I want to challenge myself to write more. Perhaps to write everyday. I am afraid of coming out and saying I will write each day for the entire month of May. Fear of failure prevents me, but the challenge thrills me.
I have always journaled for as far as I can remember. It’s kind of scary to leave a trail of evidence behind, but blogging is different because your words get exposed on real time as soon as the “publish” button gets touched.
I also feel that blogging should not just be an account of my days, but should deliver some meaningful insights. The content should be worthwhile. And words once you put them in print, once published, once in cyberspace cannot be taken back. I enjoy trying to find precise words to express myself. I also enjoy figuring out the etymology of words. When you know the origins, history and meaning of a word it gives the message more weight and credibility, more depth.
When I think about words two things come to mind; Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, the silliest word I know. And on a serious note, I think of this bible verse:
John 1:1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
It floors me to think that GOD himself was the WORD. He didn’t use an alphabet or a language to express Himself. He became the message, the origin, history and meaning all wrapped up in one Man. He doesn’t need a translator because He is not a foreigner, Jesus speaks our language. And He exposes, represents exactly who God is.
“The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”-Hebrews 1:3
People often say that words are powerful. We can wield them to build up or tear others down. Jesus, he sustains all things by his word!!
I have been waking up with the birds these days, at 4 a.m. with just a hint of daylight, but I do my best to ignore the racket they make and try to sleep some more. I finally give up and go outside. The 6:30 a.m. sun blasts me. I find little relief as I walk under the shade of the trees. It rained last night, so the humidity with the sun makes even the early morning feel hot. A thin film of sweat covers me as if I had put lotion on my skin. I drop the leash and step on it, so Snoopy can’t take off. She doesn’t. She must sense my urgency and need for quiet and doesn’t even move. I am bird watching in the little park in my parents’ neighborhood. Snoopy being their dog, although I wish she were mine. This morning we saw finches, woodpeckers, pianas-whose names I don’t know in English, motmots, hummingbirds. Brown-headed cowbirds? I wish I had packed my bird book. I will have to wait until I get back home to identify some of these birds.
Home? I am home. In the tropics were my skin feels moist without need for lotions, where I can roll out of bed and not shiver. Where even a t-shirt and shorts feel too warm. Home, where nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters-in-law, and my parents live. Home, where my mouth delights with perfectly ripe juicy mangoes, sour, not quite ripe ciruelas, mouth watering tacos, home made baleadas, fresh coconut water bought from a street vendor…
Home, where familiar voices sound foreign. Home were my heart feels hesitant, yet full.
I left this home almost 30 years ago. And made my new home in what was then a foreign place. Cold, beautiful. My days full of babies and learning to forge a life in a new country, a different culture. Growing my own little family. “Blooming were you are planted.” Content. Settled.
Then I find myself here again. It feels like I am opening a familiar book. I dive into the story and reacquaint myself with my favorite characters. It feels as if my heart is ready to tear, splitting me apart in two, like a cell, the tug is fierce.. I can’t clone myself, I cannot be another me…
Instead, I let all the precious characters go back into the book of Far Away. Inaccesible, yet in my heart, in my mind, I put it back on the shelf until next time.
Home is where the heart is.
Perturbed
Annoyed
Gagged
Trapped
Isolation cell
Without a translator
Screaming in a sound proof cave.
Aaah! “My soul thirsts for the living God. When can I go and meet with him?” (Psalms 42:2)
With urgency in their voices, my parents woke us up in the middle of the night. It was September, it had been raining, a steady rain, for about three days. I was seven years old. The directions were to get dressed as quickly as possible. I grabbed the first thing I saw- my school uniform and my shoes. Where was my other shoe?! Next thing I remember was our parents guiding us through the alley to the street before ours, “the 2nd” street. We lived on “the 3rd.” When we got to the end of the alley that connected the two I saw cars being dragged by the current down the street. The barrels used for garbage and tree trunks were floating down with the current. It was obvious that a family with 5 children under the age of 10, was not going to be able to cross that street safely. The practical solution? My father led us back home and the instructions this time were to go back to bed. By now, I guess I was worried. I could sense the panic building up in my mother’s voice. I could understand my father’s practicality. What else could we do?
