Top Ten Odd and Curious Thoughts (about Texting)

March 17, 2014 By

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(1) I love to text.  My thumbs fly so fast you would not believe.  There’s nothing more gratifying than the three little dots that says “they’re writing something at this very moment! In a few short moments, unless they get a phone call, have to take something hot off the stove, have an urge to do something different, or feel like totally ignoring me, I’ll know what they are thinking!” Yay!

(2) Come to think of it, phone calls are actually more efficient. As a bonus you get to hear awkward pauses, which is a delightful hobby. Why did we start texting, anyway?

(3) Oh yes, I remember.  Because you don’t have to speak to anyone.  And you sound more intelligent when you write rather than dumbly asking your man how his day was.  It was fine? Super.  You ate grilled chicken for dinner? Awesome. And your day? Oh I already asked that.

(4) Conversely, you can’t save them like love letters.  Printed screen shots just aren’t the same. It’s perhaps a bit weird and creepy to print out volumes of screen shot text messages. I imagine strange giggling and Saturday nights spent scrapbooking.

(5) My mom started to text. Which means at 10 am when I’m sitting in a meeting I get reminded to buy a crock pot and that next summer we’re getting together for July 4 and random thoughts like “I watched five minutes of Honey Boo Boo and who watches this stuff because this show is awful and your father is cooking eggs” and your boss keeps glaring at you for your buzzing phone.  Little does he know its just mom, stream-of-conscious asking if you turned off your coffee maker.

(6) The standard test for if a friend will make it past the introductory text phase is whether they can handle humor via text or whether all snarky throw downs will end with an LOL and a smiley face for the loss.  That being said there are times that I’m just tired and a good solid LOL is all I can muster.  It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

(7) I am the worst at not being able to get in touch with a coworker so I just naturally assume that I can text them like “hey buddy, so sorry to bug you but can you just stop everything you’re doing and pay attention to me because I have this work issue that’s super important (to me only) and I need you to be interrupted during your chipotle burrito to explain this complex financial arrangement to me real quick-like? THANKS!!” or the like.

(8) I’ve found that including the standard smiley-faced emoticon conveys a decent amount of normalcy or perhaps diffuses a humorous statement. Yet more intricate pictures seem to scream “I’m a nerd and found out there’s a Spanish dancer twirly-skirt lady in my picture file so I’ll choose to use it” and you don’t want to be that guy

(9) I love it when someone texts an obvious mistake like “I’ll be there at eight because I’m running a little lame” and then later you get the follow-up text that says “late” like you couldn’t possibly figure out what they meant by using standard context and you would just naturally just assume they were talking smack about themselves and they needed to clear up the rumors

(10)               Most of my best friends answer about half of my texts because they have a life and could possibly fail to care for their children or not have time to eat or shave their legs if they answered them all but then the next day I’ll get a picture of Chunk, Missouri with a statement like “who the heck names a town Chunk” and then all is forgiven for not commenting on my cute kid pictures because I am a lover of random texts.

There are times, however, that I miss the days of talking for hours.  I yearn for the flavor and tenor of a human voice.  I miss the nervous talking over each other and twirling the cord in your hand and the amount of openness it takes to talk without the shield and power of words and time to prepare them.  And most importantly, you have to form a coherent verbal response instead of just saying HAHA! LOL! Rolling on the floor laughing! Seriously? I’ve never seen anyone roll on the floor unless it part of a fire drill, and they are usually cursing under their breath.

So as many reasons as there are to love texting – for it’s convenience and it’s ability to hide behind words – it’s good to pick up the phone sometimes, just to go through the exercise of speaking to another human being.  To find out that we are human, and raw, and awkward.  To lift your head up and look around you. Maybe at the core, we are all just scared we’ll look stupid and hide behind machines to be safe.

Be different. Brave.  Put your thumbs down.  Talk to one other.

Filed Under: Embarrassing Moments, Humor Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stitch by Stitch

March 6, 2014 By

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I walked out of an OB/Gyn’s office today, thinking of lunch dates and meetings, deadlines and duties. I slid into a crammed elevator next to a woman clinging to a lab slip, trying so very hard to stifle her tears. I watched her struggle for breath.  Struggle to keep angst trapped inside the thin walls of her own self.  I wanted to reach out to her, past her messy ponytail and smudged mascara and trembling fingers.  Yet I stood still as stone as the lit-up numbers ticked down.  My heart was yearning to whisper in her ear that this shall pass.  Pain doesn’t linger.  After the band-aid is ripped, my sweet girl, numbness will settle. And yet the elevator door opened and we all filed out, us Busy People.  The woman turned left and I turned right, my high heels clicking along the floor like a woodpecker.

