Last month my husband made his first joke about my illness. We had made a few meager attempts at joking before but this was the first one that took. We’d been watching our dog run in the grass and my husband claimed that he (the dog) was becoming more and more like me. No, think about it, he said. He sleeps whenever he gets a chance, the highlight of his day is eating, …
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I wrote this last Fall as an assignment for a writer’s workshop. The question was Where Art Thou? Where do you currently stand before the divine? You know, just something light and breezy to share with a roomful of strangers. I borrowed a little from this piece, which I wrote a little over a year ago, and came up with the following. It ended up being a really interesting assignment and I so enjoyed hearing …
Tomorrow marks one year since I found out I have multiple sclerosis. It’s been one of the hardest years of my life and I’m still processing so much of how I feel about it. I’m a 5 on the enneagram so this might take awhile. On Sunday Jason asked what I wanted to do for Mother’s Day and I told him I wanted to take a family bike ride. So we piled the four bikes onto …
Last Friday night Jason and I went to hear Pete Rollins and Rob Bell speak at the Neptune Theater here in Seattle. We managed to snag seats with a couple friends and it was, as Rob Bell podcast-listeners like to say, SO GOOD. If you listen to Pete Rollins or Rob Bell with any regularity, it was familiar ground in many respects, but approached from some new angles and allowed me to sink further into …
Isaiah turned eight last week. Jason and I both felt a strong melancholy as we talked about it and prepared for his big day. It was all the usual “How can our baby be eight?” and “How can eight years have passed already?” but more so I think it was, “How can we only have ten years left with this guy at home?” A decade used to feel so long and it still does, I …
It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world ^ I’ve had that line from a Mary Oliver poem memorized for about a year and it came to mind when I saw this photo this morning. It’s from a poem called Invitation and it seems fitting for Good Friday. I’ve been thinking this week about how I’d like to discuss Easter with our boys. We were …
I was asked to pare this piece down so that it is strictly a personal essay – without the cultural critique. This is my attempt to do so. I’m still unsure which version I prefer but this one is definitely shorter, that’s for sure! The Double Bind of Breasts Learning to Love What I Lost I used to have big boobs. We’re not talking double J’s or even large enough to cause …
4th Anniversary Every March I recognize the anniversary of writing this piece. Just for myself. It’s always tempting to do some editing — rewrite it and rework it, tidy up the prose, swap this story for that — but I try to leave it as is. The idea for it came almost a full year before I actually started writing it. I pushed it off for months as “too hard, too risky, too much,” and …
I’ve been trying my hand at more and more poetry this past year. I have a very limited collection of poems in my keeping and, based on what I’m churning out, it’s pretty obvious that I’ve been hitting Wendell Berry and Mary Oliver pretty hard. I’ve tried to write a few in the spirit of Langston Hughes (one of the others I’ve got in my collection) but those ones sound pretty silly so far. Anyhow, …
A few months ago I was asked by a friend to write a one-page Lenten reflection. His idea was to find 40 different folks who would each write a reflection and then he would compile them into a complete one-a-day collection to be read during Lent. This is what I contributed. In the booklet it’s the reflection for day 2 of Lent and since today is the second day of Lent, I thought I would …
