Farewell 2012! Thanks for the deepening...

I bid 2012 farewell with a bit of tenderness and a heap of deep breaths. It did me well, but I am relieved to embark on a crisp, white page not yet scrawled on with tears, blood or pain. Not that the entire year was horrible... it was certainly one of the most noteworthy years yet in my 34 years. So much iron sharpening iron. So much storm, so many tears. Tons of changes. From January until this December, I tell ya.....I am so ready for a new season of laughter, joy, relaxation as far as my soul and mind go.
Most of you know that this last year was rough, mainly having to do with the things my husband went through, finding his biological father miraculously, and losing his faith. We also moved back to California in October, which has been a huge transformation as well. The children are homeschooling this year, and that has been an adjustment. What to say, when there seem to be so many events that have transpired and so many words, but which are the right ones to share on the internet? Hah.
We are co-living with a whole other family on beautiful, now verdant green acreage in the country about 7 minutes from the ocean. I am so thankful to live here, to be able to walk outside without freezing my extremities off in December. I am enjoying being "home" as far as the soil goes. My husband likes to say I am now like a tree planted back in its proper soil. My heart is happy.....or it should be.
Why does it seem the older I get the more cynicism attempts to creep in, like bleeding watercolors. I painted my canvas long ago, in bright, cheerful colors of crimson, fuchsia, yellow, bright greens and oranges, but then slowly reality crept in and faded the colors to grey, brown and smudgy mustards. I must make more of an effort to throw off this weighty blanket of what if's and never's and remind myself that the road ahead is still brightly lit with hope and dreams yet to be fulfilled.
This year, 2013, I don't dare to ask that you bring me all flowers and goodness because I know that would be mundane and ridiculous, for life brings all shades of emotions to paint the murals of our existence. But I do pray for renewed vision! I have been endowed with many pictures planted in my heart of things God has promised, and I still firmly believe that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living, as it says in Psalm 27. "I am still confident of this: that I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord." I ask for childlike faith in a world that caters to grownups with realism idealism and much injustice that would make us wish to be blind and deaf some days. If there are a few things I have taken away from this year, one is that expectation is merely a sketch in the masterpiece of what will unfold. The true beauty to life is supposed to be the unexpected turns and jaunts into places we have never ever gone, nor possibly hoped to. We are able to make the very best of the worst through Christ's redeeming guidance. This I know to be true. I have found His breath to be closer than my own, and His presence to be the deepest comfort in the midst of silence and times when I had no words at all.  We all have our own personal level of withstanding pain, a different breaking point that we don't know until we are led up to it and relinquish or dive in. This year has been difficult, yes. But it did not knock me down, and I am still alive. And so are you.
I feel that this year is going to be one of life. Newness. Spring to the soul. I am expectant of wildflowers as far as the eye can see, wellness of heart, a bubbling over of good tidings. I am ready for a rebirth of sorts, and doors wide open that I never thought would be. My feet are on the brink of this road, and I am taking the first wobbly step.But I refuse to do so with old, stained clothes. Garments stained with cynicism and jaded with mistrust because trust was once breached. I am persistent that I will go about this new year with the garments of simplicity, joy, wonder and awe. As my husband wrote in a song, "All that I know, I don't really know." I am ready for God to surprise me, and fill me with all of the treasures His hand bestows into this clay jar, an empty vessel happy to be filled with the fresh waters of His love and faithfulness.
Happy New Year my kind friends. I hope it finds you like a child.