As I passed hallways I’d trod before, on carpet I’d worn down, I headed to my car praying hard.  My mind raced and my lip quivered as I saw those same lab slips before me, dripping with blood cell counts and cancer.  And yet despite that fact my soul was ripped and my own blood shared,  I bore children on this earth who will outlast me.  Fruits of my womb and outpourings of my own tender heart. As I climbed into my car balancing papers and bags and keys and all the luxuries of modern civility, I wept.  For the woman in the elevator. For my friend who lost her father.  For a life that is so rich and bountiful and for a God that is the only water who will satisfy my unquenched lack of worth.

Before a meeting began I remembered the fire that raged in my abdomen after my daughter was lifted.  I recalled the black nights of a marriage ending.  I remembered being on an elevator, stifling back my own tears and wondering if morning would come.  And yet like old photos in a box I saw my mother’s smile and the way she pulls at her shirt for no reason whatsoever.  I smelled my dog’s rotten bad breath.  I peered at onions shooting from the garden ground and the way oak limbs rub against my old metal roof.  My home, my books, my lover’s eyes that are piercing blue. They all blended together, the ugly and the good, the lab slips and valentine’s days, to form a quilt that enveloped me. Busy People showed up for the meeting and we began to talk about surveys and statistics, contract terms and deadlines.  But my mind was on the woman in the elevator.

Oh, my friends and enemies and dear sweet strangers  – I beg you to be kind to one other.  We are all part of this great journey, and this story, and this collection of people.  Some days are glorious and you dance atop clouds and other days you are sitting slumped by a dumpster wiping sweat and drool from your lips. I regret not reaching for her.  If I could take back time I’d lay my hand softly on her shoulder right there in front of everyone and say I’m sorry.  I’m so very sorry.  We are in this together.

Woven in this quilt of life is suffering and singing, weeping and guffawing, the death and the living and the love and the darkness all connected stitch by stitch.  Let’s envelop each other in the dark times, so we can remember the good, even when our own fingers are trembling.

 

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Photo:

dots as markers

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Motherhood Tagged With: , , , ,

Saddle Bags

February 21, 2014 By

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I would imagine if I were starving and placed at the forefront of a great feast, I’d be filled with angst.  How would I carry it all away and save it for when there was none? I couldn’t possibly enjoy a corn soufflé knowing it wouldn’t last and the pheasant would turn to bile and the next day it would all be empty and dry again.  Just bones in the dust.  Hungry.  So I’d sit at the head of the table smiling whilst stuffing dinner rolls in my saddle bags.  We just can’t help but to carry around the angst of our past, wondering if the good times might fade away.

I think of the last few years as a trench that I’ve been living in, just hunkered down with my provisions, escaping for food and coming back to the hole with a heavy sigh.  It’s natural when you’ve been beat down to want to protect yourself from attack and make sure you stride more watchfully into the dark night.

When my foot touched down upon a different future, naturally I was still burdened with the memories.  Nights in the hole.  Bombs dropping and shells exploding and haunting faces in my dreams, hollowed out and empty.  But when you leave a warzone, there is no identifying tattoo speed across your chest.  Separated by enough continents and time zones you just seem to have appeared from somewhere, like you went on vacation with a svelte new frame and more coy responses.

So here I am.  I look down to see jewels on my fingers.  I sit at the fancy table with shimmering lights and roses, where men ask to call and tell me I’m pretty.  And in the middle of the room as I cross it in heels toward the door my insides just rage with fire and bristle.  I remember the hole.  The ache of starvation.  The pit of my stomach is just as far to the ground as it was in the worst nights, and I find my hands clasping around a hard dinner roll. I slip it in my pocket.  Just in case.  The funny thing is that the fear of death and the fear of living have the same effect on me.  Both are filled with the unknown, and that causes my stomach pit to flare.

At 3 am this morning I woke, filled with that familiar dread.  The pain that all this bounty will come crashing down.  The high will subside.  The peace broken. Pheasant always turns to bile in the end.  And yet as I lay there with my two children, huddled to my left and to my right, I heard the strangest thing.  My daughter, who appeared to be giggling.  In her sleep she was laughing, and I heard the manifestation of dreams. I held my children tight and let tears well and realized that God is to my left and to my right.  He stretches beyond me and is far behind.  What, and whom, shall I fear?

I dress for dinner in a house bathed in peace. I have a night ahead filled with laughter, with new heels just for the occasion.  In my slumber I see new life sprouting.  I take the saddle bags, the ones filled with old crusty rolls, and I leave them sitting by the garage door, leaning over just so.  A smile spreads from the ether of my former self, the one who remembered.  The one filled with fear.

