holy days

We’ve spent much of the past year “chasing after the fleeting winds of youth, through forests of indecision”, as I wrote long ago in high school, way before I actually knew what that meant. It turns out there’s great fun to be had in trying to catch certain moments as they fly past, all giggling and breathless and fresh from the well-springs of young hearts alive with discovery; but then the task gets more difficult: trying to capture them for keeps, to preserve them as vibrant and bright and meaningful—that’s the real trick, isn’t it? And yet that’s where we manage to find some of our highest purpose, while wading through the messiness of life, of new jobs and new babies and new challenges that tempt us to become overwhelmed in the sheer inconstancy of it all.

And 2009 has certainly proven to be that kind of year: we’ve made major life decisions and changes, career shifts, and discovered that our passel of 5 children evidently was not complete, and now we expect our sixth sometime in late March of 2010. The children have grown, and changed, and are all finding ways to make their marks on the world already, even as we—as their parents—work to find ways to make our marks on their hearts, through the sacred days that are masked in the mundane.
We had the delight this year of trekking up to Yellowstone, one of the most fascinating and beautiful geological wonders on the entire planet. We were struck by the changing, moving nature of the earth in that place, how some places within the park can grow by several feet a year, while others recede, a terrestrial dance of balance. This is no sterile, stagnant monument for the ages; instead, it is the very picture of creative forces at work, forging their paths up through what, at first glance, seems to be impenetrable rock. The result is often chaotic and sometimes a little scary, but always beautiful and irresistibly thrilling.

We’ve found a great many parallels between our experiences in Yellowstone and those within our network of family and friends this year; the nature of our relationships is always changing—growing or receding or just changing form—and what we wind up with is always beautiful in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Late nights at the coffee house with a few good friends, an impromptu dinner with someone we just met, game night with cousins up in the mountains of Montana, even a frightening evening in an urgent care waiting room with the children huddled about; all of these experiences, though often unplanned, have been little expressions of a great Love bubbling below the surface of our lives, rising to break that surface and creating something surprising and Beautiful. These are the moments that we treasure and chase after, trying to capture them, like snapshots, for the scrapbooks of our hearts. And we thank God—and you, our precious friends and family—for the chance to experience the greatness of the small moments we’ve shared with you throughout the year. It is our prayer that we learn to let more of those moments happen with each of you, to look past the façade of our mundane everydayness and reach out for the Creative and the Beautiful, wanting and waiting to happen.

We pray you a coming year of fullness and grace and vision to take hold of what is truly important in the world, beyond dirty dishes and money and commitments and schedules, and all that threatens to cloud the sight, and into the real joy of capturing the great moments for all that they’re worth.

a hard lesson in gratitude

We went in Tuesday to see our midwife and find out the sex of Baby #6; we were, well, shocked to find out that we're having yet another boy, especially after Bonnie and I took such delight in picking out all that pink quilt fabric and the pieces were already coming together. Bonnie began to cry during the ultrasound as soon as Jessica announced that he's a boy, and I've spent the remainder of the week in a state of mild befuddlement over what the cosmic plan is for my raising half the planet's testosterone in my own house. I told Bonnie that evening that, while I'm sad we don't get our little girl we've been waiting for, I can't help but be thankful for the gorgeous toes and fingers and ribs we see moving around on the ultrasound screen, obvious signs of a healthy, happy baby; so many people don't get healthy, whole babies. And yet, despite my preaching that perspective, I've felt a growing jealousy of every little girl I've seen all week, and I've felt a little resentful that we weren't getting our girl. We're 22 weeks along, by the way.

Enter the story of Shauna, my classmate from high school, who is 2 weeks behind me in her pregnancy. She was going in yesterday to find out the sex of her baby; I jokingly wrote on her Facebook page yesterday, "If you end up with a girl, wanna trade? I have 5 healthy boys to choose from!"

I'm glad Facebook has a delete button.

I confess that I stewed a little bit all afternoon yesterday, sure that Shauna would come home from her appointment and post to Facebook that she was having a girl, and being preemptively envious of her good fortune. But the afternoon waned on, and no word came. Then one of her sisters posted something alarming about praying for her sister, and then her other sister posted something similar. By this morning, the story was out that Shauna found out yesterday that she was having twin boys, and that she was in labor. There was twin-to-twin transfusion happening, and the excess fluid caused by this put her into labor; she was fully dilated by the time she felt a contraction. The boys, Luke and Josh, lived for 15 minutes last night, and then slipped away.

My sweet little healthy boy is kicking away in my belly as I type, and I have never been more grateful, or more shamed.

--Teri.

i cry at books.

There's a long-standing tradition in my family of reading books aloud to each other; usually I'm the reader, and the rest of the family sits in wrapt attention while we live out in our collective mind the perils and adventures of real and imagined heroes and villains. Our latest literary escapade was Timothy Egan's newest work, The Big Burn. It's about the largest forest fire to ever sweep the United States which, on the surface, may not sound like the best topic for an entire book. But wrap that up with the personal stories of the men who fought it and survived or perished in the firestorm and the political underpinnings of the day, and you have an insanely nail-biting tale that had everyone from my five-year-old to a family friend begging for an excuse to have a chapter read to them. Whenever we had to pile into the van for an outing, the first question, before seatbelts, was, "Do you have the book?"

I possess no great skill in oral reading, but there's always something about having a story read aloud that people never outgrow. We've had weekend reading parties for years whenever the opportunity presented itself, usually looking something like what happens when a college frat house and a child's slumber party collide in our living room, big strapping guys draped over all the furniture next to kids-of-all-ages, lasting late into the night until everyone has lost the struggle to hold onto the last threads of consciousness and one more paragraph of whatever great story we're engaged in.

