My Christian faith started evolving 25 years ago, but the kernel or promise of change was embedded in my heart since childhood. The catalyst for my transformation was the fire of grief, which cracked me open and left me exposed.  Community, in the form of women’s friendship and wisdom, tended me, planted me deeply in cool soil, and gave me room to grow. ​

My father died when I was 18.  I was in college at an Evangelical Christian school.  In the following year, I attempted suicide. My family of origin slid into a state of alienation from each other.  I was angry and bereft, rude and out of control. I struggled against everything and everyone. ​

Something essential in me prevailed and was witnessed.  Other women saw it. I received compassion and insight from female professors at the college.  They brought me to church, a woman-lead Episcopalian congregation. They taught me about feminism, new-to-me theologies, women’s perspectives and experiences conveyed by women authors in narratives and poetry.  I learned about the entanglement of Christian religion with colonialism. I reached out and met other female students wrestling with the same ideas and stretching into their own awakenings. I prayed and played with God alongside the guidance of an eclectic and faithful spiritual director.   ​

A few weeks before my thirtieth birthday I moved across the country to Seattle for graduate school.  It was my fresh start, far from my family, my personal history, the church I grew up in, the politics I did not subscribe to.  The Madwoman resurfaced in my graduate studies and occupied a central role in my thinking and writing. As I drafted my thesis I heard Her call.  She did not reveal Herself to me in the upper room of the house, which I had hoped and expected. Rather, She bid me retrace my steps and meet Her in each person I met as I traveled back down through the house. ​

There’s still no “there” there, for me.  I don’t have a local community that I can simply join for resonance and support, teaching and service.  I miss that. I understand, now, the best parts of a house of worship. Even so, I proceed. I am making it up as I go, one step at a time, down from Her attic and into the company of Her people, who are everywhere. ​

I wanted to be alive for my son, especially.  Now, I add to that my partner and future husband.  My friends. My garden. ​

Do you see the pattern there? ​

​As a child, I accepted the faith and its religion in earnest.  But disconnects between the words we said as a congregation and the way we lived in our homes and daily lives, occasionally broke through and concerned me.  Those concerns developed into a heavy tension as I matured. If the spiritually faithful were in action unfaithful, what was the point of the faith? If the congregation lives according to the prevailing culture rather than its proclaimed savior, which demonstration of their faith is true?  Ultimately, I judged culture the winner in this competition.

​It was a relief.  I cut loose from the tension.   I freed myself of the obligation to follow Jesus’ example.  I chose values like personal security, private property, physical health, and my immediate relationships.

But Jesus’s life, and that original tension, hovers around me.  ​

Here is Little N with Slim and Brother Justin enjoying a leisurely Sunday morning.

It was such a leisurely Sunday morning that I got to sleep in until 8-ish.  We stayed at J's Saturday night after a 4-hour playdate with G and her family.  Pizza and a movie later and Little N was sound asleep.  Only to rise early, with the cats, and then J, while I slept on.  happy sigh.

Happy too, to note that N's behavior toward me improved a little after a call with his dad.  N heard that he was going a little too far in his treatment of me and some of his classmates.  He is still impatient and quick to anger, but he's eased up on his verbal abuse of me. 

So we enjoyed a playdate with G's two boys.  We enjoyed hanging out for the evening at J's.  Little N put down the iPad and enjoyed imaginary games in J's house, which he wishes was ours.  He enjoyed pizza, a raucous movie, sleeping in a big bed by himself, with maybe a cat or two.  And I enjoyed my son.  

It's a beginning.  It's a sign, I hope, that we're in a change.  I anticipate bumps.  I'm seeking additional support in the form of a counselor for N.  And I'm holding onto my hope of N learning how to manage big emotions, like anger, like reactions to change and loss.  Holding onto my hope of knowing my son throughout this transition and continuing our relationship, on good terms, on the other side of this.

I haven't been writing here in a regular way for ages.  Real life occupies my mind, time, and energy so much.  Here's what I'm doing now:

What is my problem!? I wondered, from the midst of a low day.  I scribbled my way through it, through the lens of Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT).

My "problem" isn't my brain - at least, not in the same way as - my emotions. Big. Overwhelming. In-My-Body feelings. And in response to those big feelings I do something. Usually something unhealthy, or in DBT-speak, something Ineffective.