I have no need for these any more, it seems.

photo:

The Problem with Vintage Equipment

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love, Motherhood, My life, Religion Tagged With: , , , , ,

Luck of the Irish

February 10, 2014 By

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This girl can’t pass up a good groupon, so when an Irish restaurant in town offered a four-course menu for four for $99, I ran toward the computer with my credit card in tow and snapped it up like last call.  Not that ye Irish are really known for their food, and I’ll be honest about a vague stereotype I had trapped in my mind of a bunch of burly men in pubs eating Guinness rabbit stew, but still.  So when said groupon was about to expire, I gathered up three besties and we wore our St. Patrick’s best. Come on, it’ll be fun. They’ll be potatoes.

So off we go toward this random restaurant set high on a hill like a movie set and as we pull into the parking lot and leave the vehicle I have a sense that we’ve grown ten feet tall and what’s in front of us is really a hobbit’s house or maybe a hovel for gremlins.  But we approach what appears to be Hansel and Gretel’s cottage and open the creaky door, it opens to a front-porch-like haven of horrors with little dolls and St. Paddy’s paraphernalia. My nostrils are hit with the smell of old-people’s homes but with someone baking soda bread in a far-off forest. It’s a confusing combination.

I start to back my way out, because perhaps we’re in a dream and this place has swallowed up my children and there’s no hostess stand or normalcy and why for the love are there so many dolls.  For a fearful moment I thought we stepped into Frodo’s neighbor Marge’s living room, who has been alive since well before Eisenhower. But alas – another door in front of us creaked open and my other girlfriends were in fact inside, perched at a table covered in lace.  They looked frightened, or maybe hungry for rabbit: hard to tell.  But there were normal-looking people inside, everyone just sitting around as if they were eating a blooming onion at Outback on a Tuesday. My friends waved and I sighed because if we are going down an Alice-in-wonderland tunnel at least I wouldn’t be alone.

So there we sat in the hobbit house, trying to not hit our heads on the ceiling, just a simple table covered in lace.  My friend Jess kept wiping her eyes because the prices were all wrong and there was a bottle of wine on the menu for thirty-five thousand dollars and she thought maybe they laced the air with hallucinogenic drugs.  But alas the waitress came along, just a wee girl of fifty wearing a prairie dress with spitfire hair and told us that bottle of wine wasn’t actually for sale. “It’ll kill ya perhaps, young lassies, with all the air bubbles and such trapped inside.  But it’s a family heirloom, yeh.” So we decided to live and order the house red and the lady’s voice said “Aye, a good choice,” and the cadence of her voice rose and fell as if she descended from the streets of Dublin and I WAS TERRIFIED AND ENTHRALLED ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

So the courses began, and us girls all sat around giggling as the potato soup was served and we attempted small talk as if we are not all in a hobbit house sitting around a table covered in lace.  After a while my friend needed to use the restroom so she transcended into the bowels of the earth somewhere to the left and came back to the table as if she were having a life-threatening brain spasm. But in reality it was just the facilities, which included a green bathtub and a faucet connected together by strands of electrical tape and a cherub that looked out the window at nothing that overcame her. So my other friend Becca braved the dark and I offered to tie a string to her so she’d never get lost but she went in like a hero and took iphone pictures of the statute of a woman staring at your private places holding towels.

So between the salad and the beef they brought out a palate cleanser, but not the real kind, just lemon sherbet from Wal-mart, and we were just so giddy about all the absurdities we looked around and realized no one else was laughing and we must in fact be caught in a dream. But our best friends are all there so it was actually quite delightful and I drank red wine that in hobbit-money probably costs thousands.  I had a hunch the other patrons were in fact staged and it was all some big gag and a muskrat dressed in a three-piece suit would very soon appear with signs that said “Happy 40th, Josephine!” and we’ll all say “no, no, you’ve got the wrong girls.” But no one jumped out from the kitchen so we sat eating carrots cooked in maple syrup, but not the real kind, just Aunt Jemima’s from Wal-mart, and we toasted our future travels to Ireland where we could start a gang because we were all a good six-inches taller than all these other red-headed hotbloods and we could take this place down.

So we finally got the bill and although I had a groupon they said the actual cost of the meal would have run us about $469 so the suggested tip was around a hundred bucks and we’re like “but we live in the real world, thankyouverymuch” so we paid for our wine and we took our iphone pictures and we ran out of the hobbit house as fast as our legs would carry us.