I'm never quite sure whether it's this unique synergy of generations of friends and family all tangled up in some exotic tale, or whether it's the story itself, but I often find myself struggling to continue on through the last few pages without a lump rising in my throat and warm tears obscuring the words on the last hallowed pages. By the final chapter of The Big Burn, I was a heap, almost sobbing while listening (my voice was out and Christopher had to finish off the last few pages for me) to the last breaths of lives that we'd become so enamored of during the past few weeks. My oldest son was surprised that tears were freely flowing down my cheeks, and he asked me why I was crying. What could I say? When it came down to trying to put that emotion into actual words, I came up short. What came to mind was, "How can I not?" I become so invested in the humble heroes of our epic tales, their struggles, victories, and losses, and the whole experience of reaching into a piece of literature and finding myself tugged by the hand from the other end, that it seems like a natural response in parting to shed a few tears and not want to say goodbye.

Maybe my son understands better than I do that it's never really a parting after all, but that the stories become a part of us as much as we become a part of them, and that they take up residence in our souls and color our view of the world, helping us become the heroes of our own stories.
--Teri.

duggaresque...part deux

I'm always a little nervous when I find those rosy places in the blogosphere where nothing is ever messy and the world is just dang skippy all the time, and lest anyone get the wrong impression from my last post that my artsy little sweet-spot of a home is all peaches and smiles, I submit to you Duggaresque...Part Deux.

Have you ever visited a real art museum? Well, yeah, me neither, but let's pretend for a minute. The halls are lined with inspiring works of imagination from some of the great minds in the craft over the centuries. Statues stand, loftily and perfectly, somehow above the sometimes-chaotic crowd bustling around below. There are no boogers here. And no wet paint.

Okay, now then, for a bit of perspective, have you ever visited a children's museum? You go over to the super-trendy 'art station' to have the kids create something, only to find that some hungry little "artist" has already made off with the tips of every single broad-tipped marker in the building, probably having eaten them and chased them down with glue or tempera paint, and obviously the green glitter, which also seems to be completely empty. And what's this? Oh, how nice--fingerpaint in puddles on the floor, and now on your shoe, and somehow up your pant leg, and suddenly all over your hands and the diaper bag and the baby and your hair. Nice.

Maybe the scupture station is a little more well-organized, so you make tracks (literally--remember the paint on your shoe?) over in that direction, only to find that the glue-glutting kid from the first station found out the hard way that those items don't sit so well in the stomach and somehow the cleanup crew has missed his not-so-little technicolor masterpiece now oozing into the carpet, you know, for posterity to enjoy, since it's full of glue (ooh, and that pretty green glitter!) and rapidly becoming one with the floor. Maybe they'll give it a name and make it one of the permanent exhibits, if the administration hasn't set aside funds for new carpet in this sort of event. But we were talking sculpture, weren't we? Ahhhh, modeling clay. Since the manufactureres of this staple of childhood creativity haven't yet discovered a way of keeping the colors from 1)bleeding 2)mixing or 3)smearing all over every surface they touch, at least without making the whole compound so toxic that you need a decontamination shower after opening the package, you try your best to interest the kids in the gummy-lump of poop-brown clayglomerate before you. Somehow, the best you or they can manage to come up with resembles strongly a zoo display of wild animal scat (those little pellets are from African pygmy deer; that big lump? Supposed to be a giraffe, but doesn't that look just like Siberian wolf scat after its latest meal of boneless mouse wings?)

I think of the Duggar's little television-world home in kind of the same way as that art museum: we don't see the mess, only the masterpiece. Nevermind that Van Gogh got so frustrated that he whacked off his own ear (I'm sure Michelle Duggar never has those kinds of days); and you think that Jackson Pollack started out by slinging paint at his canvas? Anyone care to guess what happened if the great sculptors of antiquity suddenly found themselves with a one-armed Venus because of one wrong chisel blow? They'd stick it back on with wax mixed with some rock dust, pack it up quick and ship it away to the buyer, and pray that a sunny day didn't come along too soon! Isn't that a bit like the TLC show, where the snotty noses and puddles of vomit are somehow edited out, and we get to watch a polished, perfect family moving in unison and having-a-very-nice-day-every-day-of-the-week?

My house, on the other hand, is more like the children's museum on most days--we have a lot of fun and we make a lot of mess. Oh, sure, there are some great works of art here, but they're works in progress, and sometimes the chisel hits a little too hard, or sometimes not hard enough, and sometimes we have to pray that the wax will hold. I may not be tempted to cut my ears off, but you can bet that sometimes I want to pull my hair out! And sometimes I've been found guilty of slinging the paint like Pollack and leaving the world to wonder, "What was she thinking??" And on some days, the best I can manage to create feels and looks an aweful lot like a pile of crap.

But there are days, when I take a peek past the hallowed doors of the future imagined, into the day when my dripping, cracking, smearing works-of-art are finally completed, when I have lovingly applied the last brush strokes, smoothed the last surface on the alabaster man, carved my name into the heart of each one, and see a moment when I have offered up my best works to the world, ready to take their places in the hall of great masterpieces. No one will remember the children's museum days when we struggled to make sense of anything, when we all wondered how this art project would turn out, when we wanted to sling paint all over our hard work, and when tears and goobers were all part of the process.

On that day I'll stroll past in silence, admiring the beauty, and make one last track of fresh fingerpaint footprints down the hallway on my way past.

--Teri.

duggaresque

As my belly begins to be a little more conspicuous lately as our sixth child gains a sizable standing (literally!) in our family , I'm getting more and more comments from mostly-well-intentioned people comparing our family to the (in)famous Duggar family of TLC renown. Somehow, now that we're standing on the lofty edge of 6 children, everyone we know (and most that we don't!) are tempted to throw a rope across that vast divide that separates our 6 children from the Duggar family's 19, and wait for us on the other side.