sometimes I am crazy and lose my temper

This is an honest entry I am about to begin here. Being honest is hard when you are a writer and also pertinent to your success. Not that I call myself a successful writer as far as worldly standards go..I am yet to be published, though it is my dream, and no one knows my name. I am the nameless one.
My husband is quickly becoming known as far as some crowds go, due to his musical talents. That is awesome and I support him in all of his directives. But this cannot solely be my job. Even as a christian wife, this is not legit. God made me creatively and uniquely to fill a role only I can fill, as well as being my husband's helper. I think I forgot this for a long time. Like, 8 years. I have shelved so many things that bring happiness and fulfillment to my heart. Like writing for instance. I used to make a point to write every single day, whether it was poetry, journaling, or the jottings of a crazed woman making pleas with the invisible reader. I would journal as if I was Anne Frank and someone would find my writings after my peril. Or like I had something really important to say that no person has ever had the guts to say before. But the truth was, and maybe still is, okay, definitely still is, is that I am terrified to write down my true feelings, because I know they will surely hurt someone, or embarrass the hell out of me or my children one day. My parents might disown me for my lack of confidence in my upbringing. Maybe the fact is is that I am highly in need of some really helpful professional therapy to discover what causes my occasional meltdowns/anxiety attacks and bouts with depression and self-loathing...or perhaps I am merely human and need to just brush all the negativity under the carpet so that I can attempt to see the brighter, more defined aspects of beauty in this fleeting, ridiculous life. Maybe it just happens to be dreary and raining today and I have more difficulty seeing the world through an optimistic lens. Yes, that is probably it.
I am absolutely going through a whole season where I learn to have lower expectations on people I love. Not because they aren't worthy of the highest expectations, but because it's not healthy for my expectations to be so high on them and then get so disappointed when they don't do the things I expect of them. This probably makes me sound lousy either way, but that's why I gave the introductory disclaimer that this was going to be an "honest entry". I guess I am just so tired some days of the things Christianity calls me to, such as apologizing and endless forgiveness, and pressing on cheerfully when I have a tendency to dwell on things sometimes; being loving when I feel like hating, keeping my eyes on the promises God has given me and keeping that hope alive, rather than assessing the situation with the physical facts I am presented with and maybe losing hope and the energy to continue on joyfully or peacefully. I am still wrestling so hard with how to simply enjoy this life! Why? Ugh. I am so sickened with myself some days. This also is not a blog in which I expect ANY responses to my self pity, because that's not what I'm trying to do here, I don't want anyone to end up rolling their eyes at how depressing I am or feeling obliged to "lift me up" out of my current state of depression...I am not suicidal so to speak, I want to LIVE! I want to breathe easy and not take things so seriously, but I find it nearly impossible.
 The thought I had last night that seems to be the anthem of my flow of thoughts lately is: I wish I could start over, like from point A. Like on Solitaire, when you lose and it gives you the option to:  Start this game over from the beginning, or start a brand new game. I just want sometimes to start this particular game over. But I know that would only be a personal hell of its own making, so what's the point?
In the end, I know that even though some days I want to throw in the towel to the things Christianity calls me to, it is also the vein to life and treasures which have no end. I hate the process some days, the "not losing heart in doing good for in due time it will reap a harvest if I don't give up" stuff, but it is all so eternally and even momentarily worth the effort and the dying of myself to my own will and the things that bring me so much personal, internal pain that I often take out on my precious family.
Being a true follower of Christ and his ways is frigging hard. There are so many eyes on you to prove them wrong on the thousands of years of bad names people inside the church have given it. Like religious freaks, hypocrites and division-makers they can be. Or maybe I am just imagining it. I am just so conflicted lately. I just feel coo-coo sometimes. Nuts. I was thinking yesterday about the truth that if you are really wealthy, it's okay to be crazy and end up in a loony bin for a spell to "rest", but when you're broke as a joke, you better get your mental crap together lest you look like a complete failure. What is wrong with my brain/heart/emotions? Why do I seem so broken and un-fixable lately? I just need Jesus so bad, every day. Every second. And that is the truth.

enjoying the beach

how I love living by the sea.

Seasonal depression no more! It is 80 degrees here today and though there is a tiny fragment in my soul that rues the autumn chill that Bend was so rich with, I am thankful that no part of me is struggling with depression now that I am back in California. So far, so good. When I get a little blue, I just waltz out my front door, and gaze at the glorious draping oaks that stand feet from the house we moved into, or I take a stroll up the country hill to the top where on a clear day, you can see all the way to the ocean below, and let the Santa Ana wind caress my hair, and I can tell myself, it is all okay.
Bread is scarce presently, so that is an issue. But Chris is beginning to get doors opening left and right for prospects on the music scene, and right away he scored a job as a barista at this cool little cafe called Sally Loo's!
The children are happy and run free most of the day, every day, outside on the stretch of property we live on. They are filthy little muskrats but they are super giddy with the taste of freedom that not being locked inside for long hours at a time give them.
They love the beach! We try to go once every couple weeks to let them play and splash and build sandcastles and enjoy the sunshine, and it is always sad when it is time to leave.
We are homeschooling the children this year, and it's been going smoothly so far, since Latisha( the woman we live beneath, in our apartment house) is an amazing rockstar in this area and many other areas, and she does the lesson planning, which I am terribly inept in.
I have just been thinking about life lately, what with the deaths of a few people in my life, even though I wasn't really close to two of them. Life is so short! It really is. I am so guilty of taking for granted the fact that it could be over tomorrow, and putting things off that I could do today. Even simple things, if not the larger more seemingly out of reach passions and desires (like traveling and doing big amazing things). Simple things like being the best mother I can be every day within reason, and wife. Reading the children a book at night rather than saying I am too tired and rushing back to my room to be by myself. Running with them and playing when they ask. Riding a bicycle and feeling the breeze rush through my hair. Embracing my spouse rather than nagging him for something he may have done that annoyed me. And things like these. Just watching a sunset or sunrise, or standing in the rain. Enjoying life. I am curious why, as we grow older, it seems to be a thing that eludes so many of us to simply embrace the day and smile, laugh, be easy-going like a child would do naturally. It is peculiar. So this is my plan this year. To get joy from each day. To not take things so damn seriously. To take my husband as he comes, with much grace and a lot of sincere and heartfelt conversation. To love my kids enormously and actively. Going for a walk and earnestly smelling the flowers, gaze at the sky, ask questions like a child would. It makes me so sad to mourn the losses of these women who have gone on to the next threshold  mainly because they were so young and full of life. There is so much beauty in this world mingled with the pain, and I  intend to see it.

