Mondays and Hay

I am writing a blog by candlelight.

It's a bit exciting and would probably more so be if I were using pen and paper.

The house is quiet and dark.

In the dark I am a hopeless dreamer. 

I would be simple and carefree, laying on a mound of hay bales eating an apple with a dear friend, reading literature.  I must interject here that there is something so special about a barn full of hay. Oh the places you can hide! You can find a tiny corner where the sun peaks through the holes; you can sit and spread out your skirts and feel the scratchy hay and warm sun on your bare legs.  The smell is dusty but sweet and it feels delicious but uniquely forbidden. 

I would be courageous. In the face of opposition, I would be strong.  I would fight for the weak because I fear nothing.  It's not true, of course, I fear, but in dreams, actions, intentions and outcomes are perfect.  It feels powerful, unlikely, and lends a sense of impracticality.  Having no fear is dangerous and lacks imagination.  It is the balance of fear in tension with purpose that makes passion rise. 

I would be an accomplished musician.  With long, brown curls and a beautiful black lace, floor length dress, I would perform before a large audience.  All my passion would come through my arms, fingers, breath and crescendo with deep, evocative soul stirring music.  Nightly I would be removed from Earth and my soul would be carried along to the stars with melody and lyric.  This is not forbidden or dangerous.  This is beauty as is only given to a few.

I like watching the candle flicker and dance.  It does only as it can to survive and keep flame.  It bring me to reality that I am sitting up in the dark, writing. 

I'm not anything so wonderful as I imagine I might be. 

But the whole of writing is to dream and inspire.  To peak inside a reality and feel it wash over your senses and ingrain itself in your being. To live another life if only for a few moments.  To  taste abandonment which is so distant in the monotony of today. 

A mini present for Monday.  Picture yourself in a grey, weathered barn.  Hay bales stacked to the ceiling.  Climb up the ladder and swing yourself over. Crawl on all fours to the corner.  You will find a little space to squeeze between a bale and the wall.  Pick a friend that is waiting there just for you.  As you approach, their face lights up, as they simultaneously hand you a crisp Gala for snacking.  Here you will spend your Monday afternoon. Unplugged.

Your heart as only you can give, offered.   Your dreams quietly spoken and safely tucked into the bosom of another.  It's okay that nothing changes.  It's okay if none of those dreams come to fruition. 

You have tasted abandon.  Freedom. In the middle of a Monday. 

This is the gift of writing.

A Higher Plan

The brain is amazing.  I think you will agree when you consider all the functions it performs just to get you through each day.  Each lobe has specific jobs and interpretations, and yet, they still must coordinate in complex relationships to relay information.  No area is an island.

It's interesting to note that our identity is locked in brain waves, our emotions locked in chemicals, so that adjustments, even minor ones, may alter who we are known to be.

Does it then scare you that we seem fragile?  Our very selves wrapped up in chemicals, neurons, and complex pathways that might not always function just right.  We think that is a yet future concern if we are "young," but it is possible that tomorrow we wake and find it not be the case.

God has not often presented trial to me in the form of illness or medical need.  I lead a relatively healthy life to this point, for which I am thankful, but in recent months and weeks I have been feeling unwell as I shared in an earlier post.  I received a diagnosis yesterday and treatment and management are now under way.  I am taking some prescribed medication and it is already having an effect. Tiny white pills are actually changing me.  It's fascinating, truly, what the body and mind do and how we respond.

As a nursing assistant, on clinical rotation I worked in an Alzheimer's unit.  It was far from a pleasant experience.  I was seven months pregnant and one of the patients became irate and began shoving and hitting me.  My balance wasn't great because I am a short person and by this point in my pregnancy my center of gravity was difficult to locate.  All ended well, without serious consequence, but I never forgot her face.  How upset she was.  How completely lost and alone.  How she then rocked and hugged all eight of her baby dolls which I was told seemed to represent her children.  She thought I was going to hurt her child, and while her mind was struggling with reason, her protective instincts were intact, and perhaps overcompensating for the lack of clear thought. Maybe somehow deep inside she knew this wasn't quite right or perhaps her mind was so shrouded in grey that it was not possible to decipher any of it.  I think about her.  I wonder what she was like at forty.  I wonder about her eight children.  Once her mind was clear, and her life, vibrant, I suspect.

Movies are dedicated to the topic.  The Notebook being quite popular with the ladies.  Of course it is enchanting to think that someone will love you even when you've lost yourself.  Of course we want to believe that someone will stay the course because they still know you.

I think losing the person you know yourself to be would be so painful.

I think being lost inside yourself would be so lonely.

And, yet, I believe that there are people walking around looking "normal" but feeling these exact feelings.  People I see every day, uncertain, lonely, and worse, unloved.

The mind is a powerful thing.  We are wrapped up in our emotions, neurons, and chemical balance.  But we are also managers of our souls.  A deep part of us that is looking for answers, seeking hope and life.  I believe the soul overrides and outlives the temporal.  I believe the soul lives forever.  The hope I have in mine is what spurs me to help the lonely, to show certainty, and to love.

We are not guaranteed to keep ourselves just as we are.  Time will change us.  Our strongest thing - our mind and will can be altered.

