The "me" part of the list is where I prioritize the activities and opportunities to tend to myself, baby-step toward my goals, and experience my senses and perspective. I use the list to guard time to journal, take a walk outside, or read a good book. 

One of my favorite me-tasks is "nap/do nothing."  I give myself permission and something like credit for resting.  "Do nothing" is actually a specific resting position where I lie on my back on the floor against my bed. I rest my calves on the bed, thighs perpendicular to the floor, back flat, arms stretched out on the floor, and a small pillow under my head.  It's a little awkward at first!  But, soon, I feel all my joints and muscles relax, as if I'm sinking into the floor.  I remind myself to relax my face and jaw.  My thoughts are the last bit to settle as my brain is busy with all the things I should be doing, remembering, or planning.  Sometimes, it helps to imagine I'm floating on a gentle river.  I feel the sun warming my front while I'm supported by cool water.  All I can hear is the easy lapping of small waves.

I've organized my weekends with lists like this for a long time.  (Here's a snapshot of the practice 11 years ago!)  But I haven't always started the list with me.  I concluded weekend after weekend with a clean and tidy house, a meal-plan, and laundry folded and put away, but a worn out and irritated me.  Sometimes, those weekends still happen, but, for the most part, putting "me" at the top of the list ensures that I consistently take very good care of myself.  

How do you prioritize yourself amidst the chores, responsibilities, and relationships of your life?

It's been just over a year since my last "now" posting.  This is now:

Has anything been shook loose while you were making significant changes in your life? How do you attend to those pieces? ​

Is a part of you itching to be shed?   Where might something new be emerging in who you are or how you live? ​

When my father died, and I slid loose from clinging to his religion, those core beliefs couldn’t catch me.  I landed hard.  I surveyed what remained of my faith.  Then, I started a slow, iterative, circling and cycling path to my own core beliefs.  That included identifying and rejecting beliefs I’d been raised with and found vacant.  For me, slow has meant years-long and riddled with more pauses than clarity.  The process has been graced with good friends, good books, and a million pages of journaling. ​

My apostasy began with simple, pragmatic, choices made from my gut.  There were hymns I couldn’t sing anymore because of battle imagery or other language that neither articulated nor resonated with my understanding of good, the ineffable, and even the example of Jesus’ life.  Soon, I took issue with lines of a creed or the tone of a prayer.  There were entire sermons that left me cringing and crabby.  Until I just didn’t go to church, anymore.  There was nothing there for me but irritation and angst.  I had to delete so much of the service that I was left with gaping holes where others gleaned instruction or comfort or community.  ​

I returned to church, briefly, in my mid-thirties.  I was a new mother and aching for a community to share with and to receive support.  The same script played out for me there.  Vacancies developed within the services, as I closed my mouth from saying things I didn’t, and still don’t, believe.  I wished I could play along to be part of the community there.  But it chafed so painfully and I couldn’t settle in.  ​

I widened my search for “open and affirming” congregations and congregations with evidence of doing good work in the neighborhood or the city.  I did find them.  But the words, creeds, and sermons were in those places, too. ​

After decades of resisting what I knew, intuitively, since childhood I turned inward to meet that message.  I stopped fighting with the external definitions of God and Gospel.  I listened closely to the good news I understood within me.  I felt free to lay down each belief and practice that I denied.  It released me from a binding tension, which had held me in one place in my spirituality.  I entered into faith anew.  Building my set of beliefs and actions.  Finding my community one connection at a time. ​

What is your apostasy?  Play fast and loose with the idea. Don’t be limited to a particular religious instruction.  Maybe it’s cultural canon that you are ready to lay down because it no longer rings true.  ​

I am a hot pink heretic.  I worship god as the MADWOMAN in the attic.  I honor and heed the Divine according to a metaphor of female madness versus a manmade structure of order and restraint. I honor and heed Her call in my emotions, the natural world, the good work of both cultural heroes and the unsung volunteer, my own intuition and discernment, in books I read. ​

I am a hot pink heretic.  I honor and heed teachers and prophets in the myriad places they appear.  I receive their guidance in holy and secular texts, each sacred in its own way.  I observe their good work in documentaries, newsletters, and intentional communities.  I support their work with donations and sharing the good news of their good work.  I aspire to live more like they do. ​

I am a hot pink heretic.  I believe in repentance and redemption of ordinary human lives in our ordinary world.  I believe we honor the Divine best when we tend to each other, in all the ways.  I believe that “all the ways” includes immediacy of family and friend circles, the wider circles of neighborhoods and municipalities, the circles of governance and economics, the circle of our living planet. ​

I am a hot pink heretic.  I am here, with you, in a messy world where very little and very rarely is anything crystal clear, black or white, good or bad, in or out.  We are in this messy ambiguous world together.  We live with wise teachings and wise teachers who illuminate how we all might live well together.  ​

I am hot pink heretic.  I hear the MADWOMAN’s call.  “Burn it down.” ​