Eventually, after hearing desperate whispered arguments, we left the house to go down the street. I grabbed a small packet of saltines and put it into my school uniform’s pocket. We safely arrived at a neighbor’s house where others had already found refuge. That house sat just a little higher than ours as the street sloped upwards. The water kept rising. The adults decided to put the children up between the ceiling and the roof. I am pretty sure they new if the waters kept rising we would all drown trapped in there. Thankfully, I didn’t have to wait to prove that point. One of the kids fell through the ceiling and broke his wrist. So they made us get down. I was getting hungry. I fished for my saltines. They were soggy from rain and flood waters. I couldn’t eat them. So much for being prepared!
I remember my father being upset with how some adults were handling the situation. I am not sure if he ever felt scared or panicked, but he certainly did not appreciate those feelings in others. He scolded a woman who was mournfully praying, more like an agonizing chant than a cry out to God for help. She stopped.
Being the third kid (out of 5 at the time) in the family, I somehow got left behind when the next plan got executed. All the neighbors and my family climbed to the roof of the house. I climbed too, but there was a huge gap between the last rung of the ladder and the roof. I stood there, petrified, quite literally. No one was coming to my rescue, and no one seemed to be behind me. Then, underneath me, in the darkness, I spied a silhouette. Darker than night and wearing a big brimmed hat and a long coat. I can’t remember if he spoke to me, but his presence snapped me out of my frozen state and somehow I got the courage to climb onto the roof and out of his sight. Once up there, one of our maids grabbed me and we huddled under a shower curtain. (Yes, I grew up with maids, not because we were rich, but because we weren’t poor.) I remember the momentary relief when I wet myself and the warmth of the urine stopped my shivering for a minute. I also remember, as light started to dawn I lifted up the curtain and saw furniture floating in the current that was now roaring down the street. It was our furniture.
By early morning, firefighters were rescuing people out of the neighborhood. We were instructed to get off the roof and find our way to them by walking single file on the walls that fenced in our homes. My parents carried the babies, I walked on my own. I remember walking by our house. The back yard was a pond, a chocolate swirling pond with a huge tree trunk jammed into my bedroom window.
A firefighter taught me how to tread through the water by marching, lifting my feet as I went. When it got deep enough, they passed me from firefighter to firefighter until reaching dry land.
I remember the whole family and the maids, crowding into a small taxi cab and trying to figure out where to go next. We ended up at my aunt’s big, beautiful house. There was much discussion as to where we would sleep. Eventually we ended up on the floor of our cousins’ bedrooms.
Soon thereafter we went to stay with my grandparents. I have no recollection of how much time passed, but eventually we moved into a rental house. We attended school in a the local theater, the office spaces on the upper floors were temporarily turned into classrooms. I loved feeling independent and walking to the corner of our new neighborhood to wait for our ride. Riding to school with the owners of the school felt like a privilege.
I remember all of this as an adventure. I only was scared when the “dark silhouette” looked at me and when I had to walk on walls as if walking on a tight rope. The rest? It never traumatized me. Losing everything, including my beautiful doll dressed as a bride in gorgeous lace, never saddened me. She floated away on a chair.
My pet goat, Paula, didn’t survive the flood. The landscape of my father’s farm completely changed after the flood. Instead of rich soil everything was covered in silt and sand. Our neighborhood was dug out and all the sand that had washed down from the mountain was piled high into a paradise of a playground. After we moved back, the neighborhood kids would play on the sand piles endlessly, riding bikes over mounds and jumps, tumbling, playing tag, hide and seek… I would go to bed with gobs of sand in my head.