I haven’t laughed so long and so hard in months and when I think of that green bathtub and my friend having a brain spasm and that waitress in the prairie dress and the hobbit house as we sat around a table covered in lace I am exceedingly glad we went, because it was all just so brilliant and colorful and strange. And it’s times like this that memories are seared and if we were all just sitting around eating a blooming onion at Outback on a Tuesday night we’d have no great stories to tell.

Because life, my dear friends, is a huge book that can’t close because it’s so jammed with stories. I’m so blessed and delighted to live inside of it, with friends who laugh and a heart that’s open and a life that sings, so when we run out of little houses after sitting around tables covered in lace we can say we had a life well lived, and friends that are well worn, forged in the tunnels of green cherubs staring into nothing.

It’s just luck of the Irish, I suppose.

 

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photo:

Bag End

Filed Under: Creativity, Friendships, Humor, Love Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Breaking of Bread

February 8, 2014 By

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I’m not Catholic.  And yet in church when all heads are bowed I make the sign of the cross on my chest because somehow it feels holy and special like I am a part of a secret club.  My Catholic friend Dawna invited me to attend her church once, and I gleefully knelt up and down and was practically giddy as I listened to the archaic priest-who-never-married repeat things in Latin. I proudly stand like a soldier when we repeat en masse the Doxology and the Lord’s prayer and I once sang in a baroque acapella group. So if you think this girl lives in a modern world you are SADLY MISTAKEN.  My soul is trapped somewhere in the 1800s and really only get out to drink lattes and watch Netflix and buy fun little apps on my iphone.  I love tradition, and things that are deeply rooted, and for this reason change is my adversary and I struggle breaking things apart that are long-lasting.

So when I see churches with names involving rocks and stones and new life and cafes in which people-drink-coffee-with-Jesus I get confused. Not because these are bad things.  There is no bad as far as I’m concerned when it comes to worship and love and being in community with people who are trying to row the same direction.  But I wonder how these churches will be able to build the type of roots that stretch deep through generations.  How one who is impoverished and hungry and living in a broken-down shack in Ireland where everyone shares the pisshole and living on the dole get excited about coffee with Jesus like they do about First Communion. Because there’s something holy and sacred about traditions, and relics, and stories that have been handed down from King James and wafers on tongues and the body of Jesus, broken.

Last Sunday, I thought about bolting after the last hymn.  After all, I had laundry to fold and errands to run and friends to text. The whole concept of communion is slow and old and antiquated.  It’s times like these I wish I were drinking coffee with Jesus and singing praise songs on a Jumbotron. I sat there and wondered what this must look like to the outside world.  Just a bunch of silly chaps eating bites of bread and taking grape juice shots in little plastic cups before noon.  But I waited, because it’s rude to leave and I had nowhere really important to be.  I waited while the choir sang and the little trays were passed around.  I wondered if I had a missed text or if I’d eat leftovers for dinner, and I looked at the ushers going from row to row to row like they did every first Sunday of the month.

And then the tray was passed.  The body of Jesus.  I smiled and took it, which I knew was just a loaf of Hawaiian Original Sweet Round Bread from Kroger and wasn’t the literal body of Christ, but as I tore off a hunk and put it in my mouth something happened.  It just cemented itself like a glob of peanut butter and I couldn’t choke it down.  Try as I might it wouldn’t move, and tears welled up in my eyeballs as I sat there in my new hat wondering if I had any missed texts and whether I should have bolted after the last hymn.

I could feel thousands of years crash into one. Tradition came up deep like drawing water from a well, and I remembered the times as a child I waddled up to the communion rail and sat next to my father in a suit and the nights I cried and sobbed over the fact that the son of God had to suffer on our behalf and how deeply metaphorical and beautiful and special this last supper was so many years ago.  And then the cup was before me and I drank the sweet juice and I felt small and humbled and so full of gratitude my hat couldn’t hold it all in so I held it down as I walked to my car and felt inextricably full.

I swallowed. Greedily my body devoured it.  Hungrily my heart absorbed it.  I accepted that love without feeling paralyzed by guilt or haunted by pain because it was freely given, and despite just being a loaf of Hawaiian Original Sweet Round Bread from Kroger it was the body of Christ after all, broken and torn and laid out for the redemption of sins.

 

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photo:

The Last Supper 18

Filed Under: Blog the Bible, Inspirational, Love, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Before the dawn

February 3, 2014 By

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Before I wake I want to feel breezes dust my face and kisses so light they fail to touch my skin and I want to roll to my left and curl up in you.  And when I close my eyes I see bursts of blue and gold and crimson red and I will shudder at the  chill.

Before I dine I want to slow cook and rise high and marinate for a long while so you’ll see my heart poured into what is spread before you.  A feast that I created for the first look when you take a bite and nod.  Yes, my love. Fit for a king.

