Gilead

Twas the morning on the day after Christmas, and this holiday season nothing seemed to go as planned. I've written the following lines time and time again but they never seem to come out right. It was the morning on the day after Christmas and every time I sit to document the going ons of this season I get about as far as "Are you kidding me?" (Usually with more curse words strung somewhere in that sentence) This was our first Christmas without Paris, and a large part of me is issuing a sigh of relief because never again will we have to experience our first Christmas without him. Another part of me is sighing because, while we have made it through the monumental first Christmas, we have years of more Christmas celebrations and birthdays and holidays to survive without him. Shortly before Christmas, i ended up being taken to the hospital by ambulance. Once again my life narrowed into this moment of emergency. And while I did make it home for Christmas day, it wasn'...

I'm sitting in front of the Christmas tree, all twinkly with white lights. The stockings are hung - 3 in a row, even though only 2 of them will be filled this year. I'm breathing in this moment of peace, stillness, the silent night. Advent is a season of waiting. We wait, with anticipation, for Christmas to arrive. We look forward with hope. I've always found advent to be a magical time of year, but this year the season is tinged with a sort of heaviness. I shared earlier about how I wasn't going to celebrate advent this year, but how the promptings of a friend and her sharing of the beatitudes reminded me that this season is just as much for those who grieve as it is for those who rejoice. Today i want to talk about Elizabeth. She's not who we think of when we think of the Christmas story, and yet she is one of the first characters introduced in Luke's gospel. I overlooked her story every year, thinking nothing more of her than this story line as an entry po...

It's been a while since I've sat down in this tiny space in the middle of the internet and shared my thoughts. The last few months have been full of grieving, loving, learning and growing. I'm currently in the middle of a social media detox, and while its giving me tons of new inspiration and energy, I also realized i miss connecting with friends online. So I'm turning to my old blog to share some thoughts I have on this advent season. I've shared before how I love advent. I've moved away from a lot of christian traditions but advent and lent are still 2 traditional church observations that i adore. I didn't do anything for lent this year (Or maybe I did? The grief fog was so real I'm missing huge chunks of memory from around the time Paris was born) and I almost skipped over advent without giving it a second thought. The first Sunday of advent i was exhausted and didn't make it to church and, when Cody came home and told me they lit the first adven...

I've been teaching buti classes locally since the beginning of summer. When i took this position at this studio I knew it would be temporary. I didn't know all the details of just how temporary it would be, or all the opportunities that it would open up. From fairly early on I began to refer to this time period, this job, this class, as liminal space. It was the in between, the almost but not quite. I didn't know where i was headed to yet but i was leaving behind the old way of being and whatever i was moving towards i knew this wasn't it. this was just a stop on the way to where i was going. I never thought i would be so grateful for this little stop. The first few weeks were hard. Some classes no one showed up. Some classes one person showed up. I was knee deep in grief and a lot of days it felt next to impossible to get out of bed. I was still recovering from surgery, my body still recovering from the traumatic medical crisis i had just endured, from being pregnant...

In her comedy show Nanette Hannah Gadsby tells her story of growing up and discovering she was a lesbian in Tasmania, where homosexuality was illegal until 1997. I don't know what I was expecting when i turned on Nanette on a rainy Saturday afternoon. I had heard excellent reviews, how both hard truths were revealed intertwined with hilarious comedy. But when i sat down in front of the screen, i didn't expect what hit me. and maybe that's the brilliance of it all. In an hour long feature more story telling than comedy show i was hit face first with the human experience. Hannah shares about shame. She talks about how before she even knew she was a lesbian she knew to be homophobic. 70% of the people in her immediate community - the Bible belt of Tasmania - thought homosexuality should remain illegal. And shame, she said, doesn't just go away. In the mind of a child it grows like a weed, ruining the pathways of being able to think things for oneself. The closet keeps yo...

"There are years that ask questions and years that answer" And this is a year full of questions. Who am I? In the face of crisis when all is stripped away what is left? Who are my people? What do I really want out of life? A year ago I thought I knew the answer to all of those questions. even in December as I sat around making a list of highs from 2017 and wishes for 2018 I would have called myself extremely happy. I knew what I wanted, and I said so many times that I was living the dream. I finally felt like I had an understanding of who I was, and I felt ready for the great rising. I had a tribe of people I thought I was going to be with forever. And then March of 2018 happened. Crisis and trauma has a way of making shit real. and that dream job I had didn't have time to wait for me to collect myself. And the people I thought I would be friends with forever decided I was too much for them, or as the months passed and I wasn't 'over it' they moved on wit...