Gilead

Sometimes I think someone should give me a pulpit. I think I could preach a really good, impactful sermon. I mean factor in that I never went to seminary and usually to become a pastor you have to have a belief system that is a little less... abstract and I'm completely disqualified from the role. But none the less every once in a while i get all fired up and imagine myself speaking to a room full of people that have to listen to me and usually this fantasy ends somewhere with inspirational music playing and people shouting "Amen" in the aisles and usually some tears because cue the waterworks when someone gets something right about your life you haven't been able to realize for yourself. Ok, maybe pastor is the wrong calling for me. I think you have to be a little more humble and less focused on self to take on that job title, and in all honesty I don't think I'd want it anyway because I've heard its not all its cracked up to be. Inspirational speaker m...

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...

What's right now? What's happening right now?  My friend Stephanie shared a video this morning about living in the hard spaces. When you are at the end of the rope, ready to collapse, shaking and trembling, what then? She shared a story from when she taught yoga and took her class through the holding of a posture. As the posture was held, as the muscles began to shake and the mental game turns into "I can't do this, i need to be done, i need to collapse into child's pose" she would say "the shaking means you're still in this. you haven't given up yet." I wrote a letter to a friend this week detailing a specific aspect of grief i am currently finding challenging. It's not the ache of loss itself but one of those unexpected side notes that pop up as a result of the drastic shift that just took place, and i wasn't writing to get an answer so much as i was writing to give voice to what i was feeling. And she replied with "Oh, it...

Life moves on. One day the worst day in the world feels like yesterday and you can still feel the physical ache from the surgery and the next day you've started a new job and are worried about normal people things like taking your dog to the vet and being annoyed about people who drive too slow and wondering how you can get in another workout. And its not that in the days that have passed I haven't thought about Paris, its just that grief has taken on a new flavor. I've started a new job and am teaching yoga at a few new studios and everything is transforming. My mind has been full of things like class attendance and these new pants i want to buy and how money is still so tight between paychecks as we try to catch up from all the months i spent not working. this morning was the first morning i woke up in over a week with no where to be. And from the minute i blinked open my eyes i could feel anxiety gripping my chest. I could feel the frantic energy of grief begin to eme...

We went out to a patio last night to have supper and celebrate bereaved mother's day. Celebration may be too big a word. But we went to have a meal and some drinks and because we desperately needed to get out of the house and because, being the functional adults that we are, we ran out of toilet paper. So we decided to make a date out of it. I was already in a bad mood before the conversation happened. I didn't like my drink and the table beside us was loud and the sun was shining right in my eyes. Things that I would have normally been able to tolerate but all of them piled together, on this day, was enough to make me crazy. And then, from the loud table behind me, I heard "We never get to come to patios anymore. You know, because of the baby." My ears tuned in to their conversation. As much as I hate it baby is one of the words that has the power to turn my head and depending on how you use it will depend how I feel about you from that moment on. "She'...

There is a quote somewhere that says something along the lines of "You think you've hit rock bottom and then you realize you're standing on a trap door." That's how I feel. You think the worst thing that can ever happen to a person happened to you... and then the things keep coming. I had a meltdown in front of town hall today that wasn't really about what everyone thought it was about. I went to register our dog and ended up encountering problems because one of the breeds listed on her adoption file was pitbull, and if she's pitbull there's a ton of other hoops we have to jump through which include a higher fence and having her muzzled every time she leaves the house. And I was outraged that people can discriminate against dogs like that and assume all pitbulls are violent (If you've met our dog she is the sweetest thing) and I am not going to treat our dog like she did anything wrong when she hasn't. I wanted to grab her and protect her and...

I've been in the business of saying controversial things lately. Blame it on the grief, or lack of self control, or the fact that i never had much of a filter to begin with and the isolation of losing a child has made me realize we need to talk about the important things while we can so that one day another person doesn't feel the same way we felt. In the privacy of my own journal, while standing barefoot in the kitchen, whispering to the trees while I take our dog for a walk, I've said things about God, marriage, children and the world that i wouldn't have normally said otherwise. I won't tell you what those things are, because i know there are those people out there that would fear for my sanity and pray i have a come-to-jesus moment if i confessed some of the things i've said, but sometimes it feels honest and good to say a good "fuck you" to the universe. Even as i write this i'm not entirely sure i will post it. mostly i'm writing it to ...