Before I hit midlife  I want to cry so hard for a suffocating loss that takes my breath and stomps it into concrete.  Because when redemption gallops through darkness I will admire it more like a stallion racing and sing my thanks like butterflies wings flapping, fast and quick my heart will dance as his muscles pound on racetrack sod.

Before my heart is hardened you appear like the twinkling of dawn and you take my breaths and blow them back inside of me. And as I run you run and as I dance you dance and I scream for you to leave me be because I do not deserve such pretty talk and such beauty.  But as you drive away in a cloud of dust you turn the truck back around and come back to the place where you started.

Before I sleep I want to see you resting on your left arm because I’m reading and you can’t stand it when I’m reading so you tickle and fuss and we roll together tangled in heat for your fierce jealousy of the words that capture my heart.

Before I grow too damn old I want to rest upon your strong arms and you will remind me of our summers and our winters and our glory days.  I will smile and shuffle on at the memory and the taste of you when you’re long past gone.

Before I die I want to have strength to offer praises, for as it turns out, this ain’t no middle-ground life.  I thank God for what was good in my future that I was too blind to see. For redemption that was inches from my face and yet my inveterate stubbornness prevailed.  And with wrinkled skin and a burned heart I turn to God and cry out in gratitude for the blessings so freely given.

Before I complain, instill in me gratefulness.  Before I judge, let me show mercy.  Before the dawn, grow my boldness.

Before I give up completely, allow me to persevere, for the future is coming right around the bend.

 

Photo:

http://(threew’s).flickr.com/photos/wynandbasson/11449434875/sizes/m/in/photolist-irKm6z-8Sbek8-32Re6G-cZXNW-dS2LVn-dB8JTy-jde5Tm-9epjtp-9UMsaB-dEtbXt-4yaQVV-awwtbq-9PN17E-9PMYMq-9PMYqb-9PN21G-9PN2kE-9PN1AE-9PMZDU-71cMAJ-foyNxk-9PN2GJ-ihF34z-6AbJYU-2iJ35S-7Xso5Y-cZXLN-cZXSP-cZXEG-cZXR5-cZXGz-iq6i5A-4f4Vfh-dPR9zF-jX6rc-7ipEVu-d1cqUq-8goiju-9DxCgU-3F7r2Q-7D6pQk-5YQfMp-7xzQtA-2JKNkb-7xzPME-7xzNYd-kLWHV-aNuK86-737Y7b-545aje-ab4dUT/

Filed Under: Inspirational, Love Tagged With: , , , ,

The Hot Chocolate Hike

January 26, 2014 By

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Texas weather has been a bit schizophrenic lately. One day we have an actual dusting of snow on the driveway that doesn’t immediately melt upon ground impact and Austin closes the schools for an entire day.  There’s a rush on grocery stores and folks bite their lips wondering if they have enough heat to make it through until the weekend.  But by Saturday everyone’s stripping off their hoodies because it’s 75 degrees up in here, ya’ll. Cedar pollen flies through the air like a wildfire haze and everyone I know has a Rudolph nose and sounds like Lauren Bacall with a smoker’s cough.  “It’s just allergies,” they mutter as they set their used snot rag on your coffee table.  Yeah, okay.  Pick that up.

So when the weather warms up for a short reprieve I try to get the kids outside to do fun things together.  Like the other day when we went hiking.  I bundled the kids up into their best REI gear and decided we’d have a hot chocolate hike, which sounded exciting at the time, so I packed a large bag of pretzels and cheese and salami and fruit and a thermos full of thick hot chocolate with marshmallows.

Going anywhere with a three-year-old can present some significant challenges.  Like “I’m tired” or “carry me” or the favorite “I’m scared of the bears.”  Bears? Where are bears? There are no freaking bears.  Keep walking, kiddo.  Then my seven-year-old pipes up with “look the clouds/they are so magnificent in the sky” and skips along collecting items for her nature collection in total bliss until at some point she feels  something strangely wet and drippy on her neck, to which I respond “it’s sweat: you’ll totally survive.”

Finally about half a mile in, the children are panicked that they won’t ever again see modern civilization and I think it might be time for a hot chocolate pick-me-up, so I veer off the trail like ten measly feet and sit down upon the ground spreading out the trail-food bounty.  My daughter just stands in the same spot and points to the sign, which reads “Stay on Trail” and looks at me as if I’d decided to rob Target.  “But mom,” she cries in horror.  She points again to said sign as if I were a terrorist.

