There’s a place inside of me I miss. A place where wonder pulses like a heartbeat - now quick with in-loveness for everything - a word, a sight, a sound, a person - now slowing with the lull of the crickets outside, or the fans that make these summer nights bearable. It’s a place that’s full with beyond-mere-survival, or rather, that knows survival as integrally related with music and contemplation, good books, deep thoughts, conversations with friends. It’s where words and the unworded stuff of experience mingle, tickling each other with the joy and utter frustration of remaining mostly, but never altogether, “other” from each other. The place from which my writing springs.

I’m in it tonight, though, miraculously. My body creaks and groans still with this pregnancy, a wooden ship made better for the wiry frame of a single captain and few supplies than for barrel upon barrel of rations: blood, fluid, tissue, fat. And this not even mentioning my second passenger. I love her already, and know it a privilege to navigate her passage.

But I creak. I groan. I bail water (four? five times a night?). And rarely get to that part of the ship I so treasure.

But.

Here I am tonight. I have no idea when I’ll return again, and even less what tomorrow’s winds or seas might bring (fortune? pirates? peace?). But for now, I’ll light a candle. Dip pen in ink. Open a scroll. Try to forget the fatigue that makes my heart beat strangely, the stomach that doesn’t want to hold my meager offerings.

The sun sinks well below the western sky. The pines that guard this strip of dwellings blacken. I hear crickets, fans, a distant plane’s propeller. The click of N’s keyboard.

Past place and surroundings, I hear groanings of people I love - strong people whose strength is pressed to breaking with sufferings they don’t deserve. I hold them in the Light of this flickering wick, this quickening heart. I pray the womb of this Ship, this Mother that’s bigger than all of us, this Sea that we all of us sail, will give them safe passage. Will take them through their night. Will birth them and rebirth them as the tender, beautiful, honest, beloved creatures I know them to be.

And I hear joy. The paradox of it! Joy and suffering both on this Ship. And my own little vessel. Just now joy’s un-words resist being worded, though. Fair enough.

I try to move on, but the winds upstairs have shifted and I need to check my sails. More stores must be unpacked. A belly needs filling.

I give my candle an earnest stare, my quill, my surroundings. Be well, dear room. I love you.

Hi everyone! Just checking in to say hello.

I’m now half way done with a challenging pregnancy, which is both wonderful and also unnerving, considering I still have 4 1/2 months of challenge yet to face. The nausea of the first trimester subsided wonderfully at about the 3 month mark, but was replaced by a heart problem that handicapped me until we could do the many tests and appointments necessary to discover its remedy. I am on medication now to slow down an over-active heart. The risks of NOT taking this, to me and the baby, far surpass the risks of taking it, so…pills I will take.

Our mid-pregnancy ultrasound also revealed what looks like the development of something called placenta accreta, which means the placenta may have imbedded too deeply into the wall of my uterus. If this is the case, it is very likely that the uterus will have to be removed at delivery, in order to avoid life-threatening bleeding that could happen if the placenta and uterus are attempted to be separated. We go back in a couple of months for another ultrasound to determine whether this condition continues to be present, and if it does, to more concretely plan for what we’ll do about it.

So…I have been a little preoccupied lately.

In between sleep and doctor’s appointments and novel-writing and trying to keep up with a lively toddler, I’ve enjoyed a few books that I’d love to tell you about sometime soon. Paulo Coelho’s Veronika Decides to Die (an exploration of sanity and insanity) and his Eleven Minutes (an exploration of love and sex) are two of them. I’m mid-way through Reza Aslan’s No god but God: the origins, evolution and future of Islam as well, which has been a wonderful read for this mostly Islam-ignorant girl. I’m amazed and intrigued by the similarities between Islam and Christianity, or more specifically, between the people who identify with these traditions. Humans look and act like humans no matter what, I think.

But that’s for another review…

Mainly just saying hello. Hope you’re all enjoying a summer rich with the things you love!

Do any of you remember this post? - the one in which I practically danced off the screen and kissed you all? I have to chuckle at how true the last part of it is - how all that (broadly-defined) sexual energy just can’t sustain itself forever. How it seems to come in seasons.

Since writing that post, and expressing its inspiration most viscerally, N and I have discovered that another munchkin is on its way! This was a much desired discovery, so we’re happy, and happy to share the news. But as for energy - sexual and otherwise - mine’s greatly altered from the writing of that post. Our due date is Thanksgiving, so I’m 2 months along, and feeling very much that way (read: tired and nauseated).

My heart is bursting to get my book written sooner than later, so once again, in light of my energy drain, I’m stream-lining my activities to try to make that possible. I’ll post here when inspiration hits, but if the last few weeks are any indication, I’m largely out of line of fire these days.

In the meantime, please be most welcome to explore the archives, or the essay links on my writings page. And drop me a line any time! I’m always happy to engage that way.

