Maps and Travel Snacks

Maps and Travel Snacks

The fire inside me burns brighter now

Dreams reignited

I feel ready to fight to take flight

The drive to survive and thrive

The fire feels so much more grounded

Confidence in the uncertainty

Excited for all the possibilities that I see

The small steps I have taken

Over the past few months

Have put me miles ahead of where I was before

I want to explore and forge ahead

Preparing all the travel snacks for the journey

I sometimes feel exhausted

Looking at the path ahead

I take it one day at a time

One moment at a time

I am confident but vulnerable

Muddling about in what it means to be human

Here are some things i know:

I can’t pour from an empty cup

I can’t kindle flames if my fire isn’t burning

There’s a time to ponder the nature of existence

To map out dreams and pit stops along the path

And there’s time to just enjoy the trail

And drink a lot of water

Faith

First of all I wanted to say thank you to those that read this blog. It's super cool to check the views and see your responses on the Facebook. I'm pretty happy that I have managed to follow thru with this New Years Resolution so far. (We're almost halfway thru the year, huzzah!)

I've been thinking a lot this week about the idea of faith and the  "leap and the net will follow" thing. I started another challenge for myself: the 30 by 30 project. Basically the goal is to write 30 songs and perform them on Facebook live in their "done enough for an audience" state. After that point the plan is to tweak and make recordings and then put these on my Soundcloud or figure out the life of the songs from there. I'm doing this to light a fire under my butt to actually write songs and challenge myself to not get caught up in perfectionism and my inner critic giving me writers block. All that good stuff about building my confidence as a writer.

Since starting this project my brain is already making room for the next songs in line. It's really exciting! It appears so far that my theory was correct: if I take the leap and give myself the challenge, then I will rise to it. It takes deadlines.

I'm really excited that I think I am starting to enter the new phase of the grief process where I have glued most of the pieces back together and am ready to move forward with confidence and kick butt and take names and be my best beautiful butterfly rockstar and all that good stuff. Now that metaphorical glue might not be the strongest and the pieces might still be a little funky but still it works.

I also am more willing to take "leaps of faith" because this year has been an adventure in understanding what that is. Now my definition of God is still that "wibbly wobbly still small voice inside of all of us with the light and the good vibes and the universe" thing but I'm realizing how that works in reality. It's a faith in my ability to trust my intuition, creative abilities, and problem solving skills to power thru life with confidence, trust awesome opportunities, and not be afraid to ask for help when I need it (and know who and when to ask for help). It's my faith that the universe, etc will give back what I give out and that somehow everything is connected.


I've never been into using the term "Person of Faith" for myself but I'm starting to understand what that means.  Being a" Person of Faith" to me at it's core means you operate from a place of faith rather than a place of fear. You make decisions based in love and compassion rather than guarding your heart and staying small. So regardless of how I interpret the mystery or what name I chose to give it. I have faith in it. That's a pretty awesome thing.

happy all the feels day

So it's Mother's Day.  I went to church, sang with the WISE ensemble (new choir thing at church "Women inspired by song"). I got brunch with one friend and then went out for coffee with another friend who was stopping by on his way back to Michigan. I'm heading out soon for a historic bar crawl of Rogers Park. I'm keeping busy.

Yesterday I decided to get myself something in honor of the fact that it's Mother's Day and my mom's birthday in a few weeks. May is going to be hard as it's the first May without my mom and I so I decided I'd get myself some jewelry. I got a super sweet Tree of Life pendant that called out to me. I'm pretty happy with it.

I've been thinking a lot of how my sense of humor and sense of self has shifted in my grief. I definitely have inherited my moms sense of humor. On my bike ride to church this morning I was like "well I guess I can use my snark to mask my pain...which is the most mom thing."

She had such a sense of humor even as her body was being increasingly difficult. Before she had multiple myeloma she had breast cancer twice and pinch of skin cancer on her nose. She'd say "ever since I turned 50 my body has been trying to find ways to kill me. I don't appreciate that." When she had surgery to remove the lump from her breast I remember I went to visit her and they had given her a sharpie to mark the one that was being taken. When I got to the hospital room she said" they took my sharpie away when I tried to draw a frowny face on it."

I find myself meditating on how much I have transformed since August. I have become more honest with myself and more ready to take challenges head on. Not a lot phases me, except for the times when I get overwhelmed...mostly that means I need a snack. But I am strong as hell. That's pretty awesome.

I also am grateful for all the strong women in my life who have been maternal figures. I have always developed this solid network of badass women who I admire and I still have them to look to.

So I find myself on my first Mother's Day without my mom grateful for the things that she taught me and reflecting on the strength I have gained. Still Mother's Day without your mom sucks lots.

Anyway off for adventure and enjoying this Spring Day.

The Metaphorical Restaurants Along The Way

(bathroom graffiti spotted earlier this week) 

So when my mom was going thru her first round of treatment for Multiple Myeloma 11 or so years ago, she had a friend who was giving her rides to appointments and such. She said of this friend "she's a woman who's been to hell and back a few times already and knows all the good restaurants." I've always been drawn to this phrase. Much like my mom, I enjoy finding the bright side of things and bringing humor to situations. Even though my optimistic view of the world has been tested and tossed and all the other things that happen to optimistic world views post college, I have remained fairly positive.