I convince my daughter we won’t get shot and confirm to my son the bears are hibernating and yell at them both to sit down and gather for snacks.  See, guys? Isn’t the landscape beautiful?  Do you see that cloud that looks like an alligator? A line of horses trot by which brings a look of sheer panic on my daughter’s face like they might be the regal trail-enforcement brigade and we have gone rogue.  I’ve had just about enough. This is supposed to be a fun family outing so EVERYONE ACT LIKE THIS IS AWESOME.  But my daughter is scowling and my son is so excited about the chocolate that he grabs a cup and begins to guzzle it like it’s Gatorade.  It’s been in a thermos, which means it will stay at exactly 900 degrees until I retire, unlike my crappy travel mugs that can’t keep coffee warm from the house to the car.

Commence the screaming. I leap up thinking there might be a snake or a venomous spider but realize he’s poured hot chocolate down his pant leg and man that must hurt. But he’ll be okay because he’s a tough little dude and all I can see is a slight reddish area on his calf. So I think he’s just being dramatic as he hobbles alongside of me back to the car.  My daughter is now breathing a huge sigh of relief that we’re back on trail and in the legal clear and I hear lots of statements like “will we ever drink water again” and “please hold my sweatshirt because it’s so hot I’m melting.” We’re a very dramatic lot.

Back at the car I remove my son’s socks.  To my horror I realize he has a third degree burn on his foot that’s all blistered up, which has rubbed against his shoes for half a mile. This makes me want to cry and curse the fact that I didn’t immediately call for a medical helicopter to transport him to our vehicle and I feel so terrible I just sit there holding compresses of water soaked towels around his injury and shushing him.  I hate you, stupid thermos.

When we get home, I have a wretched sneezing attack and I have to breathe into a wet rag just to get control of the cedar pollen.  I lay next to my son as he naps holding ice packs on his burn and think to myself how much more fun the day would have been if we just hauled our little selves to the movie theatre and ate popcorn with wild abandon.

And yet despite the dangers, hot chocolate risks, red nose of doom, and peril of going off-trail, I’m determined to get them outside as much as possible.  Nature is good for their skin and their soul and their curiosity and their placement on this earth, so when the weather lifts we’re trekking it to Enchanted Rock, whereby we shall all brave a large barren hill and I shall bring cold water and fruit roll-ups and allergy medicine for all. And we will like it.  Because there will always be movies to see, but they don’t present any real memories to build a life on.  But touching the sky with your hands, feeling the dust under your feet, and getting scalding burns from Williams-Sonoma peppermint hot chocolate – well, isn’t that what makes life worth living, after all?

 

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photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hills_alive/4803463651/sizes/m/in/photolist-8jt1oP-7vDBEk-bkEY4A-8HzXBK-dTpSnY-7FZ87U-b6P1px-4HQ2aA-4HQ26d-4HQ2ej-4HKLmH-4HKLbe-4HKLgP-4HKLsZ-4HKLL2-bW35PP-yEzN9-6kv14a-eNJAMS-5RqgrZ-5zZed9-5wqqau-7noLMY-6iudKg-82outQ-8UTd2c-nNJYK-nNJs4-nNHDN-dU5QYm-4dQkCz-nNNGz-nNN9s-7zs8Hw-95Jw2d-NL77Z-NL8Fa-NKsBC-dJiPrm-b8heCn-4kNHeB-gH2oUV-7uiJak-5TZQuV-8kwvAt-iBhBht-ak5CYZ-aGfZdv-egT72u-c7Vq7-4rjPMB/

Filed Under: Humor, Motherhood, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , ,

Glory Days

January 21, 2014 By

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I abhor the ripping and tearing of lives.  The brokenness and isolation that comes along with One Who Has Lost Things.  I was a Grand Oak, I was.  Not some maple who burdened the land with the changing of color or a willow who drooped and swayed with a weary heart.  I was one who stood tall when others succumbed to rot or grew parched or sucked from the earth like a thorny Mesquite.  I offered shelter and always protected the home next to which I was planted.  I was a wind break,  you see.  An honored trunk of wisdom who saw all and bore all and kept digging roots deeper in the earth.  If you could only have seen me in my glory days.

So imagine my horror at the uprooting.  The condo development.  The cement trucks and white haze of caliche dust and sheetrock leaning against me like a foreboding call of death.  The contractor said he’d save me.  Swore to the city he’d built a fence around my body and erect little benches made of bronze.  He made promises it might still work, my years not spent in vain.  Children would still swing from my branches and my growth rings intact. But it was all a bald-face lie, one I didn’t quite believe until the chainsaw ripped into my flesh and my branches were cut off.  Like a blow to my heart.  One by one they broke and for a moment they hung in the air spellbound, before landing in the trampled dirt where workers sauntered to lunch or took Dr. Pepper breaks and called their girlfriends.

