Doing Something For the Families of Sandy Hook Elementary With Care, Be Aware and Share

By:  Kristi Tisor Ambriz

When news broke that a lone gunman unleashed evil on a school full of innocent people, many of us were struck with the need to do something.

Our Wings Like Eagles team assembled together and discussed the ways in which we could help our readers by providing content and resources that could offer encouragement, and lead people to answers to the very questions they would find themselves asking.  Questions like "How?"  "Why?" "What now?"

Unfortunately, most of the answers we come up with aren't satisfying...no answer could be.  Tragedy struck, and no answer can satisfy or change the unfathomable facts.

Still, that need to do something, anything, remains.

With the Care, Be Aware, and Share Event, a wonderful project Glendora, CA merchants are putting together, we really can do something.

Our very own Joelle Deyo interviewed some people, and got the scoop.  Check out her article published through LifeinLA here.

This would be a great project to participate in as a family, classroom, church, or club.

You can drop off your contribution to:

Glendora Interiors 118 N. Glendora Ave. Glendora Florist 234 N. Glendora Ave. Cake Mamas 865 W. Route 66, Suite C Ken Turner Real Estate

Tragedy in CT: Grieving Together

Joelle Deyo holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

By:  Joelle Deyo

I am deeply grieved by the events that transpired in Connecticut this morning. Twenty-seven precious lives taken in yet another mass shooting this year.  I just don't know how to wrap my head around that.

To be honest, I am angry that I live in a world where I even have to try to make sense of such a thing.  Sadness, outrage, disgust.  I know I'm not the only one cycling through these emotions.  I grieve with millions today. 

It is not just the families of the slain who must now pick up the shattered pieces of their lives and try to find a path forward in the wake of terrible losses.  As a nation, we are once again left searching for comfort and hope, wondering if we will ever see peace in our time.

Those of us who have children are burdened with the difficult task of trying to explain an act of violence to which we would not have them exposed. We feel a loss of surety in the safety of our little ones as we send them out into the world to learn and grow. We cannot imagine losing one of our own. 

Those of us who do not have children are left to question the state of affairs in our nation and ask, “What has happened?”  We wonder if the cruelty will ever end and fear that it may only be the beginning of a trend of increasingly brutal acts against the innocent.  I look at what I see around me and all I can say is, yes, this is just the beginning, unless... Unless, we open our eyes, wake up, stand up, and move toward transformation as a body. 

In times like these, in our grief, we often cry out to our leaders, “How are you going to fix this?  How are you going to stop this from happening again, and again, and again?”  But, I wonder…what are we going to do?

I've read a lot of things in the news today. I've listened to the voices of pundits speaking from their national platforms on everything from gun control to increased security in schools.  But, I’ve heard absolutely nothing about individuals and families stepping up and taking on the role as healers of their own communities.  No one talked about looking for a cure that heals the disease holistically and from the inside out.

I do not feel equipped to give voice to the political issues at hand.  I do feel highly equipped, however, being a trauma survivor, a victim of violence, and a human of good conscience, to speak to the very real need for proactive grieving. 

It is not enough that we feel sorrow. It is imperative that we go to the source of the violence we see growing around us and get honest about it. 

We live in a society permeated with aggression and fear.  Our youth are more exposed to their effects, and exhibit more anti-social behaviors than at any other point in our history. Our rates of divorce, addiction, crime, unemployment, debt, and mental illness are at all-time highs. Far too many of us are enraged, depressed, afraid, and hopeless.  In spite of all of this, we are encouraged to remain in a constant state of consumerism, distraction, denial, and desensitization -- to turn a blind eye to the very real threat we are becoming to ourselves.

There has NEVER been a more crucial moment for us to step into the light, and admit the truth. There is too much at stake.

Something has to change. It is time for mothers and fathers to pay attention.  It is time for classmates and friends to look around them.  It is time for families to acknowledge the seeds of violence and despair taking root in their homes, and it is time for individuals at every level of social standing to reach up and reach out.

We are not alone, nor are we islands unto ourselves.  We cannot live as though our behavior does not touch others.

We cannot continue forward, hoping for peace without reconstructing certain values from the ground up.

No law will take every gun out of every hand. That's a hard reality. Just as hard, is the reality that not every individual, if given the choices, opportunities and resources, will choose The Good.

We grieve, in part, because we know this to be true. Bad things will happen to good people sometimes.  But, I firmly believe that stanching the flow of violence is within our grasp, and as we feel our sadness and anger, we also need to consider together what we can do to bring harmony into our homes, our schools, and our cities. 