It surprises me to this day that a tragic hurricane which killed thousands of people and caused so much damage never translated into a tragic event in my life. I am grateful to have survived and grateful for my parent’s example of faith and their resilience. I am sure they had their fair share of worries, having lost our home and our source of income with the farm, but I do not ever remember them acting like victims or burdening us kids with worries.
Corinthians 4:8 “We are pressed on every side by troubles, but we are not crushed. We are perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” 7–“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all surpassing power is from God and not from us.” I reversed the order of these verses because that is how I see it. I am glad to have had this experience in my life because when it comes to mind, like it did tonight, it encourages me that although I often feel like I am treading water and get so tired, God is my source of all-surpassing power available to me in the flood. I must tread on.
I recently found this deep, dark, piece of my soul in a journal. I have no idea what made me feel this way. The truth is that I have visited this place many times before. I don’t linger for long. Sometimes I quickly have enough and climb out of it with ease. Others, I need to be rescued almost by force- force of patience and love. Thankfully I haven’t been their recently. I was surprised at the depth of darkness and maybe anger in what I had written. Sometimes, when I find pieces of writing like this one, I tear it out of my journal and burn it and flush it down the toilet where it belongs. Perhaps, because I am ashamed or because it is not relevant anymore. But this time I admired the feelings, and contemplated the depths, and decided to keep it. It is okay to feel. To feel and acknowledge the full range of emotions. Joan Crawford said ” Learn to breathe, learn to speak, but first learn to feel.”
Even at my age I am still learning to feel… especially feelings with negative connotations, like anger and sadness, and fear. Generally, I try to suppress them and only exalt and acknowledge happiness and joy, but they are all part of the package. The trick is to not be defined or dominated by them. To respond and not react. To learn from them, to overcome, to control and not be controlled by them.
Although it is not easy, I think that we should be earnest about our feelings. If we allow ourselves to feel, we are able to experience life more deeply, and to have richer relationships. We tend to protect ourselves (and others) from pain, from criticism, from acknowledging what is in our hearts. But I think it is important and beneficial to face those feelings and not flush them down the loo anymore.
3 Squares is a popular place to meet friends, get a quick bite, have a date with a book and wet your whistle with bottomless cups of coffee. It sits unassumingly on Main Street, Vergennes, the smallest and oldest city in Vermont. Reminiscent of the fictional Stars Hollow…
It is also home to Tuesday Trivia and its very elusive first place. We like to attend to support the local Boys and Girls club, see acquaintances, feed our competitive streaks, and give our brains some exercise. It’s a great outing on cold winter nights.
Last week we came in second place. We missed the mark by 5 points. We were so close to beating the champs who reign Tuesday in and Tuesday out. Still we won maple syrup and got free eggs from regulars, Sean and Annie’s farm. They sit at the long table with their cronies.
Tonight, however, the title was finally ours! The prize? The oh, so satisfying feeling of belonging in the community, bantering with friends and neighbors, bragging rights and free dessert. Creme Brûlée never tasted so sweet! I love living in Small Town, U.S.A.
A special thanks to our teammates Sue, Mary and Glen!
I spend quite a bit of my work time thinking of what I will do once I get home. Read a book, start my sewing project, cook dinner, paint, nap…there are so many options. Once I get home, however, not much gets accomplished. I should have been born a fairy tale princess. That way I would have all the time in the world to do whatever I want when I want. There never seems to be enough time to do those things I WANT to do.
I have always had a bad relationship with time. Specifically schedules. This is compounded by the fact that I am from a country whose people stretch every minute as far as they please. We move at a slower pace, with no concern or regard to what a clock or an invitation, or appointment, might say. (You can think what you like, but it is not out of rudeness that we behave like that.) Why should we be enslaved by two little hands in perpetual motion? I feel so constricted by schedules. And I find it very hard to arrive anywhere on time. After all, my father was 45 minutes late to my wedding- mind you the ceremony couldn’t start without him to walk me down the aisle. Where was he? What emergency had arisen? Oh, nothing as such. He was late because he had to see to some farm chores. And so it goes…
I read about blocking your time ( http://How to Time Block ) to become more efficient with your days. Instead of setting a schedule by the hour, you set it by tasks. So I sat down with a planner on hand and a list of my must-dos and a list of my wanna-dos. So far, I have discovered that there is reason for my frustration. I work for seven hours a day, plus 15 minutes of my short commute and 1 hour to get ready in the morning. ( I am not a morning person.) This leaves me with roughly 4 and a half hours of “free” time. So in reality there is not a lot of time for singing with birds in the woods, or sewing for mice. Which brings me to the second realization. I must prioritize in order to maximize the time. Prioritizing is not a strength of mine, either. I like to do things spontaneously.