But our soul.  That can be kept by God above.  See a higher plan, dear friend, in this world.  Seek hope and life to fill your soul.

Tell the stories. Make the confessions.  Free yourself from the chains that would bind you.

Grace we cannot understand will meet you.

Your life will never be the same.

I leave you with a quote:
"To love another person is to see the face of God."

Siblings

Sometimes I look up to the heavens and try to picture what it's like beyond the stars.

Sometimes I take a little pause in my day and contemplate eternity.  

Sometimes I like to eat all four bars of a peanut butter Twix.  (You have no idea how much I love the PB ones....caramel has nothing on it.)

Sometimes I fall asleep on the couch.

Sometimes I wake up at 0500 on a Saturday morning. (Like today)

Sometimes right in the middle of the day I get lost in memories and I have to shake myself from reverie.

I love the studies of human behavior and personality. I love to observe people and understand what drives them and makes them unique.  I believe that some of our behaviors and pieces of our personality are shaped by our learned and ingrained emotional response. Childhood experience goes a long way in developing, for good or bad, how we will perceive the world and the people in it.  

I think I've mentioned the birth order of my family.  I am the youngest of three children and the only girl. All kinds of ammo with that information.  Drama for days.  We are all three less than four years apart in age, and I think we were probably a lot to deal with.  Ever so many stories of mischief and it is always interesting to sit around as adults and hear what the others remember.  Some things I have forgotten. Some things I don't recall even as I'm being described as a pickle throwing, explosive-but-darling angel.  I am feisty to the core;  I would not deny it, and I believe it has some correlation to birth order.

What is a little princess to do when she is always the prisoner tied up with ropes to the treehouse? Seriously, could I once have been the outlaw?  Just once?   A princess might also routinely be sent out as a messenger to ask for "group" permissions because it is believed she can elicit a positive response. This task is ALWAYS given to the baby of the family.  I have seen it with my own children. I would hear plotting in the background and into the kitchen, eyes dancing, came Aaron.

Siblings make life.  It just would not be the same without them.  I often wished I had given my kids one more pal to lean on, but I just physically couldn't swing it. A sibling is someone who shapes your views; someone who knows all the dirt; someone who understands your roots; someone who shares DNA of the body and/or the soul; someone who loves you without question.  The loyalty that you find in a sibling is worth all the bars of Twix, hands down.

I often am lost in reverie. I see a small girl with blonde, stringy pigtails, a walking advertisement for Dr. Pepper with an "I'm a Pepper" shirt atop a pink triple layered skirt.  She is a fireball that for the love will not stop talking and will not sit in her seat on the bus. She eats all the peanut butter and chocolate off the Twix and eats the dry wafer last. She is the youngest child, the only girl.  She is a prisoner.  She throws pickles. She is very feisty.

Sometimes when she looks up to the heavens and wonders what it's like beyond the stars....

Sometimes when she takes a pause in her day and contemplates eternity...

Deep in her soul she knows how fiercely and protectively she is loved...and she hopes that all of her siblings will find out with her what eternity holds in the heavens. 

Three Positives

For a Saturday, I am feeling so empty.  Feeling empty makes it hard to write.  This week has left me thinking that I am going through motions each day without depth.  My work is just a job,  it neither excites me nor leaves me fulfilled in any particular way.  I just go there, do some work, and go home.  Parenting is hard right now.  Really hard.  It takes a great deal of effort not to be offended.  But today I had to go to my room and cry, for the look my child that I birthed with love gave me hurt all the way down to my soul.  Physically I feel lousy every single day.  I haven't breathed through my nose in eight months.  Have you ever tried to eat without being able to breathe through your nose?  Have you ever tried eating plus talking without being able to breathe through your nose? It's really hard to enjoy a social meal so I might as well eat alone.  Regardless that I take a Zyrtec every night like the doctor suggested, I don't sleep well, and every day people ask me if I'm sick.  It's just the new older version of me, friends, unless unbeknownst to me, I have respiratory cancer.

It's a tough day, maybe a tough season.  Life always has a rhythm. I think I might be in the low section.  Chocolate does me no good because I can't really taste it.  It's in these moments you ponder.  You look for the positives to give some semblance of balance and order.

One positive, I went to the dentist this week and made it out alive. You really need to be able to breathe through your nose at the dentist.  There were two separate moments that I thought I would literally drown in my own saliva and Listerine. 

Second positive, texts I received this week have literally saved some of my days by bringing comic relief and love.

Third positive, and quite possibly the best one of all, when I am upset, my husband lets me crawl into his lap, lay my head on his chest, and cry.  He tells me these days of parenting and working and striving are long and twisted.  He tells me there is no straight course.  But there is an end.  I lay there, letting his words ease over the aches and pains of being a working, sinus laden, mother.  And I believe he is so wise.

And I believe I can carry on.  For tomorrow is another day.  It is full of new, mysterious things that might amount to simply: church, cleaning, groceries, and a Redbox. And lots of tissues.

It is repetitive and tough, couched in drudgery, this season.  But I will continue to look for the positives, because there will be many.  God will post little signs along the way to announce His presence.  To establish His peace in my heart.  He is here. In this season.  Maybe one day soon He will allow me to taste chocolate.