me. It’s really to finally hear the still small voice within (God) saying, “You are my beloved daughter. I take delight in my creation and am well pleased with you.” I believe that is the harvest of True Self that takes a lifetime of planting, tilling, cultivating, fallow waiting time, patience, thanksgiving, tender compassionate gentleness, and humility.