Is it time to turn off the violent images and games? Is it time to learn to communicate as a family? Is it time to get help for an illness or addiction? Is it time to stop the cycle of rage and abuse in your life? Is it time to be a friend instead of a bully? Or to offer support to someone who seems to be hurting? Is it time to become an advocate for peace?  

Only you know how to answer those questions for yourself. What I know is that that you and I have more power to effect change than we realize.

As we grieve with the families in Connecticut on this awful day, we need to take hold of that power, to take responsibility, and haul our lives and the lives of our loved ones back from the brink. That is the heart of all crisis recovery, no matter the scale or the degree of tragedy. Healing starts in the heart, and in the home.

Whoever you are, wherever you are; if you have been hurt, if you are angry, if you are broken hearted, if you can’t understand, if you’ve had enough, and seen too much… step into the light.

I encourage those of you struggling with the news today to reach out for support. Have conversations. Say I love yous, give hugs, and cry if you need to. Consider whether it is time to change negative patterns in your life or that of your family. Find out how you can show care and support to those who lost children today. We need one another.

Answers vs. Acceptance

Joelle Deyo holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

I’m one of those people who love to ask why. 

It’s not enough for me to know that a baby can grow within a woman’s womb. I want to know why a single cell divides into two and why those cells divide again and begin to specialize in their functions. I want to know why some cells become heart cells and others become brain cells. I want to know why an organized clump of neurons can tell another organized lump of cardiomyocytes to begin to control the flow of blood in the body. I want to know why the cell nucleus reads and copies strands of DNA into RNA and why individual oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon atoms even “know” to form DNA in the first place. And whenever someone attempts to explain the bottom line to me, I don’t say, “Thank you for that enlightening speech on the radioactive decay of free neutrons.” Instead, I ask, “Why?”

Do you see my problem? My thirst for understanding is nearly insatiable, but sometimes it happens that I can’t dissect something down to its smallest parts and gain a comprehensive knowledge of it.  

My own soul, for example, does not consist of tangible components, which can be studied under a microscope. Within it, all of my experiences, memories, and dreams for the future are contained, as are my feelings of love and fear. It is the little internal driver that prompts me toward one course of action or another, yet it cannot be isolated and analyzed. I call it my “heart,” but it is not made of muscle and blood. It consists purely of elements that are immeasurable. It is the part of me that contains all of the whys – that yearns toward an understanding of itself and of the world around it.

It’s natural to question. It’s part of what makes us human. It’s especially natural to question when we are in a period of healing. We need to ask ourselves why certain life events may have lead to others. We need to know what we’ve been working with so that we can change patterns that haven’t been working well for us, at all.

In this examination we can break down the content of the soul – to a point – and determine its overall health. But even this process has limits. Sometimes we go back as far as we can go, or down as deep as we can go, and at the root of the matter is not an “ah-ha!” but another maddening “why?”

How do we make sense of, or find meaning in our lives when the ultimate questions we’re asking don’t come with ready answers, or when we’re faced with painful, confusing thoughts when we’re in need of comfort, yet our thirst for understanding goes unstated?

I know that even if I go to bed tonight and lie awake asking the greatest existential question in the history of great existential questions, and spend the whole night biting my nails as I wait for the answer to pop into my head, I still have to get up tomorrow morning and be. I have to get up every morning and be until my days on this earth, in this body, at this point in time, are done.  

I have some options available to me as to how I might go about doing this. I can move forward in anger and frustration over all of the things I don’t yet understand and hurl blame at everyone and everything around me. I can live in a perpetual state of internal torment over the unknowns. I can put up walls and block out every uncomfortable feeling. Or, I can choose to follow the path of acceptance.

I talk a lot about acceptance because I believe it’s a key to Life. I believe it is the only way to move from being locked within a prison made of unanswered questions, to walking out into the world in love, as free men and women. Acceptance is a form of trust. Of faith, if you will, in the idea that we are each enrolled in a unique course of learning and growth and that our stories are what they are for a reason – even if we do not know what that reason is right now. 

We can allow our struggles and suffering to be our teachers, to make us soft where we need softening, and strong where we need to develop backbone, or we can spend a lifetime getting lost in the minutia and trying to answer the final why when it is not ours to know.

I am well aware of what it’s like to be tangled up inside of myself hunting for tiny pieces to the puzzle, hoping that just one more scrap will show up and fit just right so that I can finally make sense out of…everything. I also know how great it feels to let the questions go for a while and just set my eyes on the road before me. As I let go, I find clarity. As I find clarity, I learn peace. As I learn peace, I discover the heart of love. Within love there is freedom, and in freedom I can change.

