I've been thinking about this plant a lot, lately.

Now is a sweet spot in our home and family 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? ​

I'm working out my faith as one who hears the MADWOMAN's call.
This is what I believe, today.

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.  ​

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. ​

In a joyful ceremony, with friends and family, J and I were married.  

​We gave special attention to including young N in the ceremony.  J made a commitment to N to love and support him as step-father and friend, with care not to replace L.  We made promises as a family, in addition to our vows as a couple. 

N also received a simple silver band as a symbol of the family the three of us make together.

Then the party!  A picnic reception with plenty of food and cake for all. 

In November 2016, my bestie G was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.  We were relieved, in a way, to have a diagnosis for the disturbing symptoms that had been disrupting her mind, relationships, and daily life for months.  But... cancer.

In an effort to cheer myself, and cast some hope into the future, I purchased some decorative papers to make a journal for her.  But the days were so full of worry, fatigue, and challenge after challenge... my energy and inspiration pulled away.  The book didn't get made.

Two years later, G is cancer-free!  She is restored to her full and healthy self.  Her family, work, and other relationships, all share in the gifts of her renewal.  We are all relieved.  We are reconnected.  The tenuous thread of life, its preciousness, G's preciousness, made obvious by disease, remains close in our hearts and minds, even as we resume the usual and mundane of our day-to-day.

Finally, I am making her book.  A token of love and celebration. For her birthday.

I've enjoyed coloring since I was a child.  As an adult, it's taken on a different feel and purpose.  When I scroll through my old blog, there are intermittent posts of completed coloring pages, filled in at night at the kitchen table, waiting for Baby N to wake up for a feeding or some comfort, until I could finally go to bed.  Now, N is a tween who needs different things from me, and I find myself again at the kitchen table coloring.   ​

 I color to soothe my nerves and clear my head after a day at the office and the commuter traffic.  I color because I enjoy the final product.  But there's something else easing its way into my little hobby.  I color to restore some of my own vibrancy.  I'm re-membering my creativity.

Granted, filling in a pre-printed page with markers isn't a unique expression of self or anything. But it does offer some foundational elements for developing creativity.  I mean both concrete things like choosing colors, establishing patterns, practicing technique with a tool, and intangibles like getting into the “zone,” perceiving something familiar from a different perspective, and engaging imagination and ideation parts of the brain.  I’ve missed these parts of myself during these seasons of personal drought.

​Coloring again feels to me like planting and tending my creativity.  Coaxing it out of dormancy.  Bringing it up into my life.  

​June Moon Visionary Art free online coloring book

​Dover Publications offers a diverse array of coloring books

This is what 40-ish years of friendship looks like!

But what do I see?  In my vanity, I see me.  I see pudgy fingers, too full face-chin-neck, an oversize sweatshirt stretched over the too round belly.  I see fluffy white old lady hair.  This is not the me I want to see.  This me doesn't look like... me.

Little N picks on me mercilessly about my current weight and size.  He calls me "fatty" and criticizes my too big butt.  His father, L, didn't talk to me exactly that way, but he, too, made it clear to me that I didn't look the way that he wanted me to.  According to him, and to Little N, I used to be beautiful.  I must complete an ambitious series of changes in a short amount of time in order to be beautiful... and worthy, and not teased or criticized, and good enough, again.

Usually I can resist the harsh criticism of my appearance.  I can say back that I'm working on my health and that human bodies change with age.  I can tell myself that the ideal they are comparing me to is a societal norm and unrealistic.  But then I see a photo of myself and I'm startled and sad to see what I've become.

I don't like how I look.

I don't need to look young. Right?  I need to look like me.  So what does "me" look like at 40+?  What do I want my physical appearance to convey to my partner, my friends, my critics, and everyone else about myself?

I want to exude qualities like: capable, competent, strong, smart, creative, present, attentive, real, genuine.  Translating these things into cultural or societal parlance is tricky.  Because so often they are only seen as young and thin.  I'm not getting younger.  I may get thinner but I doubt I'll ever be thin again.  So how and where do I, as me, show up?

There's another piece to this besides how I look.  I'm 43 and a half.  My father was 44 when he died.  So I've set myself a goal of practicing good health habits in such as way that they're my baseline lifestyle by 44.  Roughly six months to adopt all the good information I've learned from the naturopath​ and therapist and make it mine. Make it me.  Six months to transform my body inside and out.  

It took years for my body to take on its current appearance.  Years of struggling with an unsupportive spouse.  Working dead end jobs.  Wrestling with my mental health.  Comforting myself with food.  Flailing in the absence of the skills and information necessary to make my body healthy.  

So I don't expect six months to return me to a lithe 120-ish pound size four with a lustrous bob and stylish clothes.  I do expect to improve my bloodwork for sugars and cholesterol.  Shed a few pounds.  Drop a size (or two...).  Decrease my windedness.  Increase my stamina.  Live a more active lifestyle.  And generally feel more like me.  ​

My hope is that when I feel more like me, then I'll look more like me.  A makeover from the inside out.  Where the inside is more important and urgent, and the outside is granted patience and grace.  From me, to me.