Much love to all, and blessings on your Spring!

Five years ago, after a five-year period of great internal upheaval - a season of intense questioning of every assumption I had held to that point, theological and otherwise…a season of constant internal and external dialogue, of reading, journalling, crying, raging, praying, thinking - oh, the ceaseless thinking! - I finally went quiet inside. If you’ve never gotten to the other side of an intense kind of struggle, I’m not sure the nature of the quietness I’m talking about can be known through description alone. I think it has to be experienced. It isn’t despair. It isn’t bitterness. It isn’t apathy. It’s a strange kind of coming-to-the-end-of-a-road. You get there and you realize you’ve been running or flailing or crying or self-pitying or raging or crawling or thinking yourself down a path, a path you probably didn’t choose and also couldn’t help yourself traveling once you found yourself on it, and here you are now, at the end. And the end isn’t some grand finale, some palace of gold or terrible awful hell, or a guru waiting to clear up all your confusion. It isn’t a cushy place set up for renewal or a therapist’s chair or a breathtaking view. It doesn’t even have a sign of any kind, no lable, no lentil to walk through to make the end official. The path just sort of peters out, and you find yourself in the middle of unmanicured landscape. Maybe there’s a few trees around, some grass, a couple butterflies. There’s the click of a grasshopper, a breeze. But there you are, and all the things that made you lose your mind along that ordeal, all the things that made the rage and fear and hopelessless and grief and have-to-make-sense-of-things-now so all-consuming don’t seem so pressing anymore. In fact the thought of intentionally pressing into them again only makes your mind stop, and the place where feelings come from close its doors. While for so many years your internal chatter hasn’t ceased, you’re left now with only the sounds of trees.

I think it takes a long time to get to a place like this. Probably the petering out of a path happens gradually, too. And in all honesty, wandering off the end of a path, at least for me, has often wound me up entering it again at some point, or many, thinking to myself, “Wasn’t I through with this one? Huh…”

But these endings. They’re real. I remember sitting with N in that initial quiet season, eating dinners silently. We still loved each other tons, and were glad to be in one another’s company, but very little came to mind to say. Our silence was the end of that road. The buzz of locusts. A faint hint of looking back along what we had just traversed, thinking wordlessly, “What in the world just happened??”

I feel like I’m in a similar kind of quiet these days. It’s different in that I haven’t just been through a painful ordeal. I’ve been writing my book and raising my boy and being a wife and friend and sister and daughter. I’ve been thinking and reading and blogging and paying attention to the worlds inside and around me. But something about everything altogether, about the energy I have to learn and understand, to engage people and ideas meaningfully, to try to be the best me I can be - something about all of it has taken me to one of these endings, and I find myself so quiet. I find myself needing rest. Nourishing food (of the literal variety). Needing not to think.

Can any of you relate? What do you do when you’re in this kind of place?

While I don’t want to admit it very often, I spend a lot of energy wondering whether I’m enough. Is this just a human thing? Are there folks out there who don’t spend energy this way?

I keep thinking to myself that the moment all of us just know that we’re fine is the moment gazillion tons of energy will be freed up for far more life-giving things.

There’s a radio station in our area that I used to listen to while driving. One day last month its rag-tag mix of 80s, 90s and current music got replaced with country. And not just country, but no-commercials-at-all country. When all the other stations are droning with hours of business jingles, this one is playing actual music. So nearly in spite of myself, I have been listening to country.

What has struck me more than anything in this new endeavor, beyond the worldview that’s felt more entrenched in traditional gender roles than most I currently observe, is the enoughness that permeates so much of it. People are singing about simple things, often very basic things, things that have little to do with money or education and a lot to do with friends. With love. With faith. And they’re belting it all out like it’d never occur to them that there are people who would be embarrassed to admit liking these things. That there are people who would never in a million years admit that their greatest dream is not to be famous or well-respected in fast-track circles or to be rich and beautiful or to travel the world on every holiday, but rather to live in a humble home, not even near a big city, to drive an old car, and to be rich only with food enough to eat and people to love and laugh and be neighborly with. To be rich with smelling earth smells, with growing things, with seeing the sun rise and set over mountains, rather than row upon row of buildings.

I live in the Silicon Valley, where money and multi-million dollar homes and ingenious intellectual and business pursuits are as common as air. I live where “enough” feels like a word from another planet, or if not that, spoken only to waiters about pepper or parmesan cheese.

So it has been with delight and a small sense of subversion that I have kept my radio tuned to the same station it’s always been, feeling my afraid-I’m-not-enough soul being nourished and healed in this most unlikely way. I come home from writing and from errands fretting less about what I don’t have or haven’t yet accomplished, content a lot more with what I actually *have* done and *do* have. The latter being foremost food, shelter, and wonderful people to love.