Before the beautiful face of transformation, all of the unanswered questions fade away. My days may be lived with hands that are open, receiving and releasing without fear, and my hope will be found moment by new moment as I accept what has been, and allow the answers to come in their own season.

The View From Where I Stand

Joelle Deyo holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

Today marks my one-year anniversary as a recovering Anorexic. I have gone one full year without starving, purging, abusing substances, or killing myself at the track to drop weight. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, just one short year, but believe me, it’s a huge thing.

I struggled with disordered eating and a skewed image of my body for a good 15 years – nearly half of my life. But, I did not know, or would not admit, that I was in a dance with death until about four years ago, when I began to purge after nearly every meal. I was addicted to the act – it gave me a rush of endorphins and calmed the intrusive feelings of anxiety and self-loathing that plagued me daily.

I hated my body. It always seemed unclean to me. Having suffered at the hands of a sexual predator when I was a child, I grew into a young woman who did not have a healthy picture of herself and had no true sense of self-ownership.

My right to control what was done to my body was taken from me long before I ever understood anything about human sexuality or consent. I was not an adult. I did not consent. I just survived and locked away the pain. What I lived through was shockingly traumatic and left me with very deep wounds that eventually became infected.

Without an emotional vocabulary for dealing with the events that left me so damaged inside, I grasped at a sense of control in the only way I could think of. I sought ways to rid myself of anything that made me feel unclean. And food really made me feel unclean. It became Enemy #1.  I wanted to eat – I’m actually sort of a foodie, if you can believe that – but I could not stand having anything in my body that I thought could “hurt” me in some way.

I had periods of time when I tried very hard, but very unsuccessfully to get well. I wanted to do it all on my own, but without any accountability or skills for managing my compulsions, my efforts turned into frustrations, which turned right back into managing my body through extreme measures. I felt proud of myself for not eating and kept vigilant watch over the number of calories I consumed in a day. The closer I came to passing out, the better I was doing.

My weight began to plummet rapidly and oh how I rejoiced as I slid smaller and smaller sized jeans and shirts over my 5’9 frame. I ignored the fact that sitting had become painful due to my protruding tailbone and that I was suffering from major vitamin deficiencies.

Eventually my body lost the ability to regulate its temperature. It was not uncommon for me to soak in a bathtub full of hot water for several hours each night just to keep warm. All the while, strangers told me I should go into modeling.

My family told me I was looking painfully thin. I didn’t believe that any of them knew what they were talking about. During this time period I also began to suffer from terrible migraine headaches and seizures.

The first time I seized, I was standing in my closet getting dressed for the day. A funny feeling that I can only half-describe as a mixture of incredible happiness and total devastation flooded my brain. My vision went red and hazy. I felt hot and then numb. I grabbed blindly at the shelf in front of me in order to remain standing because I thought I was dying as hallucinations of laughing, pointing CIA agents danced before my eyes. I don’t know how long I was in that altered state – probably only a couple of minutes – but when I came to, I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a twenty-year nap. My brain had crashed and rebooted without me even realizing what was going on.

I spent most of the next year in and out of the neurologist’s office, submitting to tests, having nodes stuck to my head and lights flashed in my eyes. Things were poked and prodded. I went on meds that turned me into a walking zombie, but killed my appetite, so I stayed on them; happy for the extra pounds they helped me to lose.

Sleep clinic. MRI. More tests and dozens of hours of waiting, staring at the peeling GlaxoSmithKline posters on exam room walls.

Through it all I continued to starve myself and had no clue that there might be any correlation between what was happening to my brain and what I was doing to my body.

My sister acted as my sole interventionist. She had been watching me waste away and could see things that I couldn’t. I have my health and my sanity back in part because she took me aside one night and said, “I feel like you’re killing yourself and that you’re happy about it.” Those words chilled me to my marrow and finally shook me awake.

She was right. She held my hand the day I sat in my MD’s office and admitted, for the first time, to anyone, “I’m anorexic. I’ve been really sick and I need help.” That was how I started on my path toward recovery. I took one terrifying step in the right direction.

So, here I am, one year later and the view from where I stand looks very different now. I am so much healthier than I was, not to mention happier than I’ve ever been in my life. Yes, I still get anxious, and, yes, I still have to fight against persisting urges from time to time. I’m still learning to look at myself in full daylight without scrutinizing little things. But I no longer crave control. I know that I have enough within me to surrender to the moment or stand firm in it as I choose, without losing myself.