It was there my pride fell.

I wake up now to a new reality.  I’m cut in neat little stacks in a grocery store floor.  You can pick up my soul, piece by piece, for $6.99 a bundle.  Some people do, but set me down again.  “Seven dollars to burn for a few hours time? Well, I’ll be a fool,” they say as they walk on by toward the Fruity Pebbles and cheesecakes, burgers and sodas.  And I am left weeping like the damn willow, remembering my former self.

I am not good at letting go.  I hold onto old pictures and handprint wreaths and have all kinds of problems letting friends slip away through the years.  I want to hold onto them like warm blankets, safe and folded, loved and cared for, put away in a cedar chest.  I want to hold onto a better time or a better place when secrets were yet unearthed and I was an oak who protected.  I want to go back to a time when I didn’t believe anyone could really chop me down.

And yet sometimes we have to be stripped down to be built up again.  Ripped into bundles and packaged differently and oftentimes devalued in the world’s eyes to realize what our true worth is.  A piece of wood cannot again become a tree, but it can light a glorious blaze of sacrifice, to be used to extinguish prayers one writes on slips of paper and needs to see forever burn.  It is as high a calling as any to be a vehicle for prayer. I’ve been there many nights, pouring my heart into words on paper that vanished between the fiery waves the oak provided. This is a worthy calling as great as a tree standing tall, for “we know that in all things, God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28.

Don’t look backward. Let the past slip through your fingers like fine sifted sand, knowing that God will reshape, and reuse, and redirect into something magical. Your glory days are ahead.  Brilliant blazing bursts of light that will dance and spit and pop with fire.  I’d say that’s better than an old dying life, staring at the bleached walls of a condominium.

Burn bright. It’s what you were born to do. 

—

Photo:

Backyard Fire

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Odd and curious thoughts (about glue, knives, and unconditional love)

January 1, 2014 By

 

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(1) I got an email from a very trendy store today that said “Start Your New Year off right with a new set of knives.”  Instead of just deleting it, I sent them back a response asking if owning new knives really set you up for a successful year.  Is it even possible there are other more prevalent issues that would set the tone for another three hundred some-odd days like being healthy and volunteering more and caring about homelessness?  Because I have a feeling that ordering a new set of knives will only cause one to feel as crappy as they did back in the dull butter knife days of December.  Stupid trendy store don’t care.  Stupid trendy store just wants to sell some mother-lovin knives up in here.

(2) I hosted a brunch today and several people asked me “but where do you have the time to do all of this?” and I don’t think it was a compliment but more of a “honey, you might need some more friends or take a yoga class” type of statement.  My response was to show them how I made party favors by hand stamping “Happy New Year!” on little brown bags and I realized as the words were falling out of my mouth I was making their point exactly so tomorrow I’m signing up for a gym class. But it was hand stamped.  And the bags were tied with grosgrain ribbons.

(3) As I’m writing this I noticed my daughter’s Elmers Glue on the desk and it says “visit us at elmers dot com!” and why, I don’t mind if I do! There are many articles with drop-down menus on what types of glue are appropriate in certain situations. I can assure you I’ve never wondered mid-craft project which type of glue would be the best possible choice.  I might have called the Butterball line on Thanksgiving once but undercooked turkey can kill people and glue just sticks things onto construction paper, for heaven’s sakes.

(4) I’m attempting to date post-divorce, and I have this complete prohibition on dating guys who smoke.  I realize the irony as I found myself at a restaurant talking to a cute dude who owns a tobacco shop. If he wants to know how to adhere the smoking papers together, however, I have this secret insight into glue.

(5)  At dinner this evening I was trying to cut up cherry tomatoes for a salad and my FREAKING KNIVES ARE DULL. If only I had newer, sharp ones.  It would really project my year into total awesomeness.

(6) I told my boss I like to garden and he was all “you have time to garden? Do you really have that much free time?” and my response was “absolutely not I work so hard and so many hours my snow peas are drying up and I LOVE MY JOB and the kale’s eaten by rabbits why would you think I’d ever have the time to garden OMG I get home at bedtime and gardening is the lamest hobby ever I WORK SO HARD.” Maybe that was overkill.

(7) The kids are with my ex this week and I miss them so much I found myself talking to their picture and lovingly touching their piles of clean laundry like stroking tiny corduroy pants would somehow reach their little beautiful souls.

(8)  I went to Texas Tech so when things get hard at work I imagine that I’m a superhero and say to myself “you can so totally revise this contract and create an amendment to the existing agreement and rock those meetings before heating up leftovers in the break room for lunch because you have RAIDER POWER.”  But I don’t say it out loud because that’s weird.