It's Ineffective because it blocks my route to my Goals.  My Goals come from my Values. Although... these days it feels like my Goals are being adopted and incorporated from the naturopath and my dismal health numbers. It feels a little backwards. My Goals are actually determining my Values.  They're good Values - Health, Longevity, Fitness.  They just didn't start in me.  

​Priorities and Values can change with time and circumstances and new or renewed insights. For a long time, with L, my Value was survival. While at my last job it became Interpersonal Effectiveness. That continues in my current position, though I have some mastery of it now, relying on my good manners plus prompt response time. But the Naturopath and my numbers indicate that my Value needs to be Physical Health. 

I've never been an athlete.  And it's a very long time - 15 years or more? - since I felt strongly connected to my body. I do experience my strong emotions in my body.  But then I tend to do something external to try and change how I feel emotionally. Eat. Smoke. Watch TV.  

Mindfulness, I guess, is the tool or skill for acknowledging the big emotions in my body, then letting them pass, while I remain present in my body. In my senses and physical sensations.  The Wise Mind process is how I sort out what's going on and choose actions that are Effective for body and emotions. Effective for my Value of physical health. 

And... this scribble suggests... my Value of Emotional Integrity...

Some people surround themselves with things that are pleasing to the eye. People like my mother prefer matching colors and complete sets. Furniture. Window dressings. Appliances and silverware. I appreciate that life when i visit but it doesn’t feel like home to me. My biota is much more a random collage of select things that inspire and move me, planted in the practical stuff of getting through each day. I’d like to call it an authentic life but really it’s me clinging to any meaning and vitality I can find.

My bedroom houses a collection of books, stacked on narrow shelves and teetering along the edges of rare flat surfaces. Not because I’ve read all the books but because the books tell me, just by being there, that someone has made some sense of some particular topic that means something to me. They hold the promise of meaning. They offer a glimmer of inspiration
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Today, i sit in doldrums. Winter in seattle is a palette of grey-sky days and early deep dark nights. Daily life is a trudge through obligations and responsibilities. Structures that I must abide like rent and bills, grocery shopping, social etiquette and deference to authority. My office job is mundane and riddled with “powers that be” who must be pleased and satisfied. My body is fat and sedentary. The little time that is mine is so often lost to sleep. Recover from the work-week. Not because it engaged me but because i endured it.

Is it me? Is there something wrong with me? That my daily life, and thus the span of my days alive, is so… meh. Where do other people find the spark of life?

I think that’s why we hear so much about gratitude and the “little things.” i think that’s why so much emphasis is placed on family, in this culture. To the point of declaring “friends are family,” as if friends weren’t precious enough on their own. These things are where we, as a culture, have assigned meaning. Are they not meaningful to me? Are they not enough?

I think it’s also the contrast of “Zowie! Pow! Kazaam! I’ve figured out some big things!,” in my twenties versus “I’ve got to figure out how to make ends meet and parent my son,” in my forties. Those twenty-something big things are barely relevant to my daily life now. And they were big significant things like feminism and social justice and life-giving theology. But how to build a daily life, that pays the rent and raises the child, and embodies those big things, today?

So I look for inspiration, capture it in a word or image, tack it up on the wall, return to it, again and again, like worship. Photos of my son. Images cut from magazines. Poems and quotes. Cards from friends. All stuck onto the wall together.

This collection of artifacts tells a story. Once upon a time there was a woman who felt her life didn’t matter. So she drew close to herself things that signified mattering. She stood before them, imagining they made a mirror, reflecting what mattered in her life. Rather, they were a projection, like movies cast from film and light, issuing the promise of meaning into her and her days. She could live the life depicted in the pictures. The answers were right in front of her.
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Really? Can I really live a more vital and meaningful life - beyond the to-do lists and the collage on the wall? Are the answers right in front of me?

​​"Hold your heart in all tenderness.  Something healing this way comes." 
​ - Jen Lemen

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These words have been on my heart a lot lately.  Because they are beautiful and hopeful.  Because there's so much that needs healing - in my body and my heart, in the bodies and hearts of people I care about, in this country, in the world...