I also no longer feel unclean. I have nothing to purge, because I am not filled with the darkness of abuse. I have rejected the notion and the illusion of perfection and want simply what is right and what is good.

The farther I move away from that dysfunctional pit of a life I was trapped in, the more clearly I am able to see what good really looks like – what I really look like – and the more I want to embrace it with everything I have.

A lot can change in a year. Though I am aware that much of the change I have experienced has come through hard work and taking personal responsibility for my choices, the difference that just a little time can make still stuns me. That I am honestly able to say I have made huge strides toward peace with the pain of my past and that I am hopeful about my future is nothing short of a miracle to me.

Water Girl

Joelle Deyo holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

 I grew up in a small town in Minnesota surrounded by forests, fields, and water. My family’s old Victorian house was situated about a hundred yards from a beautiful lake and many of the happiest memories of my childhood are tied to the time I spent on that shore. I wiled away many quiet hours fishing, a skill I learned before I could even ride a bike. I liked to wade into the tepid summer water, just up to my knees, dig my toes into the fine sand, and cast my line out again and again in hopes of snagging bass and sunfish. The sun bleached my hair into a tangle of strawberry blond and the water made me smell of algae – and probably of fish – but I didn’t mind. 

Sometimes my brother and I snuck out of the house in the middle of the night to run down to the dock. There is nothing quite like taking a forbidden swim under the stars on a muggy August night. We chased craw fish over the rocks with the neighbor kids, watched schools of baby tadpoles flit about in the shallows, and dug clay from the lake bed.

After a day spent exploring, I often climbed the hill to my home looking the picture of a mucky, soggy wild child.

I live in Southern California now and it’s hard to find a quiet aquatic escape here. Havasu is crowded and does not count, and the L.A. River, which is paved with cement, is less a river, and more a hang-out for the local abandoned shopping cart population. Of course, I have the ocean, and I dearly love meandering down the beach and feeling the inexorable pull of the tide underfoot. But I often find myself longing for the solitude of the place I grew up. I miss the breeze in the pines and the clean scent in the air. I miss sitting on a piece of driftwood and just gazing out over a pristine wilderness.

Even so, this is home and I have come to love it. And I am grateful that I carry with me all of the things that my lake taught me when I was young. 

I learned that water is adaptable. When still, it fills the space it is given, demanding nothing more, but taking no less than what it requires. I learned that it may also over flow, seeking a channel through which to move or a place in which it may come to rest.

I observed that it is changeable. It sustains life and gives relief, but may also be dangerous when it rushes like a tidal wave or floods a river valley. It holds mysteries in its depths. It may look calm on the surface, but a mighty current may surge where it runs deep. 

I think I am like water. In truth, I know that I am like water. You may be wondering how this is relevant to Crisis Recovery.  You may not identify in the same way with the picture I have painted.

I imagine, however, that you may be familiar with what it means to crash, flood, run, seek…and to be still. All of these words can be used to describe the behavior of water. They can also be used to explain the process of grieving. We crash against suffering, we flood with strong emotions, we run from our pain, we seek answers, and finally, hopefully, we come to rest, in stillness, as we accept our lives for what they are.

Acceptance means we may then begin to fill the space we have been given, demanding no more, but taking no less than what we need. And we may begin to sustain the life we have – not the one we think we should have had, or the one we may feel that we deserve – and offer relief to others.

I am not always placid like the lake I fished in as a kid. Some days I feel more like the river that carves through stone over millennia just by being quietly insistent. You might call it being stubborn.

I have definitely crashed hard against some massive sea walls in my life. But I do know how to be still. I do reach back to that quiet place and remember what it was like to slip beneath the surface into the sublime blue-green and become liquid myself. That is what peace looks and feels like to me.

What does it look like to you? Is it a desert oasis that offers you a shady place to rest? Is it a cozy home tucked away in snowy hills, or a pretty garden pathway leading nowhere in particular? In what unique terms do you understand peace?

I’m a water girl. It’s a part of me. It speaks to me. It taught me how to be adaptable, and, thankfully, changeable. I have had to adapt and needed to change to get to this place in my journey. But who are you? What does your picture of wholeness look like? Are you a rose coming into bloom? Or a root, pushing deep into the loam and drinking of the hidden Life? Are you just you, at ease, walking in more strength and love than you ever imagined you could? That is a picture worthy of pondering.