This week has been one of those emotional roller coaster weeks. The big thing was Thursday. I had Thursday off and got sucked into all of the things that were happening politically- the AHCA stuff and the Religious freedom stuff and just the usual daily reminder of all the political dumpster fires that are happening. This hit my deep well of grief feelings. When I want to yell about the insanity of the world I get hit with the sad truth that my mom isn't here to yell with. I mean on a spiritual level, I can yell and write rants and call senators in remembrance of her and say that "her spirit is now that resonate fire of passion" or whatever, but it doesn't change the fact that she's not here. So after participating in much Facebook tirades I went back to implementing a reduction of my Facebook usage for purposes of self care.

So I'm sitting in the place of trying to be positive but also realistic. I am grateful for all the opportunities that I have. I am also acknowledging that life is weird and hard. Not to mention that life can be more weird and more hard for so many other people.  I am lucky that I have the privileges I do and I will fully admit it.  I want to do what I can to help and I keep thinking of one of the poems of Rachel Corrie which ends with the line "I can't save the planet single handedly. I can wash dishes." It's important to feel all the feelings and be informed about what's going on. It's also important to look for small things that can be done that ground me back in the moment.

 My mom's gone. There's some unacceptable messed up stuff that's happening in the world. It's hard for me to hold these realities at the same time. I've gotten thru the surface layer shock phase and brewing with anger and acceptance for both situations.  I think it's important to monitor how I take in the news and monitor my emotional responses to everything. Mainly I've started to make sure I'm in a place to hold everyone else's emotions about the world when I log into Facebook.  If I log in already feeling overwhelmed I know it doesn't help me to get stuck scrolling until I'm numb.

So I remain hopeful but not in denial. I acknowledge the fact that this is one of those moments in life that feels like a hopefully brief road trip to hell. Luckily, there are a lot of fine restaurants along the way.

Thunder's God Rolling His Eyes

So the following blog is a copy paste of a classic mom rant. I found this on her computer. I feel that this is exactly what she would be saying about the state of the world if she were around today. I remember when she told me about this theory. She had come into Chicago to visit me and one of the first thing she said was "I've been thinking about writing a play about all this conservative christian rhetoric. It'd be called "Thunder's God Rolling His Eyes." Then we had a conversation that was basically this rant. This is probably my favorite mom rant and encapsulates a lot of her humor and view points.  Enjoy: 

My thoughts on the meaning behind God creating people to be gay.  So, we start by assuming there’s a God who is a hands-on sort of God and who does things for a reason, the more mysterious, the better. He (could be a she or something else) decides to create roughly 10% of the people to be gay, purposely making them different in a way that is likely to shake a person at the core of their identity without having any other negative effect. And he (could be a she or something else) leaves a lot of those mysterious, hard to interpret, harder to translate, stories and abolitions around for prophets and charlatans to find and report and distort over the centuries. Never tries to update things except that once where Jesus shows up with some story about loving each other and not throwing the first stone, but we’re going to set that aside for a bit. So, what is the mysterious purpose behind all of that. Hmm. Well, looking at it logically. Has to be one of two things: either God finds it amusing to watch people suffer or it’s some kind of a test. If it’s the first case, then we are all in a lot of trouble and so I don’t choose to believe in that sort of a God. That would be God as a petulant child that picks the wings off of flies. So, it must be a test. And just what and who is being tested? Perhaps a person’s ability to resist sin. However, I’d think for that, you’d want to use a sin whose attractiveness was more evenly distributed. Something like envy, greed, stuff like that. More likely the test is for the majority population and the gay people are created as test conditions. This makes a lot more sense. A truly interesting test. So, then the question is what is the correct response.  It seems the current crop of ruling righteous feels the test is to see if they can sufficiently persecute gay people in order to curry favor and prove their loyalty and perhaps bully them into either denying their own existence. But that can’t be the correct response, because that reaction doesn’t need to be tested for, it’s already well established in the literature that people are capable of being cruel to each other, particularly when they can blame it on God. No further research is needed. So, the answer must be something else.  

I’m going to digress for a minute. Going back to the Garden story. It seems to me that if God created man and woman and gave them free will and all that, and if they got thrown out of the garden for eating from the tree of knowledge, it doesn’t make sense that their sin was disobedience. If He (or She or something else) wanted an obedient pet, why not perform that magic evolution thing on the dog. A much, much, more loyal and obedient animal than a human with its monkey brain. So, if the issue wasn’t obedience, then it make sense that Adam and Eve were asked to leave the garden…. drum roll… Just Because They Were Ready. After all, what’s the sense of creating an interesting, intelligent, animal if you don’t watch it do interesting, intelligent things? In that case, then the open question is at what point are humans ready to return to the garden? OK, back to the test… Perhaps when we have learned to cut through the B.S. and treat each other decently, even those who are different. Duh. Head slap. So, that’s Jesus meant – why didn’t he just say so? Oh, I guess he did. My bad.