Most things break instead of transform because they resist. the quiet miracle of love is that without our interference, it, like water, accepts whatever is tossed or dropped or placed into it, embracing it completely. Grief these days has felt like anxiety and depression. Thick, dark, paralyzing moments of  'I can't breathe.' Moments when it all collapses in on me and all I can think is that I made a huge mistake. About choosing to leave the house at 7 instead of 8. About choosing to bring home our puppy. About renting out our basement. About getting married. About Paris. About Paris. About Paris. All these other things that paralyze me with intense fear, they aren't really the issue. The issue is that I let them take my son from me and now he is dead. The issue is that my body failed him, and me.  the element of love does not stop being elemental. it does not stop covering everything before it. and over a lifetime, the pain of withholding this great and qui...

Maybe its the sun finally peaking out from behind the grey clouds, melting the snow from what has felt like the longest Alberta winter ever. Maybe it was the phone call with the bereavement counselor. Maybe its that I'm feeding myself healthy meals and sleeping in my own bed and for the first time in months my body has stabilized itself and my blood sugar levels no longer read state of emergency. Either way I feel hopeful today. Like I can see out from behind the dark veil of grief that has been obscuring my vision for the last few months, and I will take whatever moments of reprieve I can get. I want to tell a story. It's one I've wanted to tell for a few days now but every time I sit down to begin writing I can't find the words. It's the me too's that sometimes life weight from our souls I want to talk about representation. And support. I want to talk about the loud me too's that penetrate even the darkest clouds of grief and make one feel less alone...

"It's not by chance that the dark center of the human eye, the pupil, is actually an empty hole through which the world becomes known to us." I read this quote by Mark Nepo this morning and it connected with this idea that I'd had the day before. that out of this brokenness is going to grow new life. I've been thinking a lot about my life. For the past month I've been in and out of the hospital, not working or socializing very much beyond what is done behind a computer screen. My life has become this solitary thing where my entire world has narrowed to my bedroom and a hospital room. There is no remnants left behind of the girl I used to be. What is has become this cycle of grief and pain and an inability to process everything that has happened to me. Sometimes I think the surgery that scraped my uterus clean scraped me clean as well. there is nothing left. Just the dark center of the I. "Like the center of the eye, both Buddhist and Zen traditions...

I was raised in the Christian tradition, studied it in college, have meticulously deconstructed it in my adult years. I have become one of those Christmas and Easter people, not because my faith only comes to life on these holy holidays but because I see the magic and sacredness in the season of Lent and the season of Advent. Times of waiting, preparation, getting ready for what was to come. And what was to come was a new thing entirely, an invitation into a world that is so radically different than this one. This year Easter has new meaning for me. Because as I stand weeks out from the death of my own child, feeling like I have lost a piece of myself and still reeling from the trauma of everything that took place, I feel like I have a deeper connection with the God I was always told about as a child. The God who allowed the death of the Son of God because Jesus' death was never just about the death of Jesus. The God who allowed a part of Godself to suffer and die for love. I u...

Great grief isn't made to fit inside your body. it's why your heart breaks Grief has manifested itself in my body. Awkward symptoms, none to be found on the sheet they gave me when I left the hospital on things to expect when your body is recovering from surgery. A lot of people ask how I'm recovering physically. Which I understand because the surgery was a big deal and left me with some pretty fancy scars and its the primary reason I'm writing this from the bed instead of working. And I usually answer with "I'm healing slowly but fine" and its the end of the discussion. Sometimes I prefer it that way because it gives me an excuse to duck out of the conversation earlier (if I was anti-social before I am extra anti-social now. I have to use my fingers to count the number of text messages and emails that have gone unanswered) Most of the time I wish you would ask about my dead baby. Paris . tell me you remember. Tell me you know this surgery wasn't...

My friend shared yesterday a story Mark Nepo told in his book the book of awakening. In it he told the story of this people group that, when someone was suffering a great loss or death, during the night their friends and neighbours would go to their home and change the location of objects outside their house so that when they awoke the next morning and went outside they would know that everyone around them knew that everything was different now. that the pain had changed everything. She went on to share that there is a way that we can hold space for people who are grieving that doesn't require words and that is full of love. It reminded me of a quote by Glennon Doyle, which I have been reminded of many times over the last few weeks as others have struggled with finding a way to approach us during this season of loss. Glennon says "When her pain is fresh and new, let her have it. Don't try to take it away. forgive yourself for not having that power. grief and pain are n...