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Relationships with Words
This post feels a bit heavy-handed on “words” — but given that the physical tethers have been stretched thin during COVID, words are often all we have to go on in our relationships. I can be a vulnerable person, or at least come off as such, in the way I use written word to process feelings. When I feel prolonged dissatisfaction, shame or sadness, I often work my way through and rise above them by wrestling with words. It’s like being a broody hen, who feels all sorts of ways and sits on her eggs until they have hatched. My words are my eggs, an expression of myself. I share…
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Processing 2020
Of all the years, 2020 has been one for the books. Years from now we will look back at the headlines of this year's headlines with hearts and mouths still agape. Personally, I've never spent as much time as I have this year reflecting on deep and hard topics.
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Hilton Head Island 2019
Our next trip to HHI is coming up in less than a month, so it’s probably time I share the pics from 2019 in preparation for the upcoming one. I’m going to jump straight to the highlight of the trip, which was watching baby loggerhead turtles find their way to the ocean. (I’ve also seen that today, June 16, 2020, is World Sea Turtle Day.) Joe and I took a late night walk to the beach on the last evening and were delighted to discover a couple baby sea turtles working their way down the sand to the surf. We went back to the house to tell the family, and…
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The Gas Station Jerk
This morning I’d like to explore getting my feelings hurt over silly things. The first little story is about my cat, and it may seem unrelated to the story of the gas-station-jerk, but my emotional fall out from each is tethered to the same starting point. Nala is our fifteen year old cat that we adopted from the SPCA about a week or two after we returned from our honeymoon. After doing a few puzzles in our tiny one bedroom apartment in the evenings, we were both a little bored. As I was in graduate school and tended to work in the field and out of home rather than in…
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Reaching Back
Do you ever try to reach deep into your memories and remember places and how you felt in them and what you were doing? I love looking far back and finding the small person for whom I now have so much more compassion, with the benefit of hindsight and years of growth. The older I get, the more similar to her I become. I’ve always mourned the loss of childhood, but now I’m finding I never did fully let it go. During childhood, magic was easy to access. A day dream was only a blink away. All the coming-of-age tales seem to hinge on loss of innocence, a character realizing…
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What Will You Be?
A friend was standing on the front stoop after picking up her son, and she thanked me for sharing my mid-life crisis post. She had been having similar conversations with friends, one of whom observed the ridiculousness of her own crisis when her high school junior was on the precipice life-defining choices. It struck me that I’ve never felt like I had arrived or become what I owed it to the world, my parents, God or the foundations that funded my education to become. At times I fear I’ve missed the window of becoming. But then I look at my children and remember I love them as they are, having…
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