Like we're physically capable of raising 19 children without literally, figuratively, and in every other sense dropping dead (I'm flattered by the notion, really).

The critics of the Duggar family's jackpot of offspring complain that the family is too big, too white, too Christian, too organized, too delegated, too mid-western...the list goes on. There seems to be a never-ending stream of criticisms against a family who has chosen to go counter-culture and have a lot of children, receiving them as gifts, nondiscriminately and in their own time. And that pretty much scares the crap out of me.

We've decided to go counter-culture, too. Our kids don't mix with a ton of other children, we homeschool, we don't own a television, the kids have a lot of responsibility for their ages. We have about three times the culturally accepted number of children, and people are afraid we're not quitting. Some people wring their hands and worry that we're environmentally irresponsible, that we're rabidly over-populating the planet almost singlehandedly, that we're raising an army of homogenized, milky-white prosumers with a cultural appreciation for grilled-cheese-and-that's-about-it. They worry that maybe we don't recycle enough, that the kids will all grow up Republican, that they'll hate the arts and freak out when they hit sunlight.

But do I have to apologize now for being white, Christian, or mid-western? Do I have to apologize that I consider myself an artist's tool in the hands of the Great Artist, and that I consider my children to be masterpieces that I helped create? Last time I checked, my lily-whiteness wasn't on the menu of life-choices I was given, so I can't really back-pedal on that one. The mid-western thing might can be remedied, but still not really a reason to be apologetic. And as for my Christianity, while sometimes an embarrassment because of the knuckle-heads in our ranks (I include myself in this epithet at various times), I can't really apologize for that, either. Or won't, anyway.

So that leaves the kids. All. These. Kids. And I wouldn't dream of apologizing for these little jewels, their amazing uniqueness, the obviousness of their potential impact on a hurting world. One scathing commentary on the Duggar's children called the latest addition to the family a "mewling sewer rat". Really. Really?? Has that nay-sayer never held a little 'mewling rat' in his arms and fell in love in the most irrational and profound way possible? Has he never looked into the face of a little one and seen the future, fresh and undefiled? How could I possibly apologize for helping to raise my very own passel of little tomorrows? Heck, they may all grow up Republican, and we may not recycle enough, and there's at least one of my brood who has good reason to freak out when he hits sunlight (oh, the woeful whiteness!), but not only will these kids love the arts, they are the arts--little kinetic masterpieces in a world in need of colorful motion. I could no more apologize for my children than Michaelangelo could have apologized for the statue of David.

But we will try to recycle more.

--Teri.

soup du jour, a la teri.

This may be the best soup I have ever created, and while my children say I should hoard the recipe as some kind of clandestine concoction, I'm sharing it, and I think you'll love me for it. Keep in mind that all amounts and processes are approximate, as I was all about the flow-of-gastronomical-consciousness on this one.

Sweet Potato Chowder with Bacon and Leeks

3 Tbsp. vegetable oil
1/2 lb. bacon, chopped
1 leek, sliced fairly thinly (1/4"ish)
1/4 c. white cooking wine
4-5 lg. sweet potatoes or yams
2-3 c. water
4 c. milk (whole milk is, like, yummy)
1 pt. heavy whipping cream
flour, mixed in water, to thicken (about 1/4-1/2 c. of flour)
salt & fresh ground pepper to taste
1/4 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
1 bunch green onions, chopped (or sliced, however you look at it)
1/4-1/2 c. tequila
1/2-1 c. romano cheese, grated

Okay, so you saute your bacon and leeks in the vegetable oil in a decently-sized soup pot, and throw in some white cooking wine. Cook over fairly med-highish heat until the yummy caramelly thing starts happening, then remove everything and throw it in a bowl for later.

Cube up your sweet potatoes, add that and the water back into the pot, and cook on high until the sweet potatoes start to be tender; add the milk and whipping cream, and bring it back to a simmer, then add in the flour/water mixture, salt and pepper and nutmeg. When that all starts to thicken up and bubble oh-so-deliciously, toss back in your bacon-n-leeks mixture and the green onions, and then throw in some tequila and let the alcohol cook off. Add the romano cheese, give it all one last good stir, and throw in some more tequila just for good measure. ;) Serve to the hungry masses, who have been drooling at the smells since the bacon first hit the pot.

Serves about 10 as a lunch soup or more for a course, of course.

my side of the mountain: in which i fail to climb a 14er

I promised to post about our illustrious adventure up the slopes of Gray's Peak and Torrey's Peak in northern Colorado last weekend, or at least about the performance of my aforementioned cheap clothing layers.

On the climbing end of things, the story doesn't go so well; the kids mostly freaked out within the first quarter mile, we had some altitude sickness going on, and we turned around, the only people actually heading down the trail at 6 o'clock in the morning. Humiliating? Yeah, but you can always blame it on the kids, right?

Sunday morning, Christopher, Ben, and Isaac redoubled their efforts and started out on the trail once again, and this time made it all the way up Gray's Peak and down again--quite an accomplishment for all of them, but especially Ben and Isaac, Ben having now summited two 14ers in a month's time, and Isaac having successfully summited his first before his seventh birthday.

But I digress about all that. I'm here to talk about layers! We camped at about 11,000 feet in late September and somehow managed to not freeze--in fact, we stayed pretty comfortable most of the time! I attribute this to 1) a kick-butt sleeping bag 2) a little Coleman Black Cat tent heater and 3) our layers-on-the-cheap. Even the guys, who experienced cutting winds and even some snow at the top of Gray's, said that they stayed pretty comfortable on their trek, thanks to their Target layers, their Wal-Mart fleece gloves and headwraps, and their Smartwool socks. Apparantly, at 14,000 feet, those neat little air-activated hand warmers don't do much (no air up there?), so it was definately the clothing that did the trick.