(9) I looked at a glue website and pretended I’m a superhero.  Weird has already been established.

(10)               A guest at my brunch today brought over this fancy bottle and she whispered “it contains alcohol” like that might be frowned upon and I said really loudly “are you kidding? I so totally love alcohol!” which might have been a reason the folks referenced above were concerned about my well being.

But let’s be honest.  We are all like children, ready to create a project of our colorful life, envisioning things of beauty being cut with sharp scissors and plastered onto a poster board to show off to our family and our neighbors that we are valuable.  Worthy.  Important.  We want to make good impressions and be appropriate and stay within the lines to show that we bear good fruit and that we are clever little soldiers. And on facebook and twitter and every social media site on earth we want to portray our lives as a scrapbook of our best selves.  Because we are constantly trying to prove something to somebody.

But might I challenge you this year to throw those conventions out the window.  Push the limits of your faith.  Bring your true fears to the table and talk to God about them.  Be weird.  Be yourself.  Dice and glue and run around hosting ridiculous brunches with full silver service or laugh off a few extra pounds and hug your children and look at a glue website if you must because YOU ARE ALWAYS LOVED by a Father more miraculous that you can imagine.  He touches your face with his angel wing like a million stacks of corduroy pants and says come home to me, you strange little bird.  I love you exactly the way you are.  If you’re goofy or messy or strange or need attention or crawl into a hole in fear or like to make party favors from tiny brown sacks.  It’s okay.  You’re still invited to the table.

And that feels good.  Even better, I dare say, than a new set of knives.

 

Happy New Year, my friends and faraway people.  Make it weird and wonderful. 

photo:

making

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Use it or lose it

December 31, 2013 By

 

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There are times I want to write but the words freeze like cold air and what was once winsome turns rigid, just cracked brittle words falling down like chunks of ice instead of snowflakes.  Fear enters my fingers because it’s not good enough or not worthy enough so I fill my time sulking and texting girlfriends who would rather watch Modern Family but humor me out of obligation. I rattle on during the dinner hour about online dating or my love of roasted kale or the fact that some store clerk told me that my new boots weren’t going to last more than two years and I might as well just buy the six-hundred-dollar ones but I looked her straight in the face and said “I ain’t ropin cattle in these fancy things so I’m sure it will all work out.” 

My brain crescendos into a fury with words, and they must escape somehow, even at the most inopportune times.  Singers sing and trial attorneys litigate and engineers create and painters color and we all just have to do what we are built to do.  So I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to all my best friends’ husbands who have to tolerate my incessant and time-consuming word dumps because they alone allow me to live a relatively normal life without the need of asylum.

But there are times when they jumble, my thoughts, like scattered stamps on the floor. I must gather them and press them into ink and secure them in some form of order on the page with no one around so that I can turn out the lights with a sigh that matters.  Because falling in bed at the end of the day without worthwhile word order is cheap and thin and I like my days to be thick like French bread, rich and ripping apart with a jagged edge.

But there are days I feel like a failure.  Failure at work, mothering, writing, home.  Failure to be thin and keep my perspective and to be the perfect image of who I want myself to be.  You know what I tell my kids? We are all failures. If not for that, what’s God’s love for anyway? 

In the depths of our fear, when we slam the phone down and there is no centering stone and we feel lost and trapped and frozen – when we feel like peeling off our very own skin and we can’t move or breathe and just want to invert into ourselves and be invisible and we are so weary of throwing down dirty cold ice– that’s where we pray.  We cry out from our deep places and ask God to take it, bear it, and hold it.  Because Jesus, we are not enough. We are never good enough.

That, my friends, is truth.  Words stick in my throat like peanut butter and I fear what might come out, and there are times I can’t move forward because I’m afraid of where I might land. I don’t want to face a future alone and I don’t want to cry any more tears and there are times I want to fall down and rip my clothes and never write another word.  But then I hear the words of Isaiah pulse through my veins: “Be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”  And I lesson the grip of fear, and the words come out easier, and I can feel a lifting. And the gift that God gave me resonates, and penetrates deeply, and I thank Him for this ability to speak when others cannot. So I trudge upstairs and write, because what the Lord gives  is right and true and it feels good to be following the yearning of your heart.

God has given each of you a unique gift.  Use it.  Nurture it.  Support it and pray about it.  Realize that your gifts are like an oiled slide that allows you to fly sometimes, and even in the midst of winter tragedy you land like a sunny afternoon at the bottom, and for just a little while here on earth, you were free.

 

photo:

Pure Joy

Filed Under: Creativity, Inspirational, Uncategorized, Writing Tagged With: , , , , , ,

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