​To me, these words are an invitation to be softer, compassionate, unguarded and vulnerable.  Open to pain, my own and others'.  Faithful to myself and others in the midst of severe trials.  To accept hope and healing, to believe that it is coming. To carry hope and healing into my relationships.  To be one who bears hope and tends others as they heal. 

It's been a long time since I've felt myself to be an open, compassionate person.  Post partum depression and the end of my marriage rendered me harder, less emotional, disconnected from other people and myself.  The last couple of years, and moving forward, have been about my healing in terms of reconnecting and re-membering myself to those parts and practices and tending their life and expression. Lately, I find myself invited to engage with others, beloved friends, with depth of feeling and healing presence.  These invitations challenge me to be the best version of who I am today and to keep growing into someone tender, attentive, and tending.

​My dear friend's health crisis is one of the invitations I'm accepting right now.  Losing faith in those dark hours last week is probably what rose this quote to my mind.  It reminded me of how to show up and who to be when life is so very hard.  It reminded me of who I am.

A few weeks ago I finally settled on the idea and accepted that there is no unifying meaning to be made of life the way it is. The lessons of my childhood and a spiritual walkabout through Neo-Paganism and Wannabe Buddhism all fell away with a clattering clumsiness confirming their unreliability. This very prospect of accepting the emptiness had followed me for years, threatening to unravel my tenuous and tentative commitment to life. And in this moment of acceptance it called to me again, with a bellowing vow to suck me into a void where nothing really mattered. Where I and my love, my Little N, didn’t matter. But I held my ground. 

Sitting cross-legged on the bed in my bright little room, I spoke softly to the emptiness inside of me. "You can stay with me. I'm not running from you anymore. And you can speak with me. I'm not afraid of your noise and words. I understand you a little better, now, and you are precious to me." 

The emptiness is valuable. It reminds me of my agency. I can choose how and what I assign meaning to.  Like some sort of spiritual anarchist, I'm declining and refuting the religious law and order that defined how I became who I am.  I retain a hermeneutic of love, grace, and justice as my lens on life, but I reject the prescribed social order and the shoulds of personal piety, of judging our neighbors, of accepting and yielding to an unjust social, political, and economic status quo. 

There’s no inherent meaning, for me, no obvious goodness or rightness, to the way Western society is ordered. It’s not God’s Law that we live in heterosexual legally married nuclear families, that we prioritize private wealth and comfort, that we amplify a narrow view of individual morality over a broader view of public health, economic and environmental sustainability, justice for the marginalized and the poor, that we define those in need as “deserving” and “undeserving” of aid and support… It goes on.  It’s all been better said and sometimes solved by folks wiser, more experienced, more effective than me.  But it bothers me.  And the religion of my upbringing hasn’t helped any of it get better.

The same critique applies to my personal life. There’s no inherent meaning in my marriage and divorce. It doesn’t mean anything that my ex-husband, L, now lives with me and Little N as a roommate and my partner in parenting. I assign no value nor criticism to my leaving home and my birth family to pursue my education and plant myself in a new place with new people in my life. There’s no particular meaning to rejecting the religion and politics I come from. There’s no particular meaning to my current financial struggles and career anxiety. These things just are, and I get to choose what sense to make of them. 

It’s easy to wax on about the big bad world out there. And it’s easy to hunker down into my tiny personal world. The common theme in both scenarios is my choice. The ordained law and order is an illusion. It’s refutable. It’s synthetic. I can and must choose something true in order to keep going in my life. 

The search for something true sends me right back to the prophets and good teachers who have walked this path before. I’m thinking of guides like Buddha, Jesus, and even today’s pagan teacher Starhawk. Their words, lives, and choices, illuminate true things for me about non-attachment to stuff, people, and notions, drawing in the marginalized, supporting the weak and the poor, heeding, tending and defending our home planet. 

In some ways it would be easier to yield to the illusion and accept the myth of a divine law and order that structures our public and personal lives giving us meaning and righteousness. But that doesn’t ring true for me and my life. It doesn’t fill the emptiness and it never has. 

Back in November, I posted that Samhain to Imbolc would be a season of sitting still with the life that I live.  Oh, but I am a wriggly little worm.  Much of this dark season has been resisting the life that I live. So mundane. So uninspired. I've been looking ahead to a season of action on resolutions.