“Hell yeah, you’re enough!” I hear this music say. Or in Alan Jackson’s words,

“…it’s alright to be little bitty
Little hometown or a big ol’ city
Might as well share, might as well smile
life goes on for a little bitty while”

After that flurry of posts and conversations about sex and sexuality, my mood has shifted into a quieter one.  I’m not sure what to attribute this to, but for now it feels fine.

The highlight of my week was a trip I took to a shoe store on a rainy day.  I needed to return some sandals we had bought for Elijah, and after doing so, Elijah insisted on being put down.  He had noticed a girl - maybe 10 years old? - who he desperately wanted to follow.

Around the corner she and he went, and to his great delight, the girl had a brother AND a sister, both younger than she.  The youngest was a girl about 2, and when Elijah saw her, and she him, they embraced.  They held on for a very long time.

Without batting an eye, the brother, maybe 5 years old, looked me in the eyes, pointed at them with a hitch hiker’s thumb, and explained in his most adult, let-me-explain-this-clearly-to-you voice, “They’re in love.”

Yep, buddy.  I think they might be.

Wordpress is not on Kristin’s list of likeables right now.  Can anyone tell me why my AuthImage plugin isn’t working, even though it’s activated?  And can anyone tell me why my blacklist of words is not actually deleting comments that contain blacklisted words?  I am up to my eye balls in poker spam.

The lovely Sage has tagged me for a meme, so here goes:  5 things you may not know about me:

1. Any project that requires a trip to a hardware store makes me very happy.  I daydream about owning a home someday and building an add-on studio where I have places for writing, drawing, painting, collaging and recording music (!).  I would love a woodshop.  Perusing and learning about other people’s tools energizes me.
2. My first and most sustained career plan was to become a concert pianist.  I think I gave the plan up when high school started.
3. My closest brush with death (to my knowledge) was a cross-country ski trip I took with my sister and dad on my 13th birthday.  The trail we thought we were following never looped back to the parking lot, and by the time we realized this, it was getting dark, and in our t-shirts and sopping gloves and pants, we were freezing.  Literally.  We retraced our entire treck, the whole while begging my dad to let us lay down and sleep.  Luckily he didn’t (thanks Dad!).
4. At age 15 I spent a summer in Kenya, building a small dormatory for a little school on the edge of Lake Nakuru.  I went with an organization called Teen Missions, which I do not recommend.  Kenya, however, I do.
5. I am drawn to weather pages like moths to light.  Especially the ones in real live newspapers.  Like with colors showing all the different regions of temperature.  I like anything that gives me a big-scheme picture, come to think of it.  Maps.  Theories that cover huges swaths of history or geography.  Anything that makes the lived terrain feel less random or confusing.  Which is funny, given Sage’s #5. :)

Okay, I’d love to know what unknown things Gail and Heather and Fran and Gypsy Girl might divulge.  And anyone else, too!  If you’re not those four and you feel like it, leave a comment here that says something about you that many don’t know.

I’m currently on the search for a good book or two on the topic of sexuality and/or sexology.  The discussions of the last few posts have been wonderful, and I’d love to broaden my knowledge on these things, benefitting from folks who have given entire careers to studying and contemplating them.

So…please feel free to offer suggestions.  I’d love to find a book that gives an overview of perspectives on sex and sexuality that have been held through time - maybe something sociological?  anthropological?  Jenell (or anyone else…) - anything from your teaching or studies come to mind?  I’d love the book/s to be current, too, as things even 5 or 10 years old can be based on outdated research.
Once I settle on a book or two, I’ll let you know the titles so that if anyone else is interested in reading them at the same time and discussing them, we can do that too.

I’m still thinking about sexuality and would love to talk more with anyone likewise interested. Specifically, I’d love to talk more about the “about sex” part of it. I was raised as an evangelical Christian, and formed my early views on sex in family and faith communities deeply shaped by that tradition. As a child and adolescent and young adult, I trusted that sex was a special thing that God invented for husbands and wives to share – for procreation, of course, but also for pleasure. Glue was the metaphor used for sex a lot in my childhood – a special kind of glue that keeps marriages together. Having sex outside of marriage makes the stickiness of sex inside marriage less so.

Sex was also compared with the relationship between God and humanity, a gift God has given us to more tangibly experience the ecstasy of union with God’s very self. And as such, something to be protected in the same way relationship with God was to be protected. Sharing sex with multiple partners would be like two-timing (or three or four-timing) God. Shameful and hurtful to God.

I no longer live in religious or evangelical Christian contexts, and so would like to work more consciously through what I think about sex today, as the me of this context. My intuition and experience say it is AND isn’t magic glue. But beyond that, things get fuzzy. How does sex affect relationships? What changes between people when they make love? What are arguments for saving sex for committed relationships and, conversely, for being more sexually free? My hunch is that more clarity on such things could benefit all of us, whether or not we’re religious or sexually active or monogamous or have children with whom we want to talk about such things.