The Emperor moth

Chrysalis

Look how unappealing and downright ugly this chrysalis is, to the layman's eye. Possibly it is a thing of beauty to the nature enthusiast, or even to a person like me, who is being persuaded to love the process as much as the outcome presently. But to most passerby's, it looks like a big, funky bug, dead with enfolded legs. Like nothing. Like it has lived it's life and is now worthless. Perhaps it even feels that itself...

But....inside, a marvelous and intriguing transformation occurs! Most people would pass by a thing like this without raising an eyebrow, or even knowing what it was, or caring what it was. Maybe a year ago I would have. Not now though. No way. It symbolizes to me the dark, stunted-seeming world we sometimes find ourselves in, and we wonder why, and there seem to be absolutely no answers forth-coming. And so we dwell in this limited world of black and loneliness, not seeing what is to come, maybe even completely hopeless....thinking we might even have only this for the rest of our lives; this seeming abandonment, no fresh air to breathe or beauty to take in with the eyes.

But let me start from the beginning. We started as the crawling, munching and crunching caterpillar: big, fat, wandering around the earth on leaves and earth's floor, our purpose "fine".  Maybe we had a passing thought that life would be much finer if we could soar like the birds overhead, I think we all have had that thought. Flight equals freedom and so forth. Because it does seem from a higher perspective that things come together  with more clarity. Bird's eye view means more power. But then we somehow found ourselves instinctively building a house away from the unseen eye, behind a leaf, on a branch no one comes often to, for safety, to go and hide inside for awhile. Before we knew it, we were in this dark, claustrophobic "refuge" but then we began to wonder why. Why were we the only ones in there and why for so long, and other why's we never had the time to figure out before, we now wrestled with inside this place, and we didn't know now if we liked this process at all. This sucked...immensely. No one has probably ever gone through this exact process before EVER, and all such loneliness thoughts we are suddenly bombarded with in waves of self-pity and sadness. (Maybe this is a little too introspective for a caterpillar, but bear with me..if I was the caterpillar, this is perhaps what I would be thinking.)  The time in here is for reflections, but then the reflections of how we used to be a fat, happy caterpillar that was well-fed, and green with goodness, and that sunlight shone upon our backs constantly bring us to depression because we know...we can never go back, for look at how we are changing in here! No one would love us now...look how disgusting we have become. Body covered in layers of God-knows what, and not beautiful at all even to one's self! The whole thing seems to be going so slow and there is way too much time to think and mind-screw ones self in here. Alone. Right?

But behold an eye that CAN see all that is going on inside that dark place of drought and questioning. A hand that is at work, a love that sees what the one inside the mess cannot see. Who knows perfectly, has done this time, and time again, with the most elegant of outcomes, the Potter, so to speak, with the lump of unfinished clay on his wheel. And now, it is time to emerge. After so long a time, will we even have any friends? Most probably we will be completely lonesome still. But the emergence is difficult, and we wrestle, and struggle with the almost impossibility of our freedom from this cocoon of darkness. But alas, finally, we crawl out, exhausted, but triumphant, and a little unsure of our place, or even what happened, kind of like a drunk person who has passed out in some strange place and must regain some memory of the night before, but the details are totally shady. We stumble onto the branch above us and realize the transformation that occurred in that place, gave us, magically, majestically, wings! So we try them out, and the view is amazing, and the beauty of spring surrounds on every side with flourishing life and verdant green all about, and suddenly! There are others. Others like you, flying above you, below you, beside you, happy, free, beautiful. You realize you could not have had these wings, this freedom, this spectacular feeling of perfect position, without that ugly, distant, challenging and AWFUL time of solitude. Here is an excerpt from a book called Celebration of Discipline, on the Dark Night of the Soul: "The dark night to which he calls us is not something  bad or destructive. On the contrary, it is an experience to be welcomed much as a sick person might welcome a surgery that promises health and well-being. The purpose of the darkness is not to punish or to afflict us. It is to set us free. It is a divine appointment, a privileged opportunity to draw close to the divine center. St.John calls it "sheer grace", adding: 

O guiding night!