Down at base camp, the remainder of the kids and I broke camp and packed everything up in the face of some pretty gnarly winds, but still managed to keep toasty in our wicking base layers, fleecy mid-layers, and wind-and water-resistant top layers. Of course, the hardest part is always crawling out of the warm sanctuary of the sleeping bag, but the shock was mostly absorbed by having good clothes to put on immediately, so we were happy campers.

Uhh, pardon the pun, but you knew that was coming, didn't you?

--Teri.

layers on the cheap

When I started this blog, I promised to mix it up a little and include posts on all kinds of stuff. Lately, I've been drawn to the deeper waters, posting mostly on movies and my own mental muddiness, and I've realized that the deep waters are usually the coldest, and sometimes not the most friendly.

So I thought I'd write about clothes shopping, instead.

My family came up with the wonderful idea this summer to hike our first 14er (14,000-foot mountain, for those flatlanders among you), and then the summer suddenly just melted away. Now we find ourselves swirling about in the eddies of autumn and wondering if we can still pull it off, now that the weather will be significantly cooler, and I seem to be the only member of the family who actually has any concerns about not freezing to death. Hey, I attended a ladies' camping workshop at REI, and I know what's up! I know that it's a sheer miracle that mankind has managed to survive this long without wicking layers, and that, if you don't have your fleece in the middle, and water-and-wind-proof breathability on the outside, you're as good as dead. I know that you have to have Smartwool socks or your feet will die of hypothermia, and then frostbite, all at 45 degrees!

I also unfortunately know how much this thinking costs, and it hurts. I've been drooling over the *perfect* jacket at REI for a couple of weeks now that would set me back 200 smackaroos, and ruminating over the cost of layering up in true mountaineering style. It would probably be well over $1000, just for me. There are seven of us. And this is one mountain (maybe two) we're talking about. And 5 of us are growing, fast. Well, make that 7 of us, if you count my belly and its little inhabitant (which you really do have to take into account, especially when all these spiffy layers have to zip up over an expanding waistline).

So my natural inclination is to try and chinch, but not too much, because that's always disastrous--you do, after all, get what you pay for. I searched WallyWorld, Ross, REI's clearance rack, all the usual haunts, and came up pretty much empty-handed. But then I turned to Target, and was delighted to find a great variety of stuff: not only a wicking, long-sleeved base layer, but one that even has compression! Base layer pants that keep the moisture away from the skin; a mid-layer fleece jacket to add more insulation and moisture control; a water- and wind-resistant top layer jacket to round it all out. Now, I don't get the prestige of wearing around the REI or North Face or (gasp!) Arcteryx label, and I might not get quite the performance out of this gear that I would had I spent gads and gads of cash, but I can tell you that, for about $150, I got pretty much the entire shebang, plus some other camping gear and quite a bit of layering for a couple of the kids...not bad!

I'll let you know how this all works out after we get back from the weekend excursion up the long slope above timberline.
--Teri.

the boy in the striped pajamas

Some films are like riding in a roller coaster: you pay your money, settle in, and you get some excitement and ya-yas.

Some films are like riding in your car: you know where you're going, you can predict a happy ending, you don't have to think too hard, everyone's happy.

Some films are like having triple bypass surgery in the back of a moving ambulance: you have no idea how it's going to turn out, it's scary, it's hard, it's bloody, and it's necessary.

We watched The Boy in the Striped Pajamas a few nights ago, naively thinking that a Holocaust story involving children might have a just-in-time happy ending. We forgot temporarily that the Holocaust itself didn't get to have one of those nice tidy endings, and for a few moments after the end credits began to roll, I felt sort of ripped off, like Hollywood had cheated us out of a good time with this realism nonsense.

How myopic I sometimes am.

--Teri.

underthinkers anonymous

I think I finally got my fill of idiotic responses last night while trying to contribute a tidbit of perspective to someone's sentimental but not very well thought-out battle anthem for standardized healthcare in America. The original phrase went something like 'No one should die because they cannot afford healthcare, and no one should go broke because they get sick.' In other words, 'The government should pay for our healthcare, and the government should pay for our healthcare.' Which sounds nice. Really nice, especially for people who have health problems and are uninsured and are having a tough time paying for it. I get that. And I'll even qualify that by saying that my family constitutes a few of those 'millions of uninsured Americans' who can't afford 'decent' healthcare, and yeah, it's frustrating and insecure.

But really, at its core, that statement is oversimplified. People hear the siren song of free something-or-other and somehow forget that there is always a price to be paid. And the bigger the sugar cube we think we're getting, the bigger the pricetag. So I commented on this, that we need to remember that, for all the media hype about how wonderful universal healthcare is, I hear stories from our neighbors in the north that you have to be prepared to wait up to 2 years for things like major surgeries. Two years! That's a price to be paid. And I'm not even talking about the taxes, just the logistics.

So some other person wrote in with the stereotypical, "Wow, I guess these people want people to die and go broke! I thought the debate was a lot simpler than that!" Now, normally, I would calmly try to further elucidate my point, which I believe is valid to the discussion, but last night I just snapped instead, and whipped back, "Yep, I'm all into death and poverty, can't you tell? Good grief." Which is not a very diplomatic approach to a debate, to be sure, but really, how sad is it that people get so attached to what they underthink will be the cure-all for a bad situation that they cannot intelligently discuss factors they hadn't considered?

Now, I realize that some of you reading this may be proponents of Obama's healthcare plan, and for those of you that are, I can understand your reasons, and I respect that--a lot. I'm not presuming to hold a corner on the facts in this very heated debate, and I understand that there's a lot to consider. Maybe universal healthcare is a great idea, and maybe it's a terrible one. Maybe it's just so-so. Maybe it'll work, and maybe it won't, and maybe it will just sorta work. Our system as it stands is certainly broken and in need of major overhaul, so don't assume that what Obama says of conservatives is true, that we just want to keep things the way they are.

