Making It Together

Am immersed in reading the impossibly good Daring Greatly. Life-changing philosophy, psychology and research on vulnerability, trust, human connection and overcoming shame. Brene Brown is officially on my list of most inspiring humans. Love it when brilliance becomes a best seller and shows up at every library everywhere. It's can't-put-it-down, divinely inspired, putting-in-missing-pieces-I've-been-puzzled-over-forever....type of good.


This morning I noticed that the snowdrops are blooming at the back door and the daffodils at the front door are showing healthy green shoots too. The grocery stores are selling dollar bundles of daffodils for a fix to tide us all over. I am super fixing my faith on the return of warm and leaning it mentally. Not much longer now. We are all going to make it.

We have made two expeditions to the beach this week. Somehow just sifting sand in our fingers and collecting shells together is enough of a recollection of summer and our recent trip to help hold us.

Came home this time with a collection of purple quahog bits, the parts that the local tribes used for money, storytelling, rank and all kinds of other signifiers. Amazing to finger these bits of shell smashed by seagulls and imagine people from another time gathering and trimming them to add beauty and value to their long ago lives too. We are all marching along together in this world, looking for beauty, holding on through the winters of our lives and standing shoulder to shoulder with historical and real-time peoples....a countless line of folks who making meaning together.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Tropical Cure

We have been to parts further south, warming our toes and tanning our pelts in the tropical sun. The world is a much better place now. We are home to our beige and grey yard and it all seems shockingly wan but the snow is almost all gone, the garden catalogs are piling up in a heap on my To Read Shelf and the chickens are started laying like gangbusters. I feel a change in the wind. We 'gon make it!

My life has felt like a ridiculous tumult lately, painful and crazy and feeling out of control. I hate, hate, hate to even tell you that I know part of it has been hormonal woman-timing. PMS is so humiliating and it makes me feel so shammy and non-legit. Blech. Also, I think its a good year to just certify myself as clearly sucked under by Seasonal Affective Disorder and realize that the endless bland, bone-chilling cold and lack of sunshine has screwed with my ability to remain stable. (I am seriously considering getting one of those dorky lights to sit under, folks!) My world has also really been truly stressful. We are trudging our way through marriage counseling, one of those scary things that nobody talks about out-loud. Marriage is hands down the hardest thing, the scariest endeavor and the deepest learning experience I have ever, ever been through in my life. Honestly, it kind of terrifies me and I long for "easy" and "happy" in my marriage but its been everything but. Nobody talks out loud about marriage, you know? Its kind of this confidential, if you-have-one-you-are-supposed-to-feel-blessed kind of a thing. I don't want to make A feel bad or dump our relational dirty laundry but I do think its important sometimes to whistle blow and just be authentic and I know we both agree on the honest desire to be .

Marriage is hella hard, yo. I have never cried harder or felt deeper or worked more from the pit of my own soul than this. I am encouraged to know that people change, relationships are dynamic, that I am growing, that we love each other, that we have resources, and that we are not the first people to walk this way. Please know, if this is you in any way....not everyone marries their high school sweetheart and gets to post on Facebook that they feel so lucky to be married to their best friend. Lots of us out there are working out our marriages, its about growth and change and hard self-work and grace and patient turtle medicine in bucket loads. I have been doing some serious soul searching and I honestly believe that life belongs to the over-comers, to the learners and the doers, those who will not be defeated and will not give up, to those who humbly and vulnerably connect and believe in a spirit of change. I'm clinging to evidence of our progress and firmly planting myself in the committed but unwilling to be victimized category. I'm committed to our marriage, to the pain and the growth and the believing in each other, to preserving myself and encouraging him to do the same, to sacred advisors and the village that surrounds us, to showing our children and people who don't have it easy can be winners too and figuring all this craziness out. Please know that you, struggling married person of great worth, are not alone. I'm all about creating a new culture of humanity, openness and growth around marriage....I'm super over the trite happy-happy pretend that all is bliss or that all conflict is sickness.

This is what the tropics hath wrought. I read and prayed, and dreamed and saw things on the shore, talked and argued and made resolutions and said brave things, soaking in sunshine, slept and slept and slept, wrote lists, took photos and just *was* in a hammock on the seashore. And I'm more whole, more honest, more awake and determined to make it.

Winter Blues

Just kind of a funny odds and ends kind of day. I am not sure exactly what happened to the whole thing really. I hate it when a day does that to me. Somehow it managed to creep by slowly, feel molasses sloggy and then not really come to anything except for a funny whooshing at the end that amounted a sudden overwhelmedness and a tinge of the blues. I think part of it is the dragging slump here at the end of winter, part of it is kid whining, part family illness (hello Round of Earaches that has been keeping Mama up all night!) and part of is just a big pile of tiny complaints that have heaped and tittered about my ankles for some time now and have just managed to creep up high enough to really whisper persistently in my ear.

Losing the baby weight has been slower than I wanted it to be. Of course it is my third baby we're talking about and I've aged since the first go 'round and then there's my willpower with dieting which is a bit lacking but, even if we can explain it, friends, that doesn't make it all better, does it.

The house is wonderful and a home-improvement queen's dream but, a few little improvement set-backs have made it suddenly feel like an impossible, laughable, I'll-never-get-it-done mountain of work for one woman to tackle on her own while three small children howl in the background. I know this one is real and lots of people would think I was crackers for even trying to fix up a house single-handedly while raising three kids but then, that's just the brand of loony I am. I am determined to get re-inspired on this one and not cave to the popular conception that what I am attempting is ridiculous. Ahem.

I am planning our garden and while on the one hand I am fidgety with excitement over the soon-to-be-muddy yard in front of me....on the other hand it is a big job and although I really want to be a gardener who can handle a whole yard, I've never really done it and I'm trying not to listen to the section of my psyche that is screaming "You're going to waste so much money and destroy that perfectly good lawn!!! What do you think you're doing, you nutcase!" Isn't that silly? I should be thrilled but instead I'm intimidated and believe I'll destroy the property. Fabulous.

A neighbor wants to give me some cast-offs that she doesn't need anymore. That sounds nice, right? I keep avoiding her phone calls. She called this afternoon and I went as far as to press talk and then panicked and hung up. I think part of it is that I suspect that part of what she wants to give me I may not be able to move myself and I don't think A will be very thrilled at the prospect of being looped into the project. Then also part of it is that I kind of suspect that part of what she wants to give me I may not actually want and I will take it anyway and then hate the fact that I brought a bunch of crap into the house that we didn't need. Am so weak of will.

I don't entirely know what to do to get out of the funk. I am not all the way down in a depression yet and I think I can avoid it. Am thinking, early to bed, good talk with A, a nice warm drink and an early morning by myself. Hopefully tomorrow the world will be a kinder place.