Sunday afternoon
I took my sadness to the dahlia fields and let it walk in beauty.
Grief
So sorry For Your Loss – Dina Gachman
I have a book overdue at the library, but before returning it I decided to dip in a bit to see if I wanted to put it back on my hold list. Yesterday morning I picked it up and started reading, by the end of the day I had read all the way through. So …
The Gravity of Joy – Angela Williams Gorrell
How to find joy when life seems awful is my kind of clickbait, though absolutely not in the perjorative sense of the word. Cruising through headlines a couple weeks ago I saw this one from the Washington Post and clicked. In the article author Steven Petrow describes his sister Julie’s “birthday bash/going away party” celebrated …
Turn. Turn. Turn.
Tomorrow is Ryan’s birthday which has become a marking point during our Alaska years – will we get our Anchorage winter snow pack started by his birthday? This year, it seems we have. (and right on schedule) Most afternoons lately I have been hanging out with our chickens – ever since a hawk swooped down …
Ordinary Grace – William Kent Krueger
When we feel abandoned, alone, and lost, what’s left to us? What do I have, what do you have, what do any of us have left except the overpowering temptation to rail against God and to blame him for the dark night into which he’s led us, to blame him for our misery, to blame …
Left Neglected – Lisa Genova
Our brains are wired differently, and we have to figure out how to make them work. A car accident. A brain injury. And the hard work to recover a life. Or rather, the hard work to learn a new way of being in the world. Revisiting Still Alice started me on a Lisa Genova reading …
Bright and Beautiful Campine
Our Golden Campine died yesterday. I am not ready to sort words and try to make meaning out of the tears we have cried since Ryan brought her limp body into the house yesterday morning. By grace, the end was gentle and before she left us she opened her eyes, sipped some water Ethan offered …
when you pass through the waters….
Last week I read an article that quoted our state doctor: The sooner we can learn to kind of swim in this new water rather than just kind of holding on to the edge of the past, the stronger and more resilient we’ll be. – Anne Zink When I hear talk of normal/new normal these …
Living in the Age of COVID-19
The HunkerDown AnchorTown Patrol makes unannounced rounds and we are glad to report tonight – we were home and our hands were clean! Our helpers need us to PLEASE STAY HOME.
take me to the river
I logged onto Facebook several times today, intending to post about the COVID-19 POUNDS that I fear are a very real risk associated with the current Work From Home HUNKER DOWN policy in Anchorage. I mean!!! We’ve got Ethan managing our lunch room!!! #realsideffects I never actually wrote the post though because there was something …
weeping, we pray.
Our family watched the History Channel’s Jesus: His Life miniseries over Easter weekend. I learned about it via Scot McKnight on twitter awhile back when he mentioned that he had consulted on the project and was eager for people to see it. My attention was further perked by the list of advisors – people you …
Paradox on Wisdom Road
Rob Bell on The RobCast 8.19.18: ….there is this paradox. This tension. This polarity that we all carry around between what we can control, and what we can’t. That which, when our hand is on the wheel, we can actually steer. And that which exists outside of our power, will, and dominion. That which is simply …
On This, the 13th Anniversary of that Car Accident: Beannacht
On the day when The weight deadens On your shoulders And you stumble, May the clay dance To balance you……. It was a grey Monday here. There have been an awful lot of grey days here this summer. But this Monday hung particularly heavy. I worked outside much of the day – digging, digging, digging. …
Grief is not a staged out checklist
Seven weeks short of 13 years since the car accident that changed my life >> I stopped by the Brain Injury Association of Alaska this morning to see what they’ve got going on. Awhile back a friend suggested that I might find a place to contribute there – tapping my background in nonprofit communication work, …
Presence: Light for the Journey
Thanksgiving landed on the calendar quite late this year. Today marked the final day of the Thanksgiving holiday even as it also marked the first Sunday in Advent. I was born the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, nearly a month too early. My lungs were not ready so I spent my first days in an incubator connected …
I’m Pregnant But Don’t Tell My Mom: A Broken Hallelujah
I had a bunch of broken ribs when I was pregnant with Ethan. I have no memory of the car accident that broke the ribs, but I remember the first trimester + broken ribs. I found out I was pregnant the day before the accident. After a long, hot June Saturday tromping through central Oregon …
Hope In Half A Banana
I think we lose sight of the beauty, the most beautiful things I look back on in my life are coming out from underneath things I didn’t know I could get out from underneath. You know, the moments I look back in my life, and think, those were the moments that made me — were …