But please, please, oh, pretty please, whatever your leaning, don't underthink the issue and become the voices of a million clanging cymbals not saying anything at all. There will always be heated debate about every political, moral, and social issue there is, but that never, never, never makes one side stupid because they disagree or have something dissenting to factor into the conversation. Have we lost the ability for civil discourse entirely?

--Teri.

goya's ghosts

It's not too often that I watch a film, and the first descriptor that comes to mind afterwards is "completely unnecessary", and the second is, " ridiculously superfluous", and the third is, "no, just ridiculous".

Netflix billed Goya's Ghosts as "the epic true story..." of Francisco Goya, the Spanish Inquisition, and the French Revolution. So we watched it, thinking we'd get a nice glimpse of a Spanish artist whose work was previously unknown to me, as well as a couple of intriguing events in Spain's history that I could use a little more information on. I really need to research movies before I watch them from now on.

The movie centers around Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish painter, and his connection to Ines, a young woman whose portrait he has painted and who is in deep trouble with the Spanish Inquisition for failing to nosh on a piece of pork at a dinner party. She is branded a Judaizer and a heretic, tortured, and thrown in prison for 15 years. Goya's role is to forget all about her for all that time and then try to help her at the end, the old 'too-little-too-late' thing. By this time, the French Revolution has reached Spain, a power struggle ensues, Ines is let out of prison and seeks the help of Goya to find the daughter she bore while in prison, etc. etc. The end of the film finds Ines pretty much insane, her ex-priest rapist dead, and Goya following lamely along as she walks with the death-cart along the streets of Madrid with somebody else's baby in her arms. Close curtain.

Okay, so what do you do at the end of an obtuse film like that? Why, you go to Wikipedia, that's what you do! You think, "This can't be the end of it--that's not even right!" You think, "Is this for real? What a weird story!" And so you begin to dig. And you find out that this movie is in fact bastardized historical fiction and bears no resemblence to any real events at all! You find out there was no Ines, no trouble with the Inquisition, no cross-mingling with the Revolution.

What you find out is that some sad little movie executive sat in the middle of his idea vacuum one day, when suddenly someone walked in with a preposterous idea for another Hollywood fricassee of history, and he just went for it. They must have figured that if they threw Natalie Portman in with all the no-name actors with schizophrenic Spanish accents, they'd have a sure thing on their hands.

I'll always maintain that the real victim of Y2K wasn't the tech industry at all--it was the movie industry. Evidently, on December 31, 1999, at 11:59 pm, Hollywood ran out of good movie ideas.
--Teri.

the tenuous threads of faith

Ever so often (actually, much more often than I'm really comfortable with), I start a long and convoluted circle of thought about my faith. It starts out as a simple question what I actually believe. Then it gets a little deeper and into the less easily-answered questions about why I believe those things and what the rest of the world believes. Before I know it, I'm in up to my ear lobes in the mirey ponderances about the nature of faith itself in relation to my experience. And it gets very confusing, yet always draws me back ultimately to the very first question, and maybe this is why I start over and over again. It goes something like this:

"Okay, so why do I believe Christianity is all that, anyway?" (This leads to some preliminary and sometimes vague rumination on historicity, bibliographical evidence, the nature of man, et cetera. Okay, deeper we go now...)

"So what about Islam? Judaism? Hinduism? Taoism? Agnosticism? Aren't there some great Muslim apologists with air-tight cases for their faith?" (This gets more difficult to answer in my own headspace, but I can still track with some basic facts of history to provide some insight on the origins and underpinnings of these other religions. On to the murkies...)

"In my own experience, what has flavored my view of religion and of the nature of God?" (This is where I get hopelessly muddled in how my culture, my emotional wounds, my exposure to media, my geographical locale, my relationships, my education, my philosophical leanings, even the food I eat has influenced how I view faith and my relationship to God. At this point, I generally throw my intellectual hands up in dispair and figure that it's all impossible to parse out.)

And then I'm back at square one the next time, determined to someday complete (or break) that circle and get to the inside of what drives and informs this sometimes misunderstood faith of mine.

Was religion meant to be this hard-thought upon?

--Teri.

let the craving begin

Sushi...for breakfast. (Hold the wasabi. No, wait. Gimme that wasabi! Ugh--I HATE wasabi! Where's the wasabi??)

McDouble in the afternoon (just one).

Cheese pizza for dinner.

Brownies.

Tartar sauce at bedtime.

Why does Starbucks close so dang early?

This was day one of the cravings. Pray for my husband.

--Teri.

thoughts from afar

I dropped a bombshell on Facebook this afternoon, confessing that I've finally come to terms with the fact that I've been involved in a very intimate long distance relationship for a very, very long time.

We'll see if I get any turned heads.

Who is it? What is his name? Does Christopher know?? Well, yeah, Christopher knows. And I'm pretty sure he's happy for me. I talk about this relationship all the time with him, in fact, even when things feel a little rocky and I'm not sure that both sides of the relationship are working out.

It's not too hard to guess that my distal infatuation is with, in fact, the God of the universe. It just struck me finally this morning that my relationship with Him is so like a long-distance romantic relationship, always longing for more, never spending enough quality time together, worrying that something is wrong, interpreting and misinterpreting silences, always giddy over the next encounter.

Maybe this makes it a little easier to wrap my mind around the intangibility of my faith and the awkwardness of not having a sense of solid presence of God in my life all the time.
--Teri.

the two trees

Just thinking on this poem by William Butler Yeats today...

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart;
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody;
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.

Beloved, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the winged sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.

--Teri.

the weight of the world

Christopher and I were sitting in a bagel shop downtown the other morning, having shuffled our children off for the weekend so we could enjoy some alone time together, when our conversation came around to the weightier issues of the world and what we're supposed to do about them. It ocurred to me that, while the world is a mighty big place full of mighty big problems, it shouldn't really be that hard to 'spread the love', so to speak, and start making a dent in the suffering experienced around the world.