O night more lovely than the dawn!

O night that has united

The Lover with His beloved,

Transforming the beloved in her Lover.

What does the dark night of the soul involve? We may have a sense of dryness, aloneness, even lostness. Any over-dependence on the emotional life is stripped away. The notion, often heard today, that such experiences should be avoided and that we should live in peace and comfort, joy, and celebration only betrays the fact that much contemporary experience is surface slush. The dark night is one of the ways God brings us into a hush, a stillness so that he may work inner transformation upon the soul."

And so we LOVE the process (even if we hate it) as much as the outcome. We love the caterpillar stage in us, the chrysalis stage, and the butterfly stage equally. You could not possibly have any one of them without the other. Change is necessary and essential to life. Transformation does not look pretty when it is in the pupal stage. But we can respect the ugly mess that is represented as much as the beauty it will incur. It is vital.

Summertime and the livin is easy (right)

The sky is beautifully cornflower blue and the sun beats down like the shade of sunset on a peach: warming, endearing, consuming. The children play rambunctiously and non-stop inside and out, with no reprieve on my behalf, which can wear and tear on the patience. Chris had taken off the week of our 9 year anniversary, and unknown to me, also the next two weeks after that for some much-needed vacation time. We have been together every day, and still have one week left of endless summer days, which can be good and enriching and also the anti of the much used credo: "Absence makes the heart grow fonder." ha..but we are handling it well and learning to have grace and soak in the quality time. It is ironic since the past few months had been so dry with this exact factor. Chris has been completely wrapped up in the recording of his 3rd album, and with having to work 40-hours a week on top of that, we rarely saw each other. Now it is a marathon of time together.
We began our time by cruising to the Oregon Coast to celebrate the victory of keeping our marriage together and doing it pretty well (I mean, we're still completely in love with each other and for the most part "get" each other, so that seems a triumph in it's self:) ) for nine years of hardship and bliss. There have been up's and down's, but such is life. Valleys and peaks, high's and low's, love and hate, joy and sorrow. It is the true anthem of life and anyone who tells you that life should only be happy and good all of the time has never been married, or is completely delusional. The goodness of marriage is seeing all of the wreckage that two people can unwillingly or willingly bring into a union, and making a garden out of the mess that works, and is somewhat beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. God plays such a huge part in this design...His fingerprints are all over our lives, whether seen or unseen. The fact that you can accept and tolerate a person that can be so perfectly opposite you and still be ridiculously in love with them is the stuff miracles are made of.
The Coast was magnificent and depressing and green and stony and cavernous and foggy all at once. I will never forget the fish and chips...I crave them daily now that we're back. The seafood is truly glorious there, especially the crab, and the halibut. On the wharf, fishing boats with colorful sails dot the shore like a tiny rainbow of toy boats seen from the bridge arching above it. We drove to Depoe Bay and went down a random street to these cliffs that overlooked the caverns in an enclave that were some of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. Green and mossy and black rock, with the grayest blue water engulfing the sides of the stone. Gorgeous! And we left the computer so we communicated freely (it was a little rough at first...but we soon slipped into the ease our friendship has always had) and had great one-on-one time.
Road trips have always been one of my favorite things to do when I'm with peaceful enjoyable company, and Chris truly is the best person to go on a road trip with because he let's me be silly and dorky and sing loudly to all the radio songs, and chat like a songbird, or just be silent for half hours at a time. We harmonize on songs, and hold hands and gush over each other like newlyweds. Fun fun!
When we arrived back in Bend, there was a steady stream of family visitors for the Fourth of July and on, which was wonderful as well.
We are full-steam into organizing this upcoming move back to California, and should be busy having garage sales and doing research on jobs etc, but have been delaying these things for the sake of "vacation". 
Anyhoo....happy summer to all of my readers (all 3 of you, wink wink) and my parting advice: Go enjoy the ones you love, in beautiful (or not) weather, let the sunshine fill you with hope of tomorrow and pleasure for today, and above all, know that God created all of this beauty for us to enjoy and share and to especially acknowledge His love and greatness. Peace and joy to you! xoxo