Solution? Don’t have one yet. It’s a work in progress. But it does bring some things to mind. Schedules and time are not all bad. They are there to keep the universe from imploding. Without schedules and time everything would happen at once or not at all. The Bible says, “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.” Psalm 90:12. I have much to learn, much to number, much wisdom to acquire. Until I get to Eternity, where I presume there are no clocks, I must remember “My times are in your hands” Psalm 31:15
In that half asleep, half awake split second out of deep sleep into consciousness I recognized a familiar, yet unwelcome guest. I think its name is Loneliness, a fear, a void, darkness.
Today was the first day after the Holidays back to “normal,” back to the Empty Nest. We enjoyed the temporary return of our youngest child from college and a surprise visit form our middle child and her youngest, our little granddaughter.
The house was fuller. Certainly the presence of a 15 month old fills up every nook and cranny with giggles and cries, toys, cheerios, play dough ground into the carpet, dolls, dirty diapers… We have gone from days of a full house, meals at a full table, every bed in use, games together, to “just us” and that uninvited guest. It threatened to fill me with the void, a hollow, empty feeling, dissatisfaction, fear, loneliness.
Empty nest. Not sure what the connotation for it is. Sometimes it is that giddy feeling of no responsibility and possibilities. Like a teenager experiencing freedom for the first time. Sometimes, it feels like a depressing label, a sentence to solitude in an abyss. It feels like living in the age of “remember when.” Yet, this is my life. I refuse to let it be a place of used to be. Instead, it is the era of wonderful memories, of special visits, of watching our children be wonderful adults, and of the best gig on the planet- being grandparents.
I must guard my heart and my thoughts to stay here in “today” –This is the day that the Lord has made. There is no room here for fear or loneliness’s ugly presence. All those hollow spaces are waiting to be filled with joy- whatever the new day brings.
My education started with, Dick and Jane. Through these books I was exposed to a new world. I learned a new language, I learned about seasons, about a new culture. For 11 years, as I advanced in school, I learned all things American. Idioms, music, geography, and history…
The thing is I knewabout this amazing country, but I had never experienced it. It’s like going to a restaurant and checking out the menu but never ordering or eating its food. You don’t really know.
Sometimes I sit there and “check out” the Bible. I read it, know the stories, memorize some verses but stop there. I don’t order the food, (” taste and see that the Lord is good,”) for myself. I know about Jesus, but never quite make the trip. Intelectual knowledge has nothing on experience, on abiding in the Place.
It wasn’t until I moved to the states that I really experienced a cool summer, a barbecue with hotdogs, foliage color, winter, the cold, snow, snowflakes, woods, biking along a lake, (When I was in 6th grade I read a book about teenagers biking and camping around a lake collecting water samples as their summer job! Unheard of!) Oh, the luxuries of a first world country…freedom and endless possibilities!
Same is true for Jesus. Endless boundless freedom, love, possibilities, but I must abide in him in order to experience Him, to really know him. I must do more than read, I must move in, sit down, spend time with Him, talk to, and with, Him.
“Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations.”
3 Squares is a popular place to meet friends, get a quick bite, have a date with a book and wet your whistle with bottomless cups of coffee. It sits unassumingly on Main Street, Vergennes, the smallest and oldest city in Vermont. Reminiscent of the fictional Stars Hollow…
Discombobulated 