On our own, it's easy to think that our small contributions to humanity can't possibly make any difference. Christopher turned to me at one point in our conversation and queried me about whether we needed to be doing more about the homelessness problem in Colorado Springs, and it suddenly felt as if we were neglecting the needs of our fellow man completely. But I asked him, "What would it take for us to feel like we're doing enough?" And that question didn't have an easy answer until we began to consider how easy it would be to solve a great many problems if we all just did a little.

What if each of us supported just one other person in some way? What if, for each child in the United States who has been blessed with an economically stable home, there was a poor child in a third-world country being supported financially, educationally, spiritually, and medically? What if a family with enough sponsored a family without enough? What if a pregnant woman in the United States helped provide prenatal support for a pregnant woman in Afghanistan? What if a single adult in America sponsored a single adult in Haiti?

Then the weight of the world would be on all of our shoulders, where it belongs, where we carry each other, where we are carried by each other, and where we all carry the world forward.
--Teri.

confessions of a reluctant jesus freak

Jesus lives in me. There-- I said it. That hurt.

I was challenged at church on Sunday morning to resist the urge to pandyfoot around my religion and to start being more up-front about what I believe. I didn't think that would be too much of a problem--until the speaker challenged the crowd to use the words. At that moment, a quote I learned in childhood popped into my head: "If you tell people you talk to God, they say you're religious. If you tell them that God talks to you, they say you're crazy." For me to say 'Jesus lives in me' is even crazier-sounding than 'God talks to me', and yet it's pretty much the core of my belief as a Jesus-freak.

So what does it mean?

Good question. Maybe I haven't spent enough time thinking about that. If we're talking about a manifestation of an actual spirit, that's awefully hard for me to get my head around. What's easier to think about is the essence of Jesus' teaching and ethos living on in my heart and mind. Then again, maybe I'm tempted to limit the power of the supernatural, and maybe there is some sort of mystical possession taking place. And I guess I'm okay with that, though it's a lot harder to explain and feels pretty woo-woo to write or speak about. I do know that when I have moments of extreme clarity or above-and-beyond patience or understanding, it doesn't feel like it comes from me, but Someone higher granting much-needed grace in the middle of my lack-of-wisdomness.

Maybe faith is like skin, strong and yet tenuous, and I've never felt completely comfortable within either one, but I've never been able to do without the essential nature of either one, either. So somewhere inside of my faith and inside of my skin, Jesus lives in some fashion, and I hope He understands the relationship better than I do and that He's comfortable here.
--Teri.

dreaming in reverse

There are times when I guess my mind decompresses from the stress of the day by replaying its events, albeit bizarrely, in the form of my nightdreaming. I usually awaken the next morning somewhat confused, maybe even with some blurred lines between what was real and what was the dreaming, but ready to move on with the day.

Things have been changing a little lately.

Lately I'm sort of dreaming in reverse. Well, not reverse exactly. It's more like my mind has a backload of work that it has to process through, so my mind and my dreams are off-sync by about 4 days right now. In other words, last night I dreamed about the events of about 4 days ago; the night-before-last, I dreamed about what happened 5 days ago. I suspect that, because today was kind of boring (or at least low-key, because I was taught long ago that you're only 'bored' if you're 'boring'--ack!) I might catch up on 2 days' worth of dreaming and will have some really wild mashup of Tuesday and Wednesday. This might be a good thing, since life has been going by too quickly lately and I can't remember so well, at least when I'm waking, what happened that long ago.

It would really be cool if I not only caught up in my dreaming, but actually got ahead a little bit and started having contorted prophetic dreams about what was going to happen in the next couple of days. Maybe if I sit really still for about 48 hours, my mind will have a chance to catch up and show me some interesting things.

Then again, I might just have desperately long, dreadfully boring dreams about myself sitting, waiting. Hmm.
--Teri.

sacred sorrow

i'm wrapped
folded
maybe tangled--
inside this warmth,
the quiet of a sacred brown sorrow;
dark like a dirty teardrop,
deeper than the dreaming.

--teri.

peace

When faced with life-altering decisions, I always find myself expecting a lighted path, maybe some neon and flashers, pointing the way to the right choice. And I expect there to be an accompanying feeling of serenity that surrounds and imbues the decision, once made, with an aura of rightness.

I was faced with one of those decisions today, and I concentrated very hard in my mind to pick out the bright lights, recalling the psalmist David who once wrote, "You are a light to my path..." when reminding himself that God had a hand in this decision-making business. Ernest as I was, though, no illumination appeared. Instead, what I got was an image of me, on a bike, at a fork in the road, both paths obscured by deep fog. I pictured myself choosing the more exciting path to the right and sailing off into the fog, breathless and exhilirated, and then I pictured myself turning away from it and, suddenly on my feet, walking somberly into the fog on the left and into the less exciting but more stable decision.

Both paths carried with them unknown risks, unforeseen outcomes, hidden joys and sorrows. And I had no idea which one was the right path.

I finally chose the stable path into the unknown, and I think it was the right decision...for now. And now I'm wondering what peace feels like. If this is peace, it feels profound, like an amputation, only less painful in a way. It feels serious, like a prison sentence, but without the shame. And it feels hollow, like a little piece of my heart is gone, only without the ache. Maybe it's like the feeling of just having birthed a baby, when you realize that there's a huge part of you missing, only it's not missing at all, and you struggle to reconcile the bodily sensation of sudden vacancy to the spiritual feeling of overwhelming completion.

There weren't any attending angels holding lanterns over this foggy path I chose to tread today, but I think there was a peace, uneasy and awkward as it may be, and I think I can walk now into the shrouded unknown of a decision made and feel my footfalls landing softly on the quiet solid of my future.

--Teri.

3 days

Life,
like a promise,
broken--
torn from history
Word from page
Living Water
conscripted to stone.



grey dawning,
bereft as night
forgotten Key
fog on the Road.



impossible Dream --
sickened hearts
aFlame!
Fire
consuming marrow
burning ashes
night--
overcome.

something wrong with good

There's been a feeling creeping up the back of my mind for the last several years, lingering around that analytical part of my brain and tickling the bottoms of my sensibilities.

The feeling is this: Good Friday shouldn't be called 'Good' at all.

What was good about the leather and lead that took first flesh, then muscle, then tendon, then bone?
What good was there in thorny spikes invading that tender space between scalp and skull?
Was it good that a Man fell under the weight of His own death trap? Or that nails were driven through feet that had walked countless miles to give love and hands that had touched the untouchable?
What can we call good in the baseness of Roman soldiers who thought so little of killing that they played dice games while blood dripped?
What was good about that horrible day when the sky was a black funerary shroud and the earth convulsed in its grief?

I think they need to rename the day.

--Teri.

internal monologue of the elemental potato

We went for our first bike ride of the season yesterday. It was my first time on a bike since giving birth, and ultimately, I've decided that childbirth is quite a bit easier for me than pedaling a bike downtown and back. The following constitutes the thoughts that coursed through my mind as my body coursed down the bike trail on the back of my dear bike, the Chartreuse Caboose (named thusly because it's green, and you know where a caboose is always located in a train):

Mile 1: This seat is harder than I remember. A lot harder. Why does my calorie-o-meter only say that I've only burned 5 calories? I'm sure it's at least 75. Must need a new battery.

Mile 2: Ahh, I'm settling in. I feel so alive! I was born to bike! I think I'll sign up for a century (a hundred-mile ride) this year, just to give myself a challenge for the summer. Why do they make bike saddles so hard, anyway? Guess they know what they're doing.

Mile 3: Why does my odometer say that I've only gone 3 miles? I'm sure it's at least 6. Really must need a new battery. Biking is not for sissies, but it's cool, because I'm all over it.

Mile 4: Did they do something to the trail to increase the incline since last summer? Is there something wrong with just making the whole thing flat?? This is getting tougher, but I'm so thankful to have a husband who pushes me farther than I think I can go. He's awesome. My butt hurts. What a cool cyclist I am.

Mile 5: Why does my calorie-o-meter only read 250 calories?? Haven't I burnt at least 1000? Who in their right mind would even consider signing up for a stupid century ride? That's suicide! This whole 'sometimes-the-path-is-paved-and-sometimes-it's-gravel' thing is really not funny. Not funny, City of Colorado Springs! Oh, and my butt hurts. Do you hear that, City of Colorado Springs?? My butt hurts!!

Mile 6: My butt hurts. My butt hurts. My butt hurts.

Mile 7: Ahh, on the way home now. What the heck--where did that hill come from? It was downhill just a minute ago!! Did we get lost??

Mile 8: Dang right, calorie-o-meter--you just keep climbing. What is the deal with my husband? Why does he always push me way farther than I can go? Insensitive rogue.

Mile 9: What is UP with the the swordfish and the bloated dummy, anyway?

Mile 10: Curse you, all you naturally athletic types! If one more hippy-dippy cyclist passes me and says, "Good morning! How are ya?!" or is biking and juggling at the same time, I'm going to give new meaning to the phrase 'the wheel spoke'!

Mile 11: Killll meeeee. KIIIILLLL MMMMEEEE. My butt will never be the same. It's going to be a black-and-blue horror in about two minutes. I'm going to look like a baboon all week! My sadistic husband is going to be hearing about this every 4 minutes for at least a month.

Mile 12: What's the point in even trying to get home? If I make it into the driveway, I'll just collapse there for a day or two, and they can haul my blackened carcass into the house and to the couch where it belongs.

Mile 12.1: Look, butt! We're home! We made it! Butt?? Speak to me, butt! I'm sorry, butt. We'll just stay on the couch from now on, I promise. Some people were made to bike, others were made to hold the furniture down. We'll stay right here on the couch and write nasty letters to bike saddle manufacturers. Until next time.

--Teri. And Teri's Butt.

ubiquitousness

Every once in awhile I get a Providential reminder about humanity.

I forget sometimes that we're important, all of us. I go on my way, passing through my days like I hold the monopoly on soulful journeying, like I am special. And some days, the tables turn and I go through my days as though I'm just another cookie cut from a cosmic mold.

Thing is, I am special. And so are the 6.some-odd billion other divine sparks running around on this great ball. It's easy to slip into the not-so-clever lie that, because we are ubiquitous, we are therefore mundane. How can my story matter in the hugeness of life? How can yours? How can hers? The real question should be, "How can it not?" If we were not gifted with sentient souls, it might be easier to dismiss humanity as one more biological curiosity, though one could argue that we're all amazing just on the merits of our crazily complicated and unique biology alone.

But we each carry something much deeper and much higher than just the body, and it is because of this, if nothing else, that each story of each life bears such gravity and is so profoundly important. The old men in the parking lot yelling at each other over a dented car; the grumpy lady in the check-out line who couldn't get past being run into by a 5-year-old unsteadily wielding a cart; the orphan in Sudan dying of the same disease that took her parents; the Chinese miner who died along with 200 of his coworkers. We all matter.

It's a good idea to re-align our perspectives every once in awhile and refuse to be swallowed by the immensity of the importance of our humanity, don't you think?

--Teri.

there will be bored.

I don't know how I got on this kick, but evidently I'm on it now and can't get off. I'm questing for the perfect movie, one that will challenge me, reaffirm my love for humanity, make me think about things a little differently, make me laugh and then cry and then laugh some more, and that will be, of course, completely off the beaten path of Hollywood films.

Where, oh where, can this movie be?

I watched There Will Be Blood the other night with my hubby, thinking we'd spend a cultured evening watching a somewhat avant-garde character sketch and come away feeling, you know, artsy. My little big brother Matt raves about this film, and I've come to appreciate his taste in cinema; it was he, after all, who turned me on to Serenity, Gattaca, and Stardust, mostly against my will but with no regrets. So I figured that if he said that Daniel Day-Lewis was masterful in this performance, than this must be a film worth watching. Maybe even the film.

That said, at the risk of insulting my sibling's sensibilities, I hated this film. I hated the creepy, disjointed soundtrack that never, ever, ever matched the action and left me constantly on edge, thinking that some horrible creature of the damned would soon be dredged up from the oily depths of the earth. I hated Daniel Day-Lewis' character, an ambiguous man whose wildly spinning moral compass left not only everyone in the movie but also everyone in the audience (this audience, anyway) feeling confused, perplexed, alienated, and more than a little freaked out. I hated the plot, if indeed there was one beyond a strange man getting stranger. I hated the title, which caused me to continually half-expect Clint Eastwood to appear on the scene with a couple of six-shooters and a bad mood. I hated the other characters, a bunch of truly weird charismatic Christian freako hypocrites with a demented take on everything from family to power to, well, everything. Mostly, though, I hated wasting a perfectly good Friday night waiting on a movie to redeem itself, only to come to the twisted, bitter end and realize that it was a completely non-redemptive film. On purpose. This film was like a French western in the style of Quinten Tarantino with elements of Stanley Kubrick thrown in for effect.

If there's something in this film that I'm missing, like dynamic character development, subtle plot twists, irony, some sense of transcendent conflict, even tragedy, please, please clue me in.
In the meantime, I guess I'll just keep looking for the perfect film.

--Teri.

the hitler i wanted to meet

Hitler has been on my mind a lot lately. After all, who can erase from their imaginations that classic, horriblized face with the steely eyes and the iconic moustache? The world rightly remembers him as one of the worst scourges ever to be let loose upon humanity, though few stop to consider the causative circumstances in the young Adolph's life that led him to such a loss of self and ultimately to the megalithic horror we remember today. I think I would have liked to meet that young Adolph to better understand how a heart once touched by art and love became so barren and embittered.

Although common knowledge among historians, many laypeople don't realize that Hitler spent his childhood being beaten and terrorized by his bastard father (a mark of shame in his day and culture) and watching his beloved mother endure the same. He rebelled against his father by blowing off his schoolwork and so was considered failure, though he had been an excellent student and a leader earlier; later on, his mother--whom he evidently adored--died of cancer. Adolph developed a love of art and painting but was rejected from art school twice and redirected toward architecture, which he was interested in but lacked the formative education because of his earlier rebellion, and so that didn't work out, either. His life was plagued with failures and sadness.

Then Adolph fell in love. His niece Geli evidently captivated his heart, and though their relationship was unclear and strained, it is believed that they truly loved one another. She was found dead, shot through the head with Hitler's pistol, and this event marked a devastating change in his character and behavior; he became depressed and ever more violent and vitriolic. The rest is a grisly history ending in mass murder and eventually suicide.

I've no temptation to try and justify the atrocities spawned by Hitler's diabolical and twisted mind, or to over-simplify the causes of the ideology that proved fatal to millions. But perhaps it's a worthwhile exercise to think about the ways in which his family dynamic affected his heart, and to consider the connection between a wounded heart, a keen but unfulfilled mind, and a terrifying onslaught of violence. What would we think of Adolph as a child? What would we see in his youthful eyes that were already tortured and misunderstood? And what does that tell us about the importance of nurturing children and honoring the fragility of young spirits? The biggest question looming in my mind is what kind of intervention may have stemmed the tide of failure and brokenness and given hope to what looked like a doomed life. We've all heard stories of people who overcame horrible circumstances to live lives of joy and fulfillment, and stories of those who were overcome by those same circumstances and somehow drowned in the deluge, taking countless others down with them. What's the difference?
--Teri.

reign over me

I hate Adam Sandler. I hate movies with copious foul language. I hate Pearl Jam. And I especially hate movies with obtuse endings where you never know if it's going to turn out okay or not.

But I loved Reign Over Me. It was one of the most difficult films I've watched in a very long time, probably even harder than Schindler's List was. It wasn't funny, it was raw, it hurt to watch it. The pain of a man who lost his family in the September 11th attacks was almost too much to watch; I felt voyeuristic sitting through Charlie's utter inability to wrap his mind around his profound loss, and something close to obscene bearing witness to his intricate choreography of avoidance and denial.

This film was an uncomfortably close brush with the messiness of life and loss and a coarse rumination on the endurance of love way out past the tattered fringes of sanity. It was a sobering reminder that even these few years later, there are still scores of people suffering in their various ways from the consequences of that horrible day in September. It was a reminder that I needed, I think.
--Teri.

happy birthday, charles

As the world gears up for Darwin's birthday celebration, I'm finding myself niggled by the presuppositions of science in the past century or so and wishing that a civil discourse on the origins of life wasn't so difficult to achieve.

I have lost count of the number of times that any mention of intelligent design has provoked the heated and incredulous response, "Come on! Do you really believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago?!" Perhaps the better, fairer question would be, "Do you have any evidence to support that theory?" Is it possible that Darwinian evolution doesn't have the monopoly on good science, or that there may be evidence that contests or at least raises valid questions about the theory of evolution? Is it possible to discuss this evidence in a way that temporarily suspends the assumptions of biology and gives unbiased credence to both sides of the debate?

As an example, it's fairly well-known that the fossil beds of Montana have given up a T-rex skeleton, a femur of which appears to have red blood cells--marrow! Instead of challenging the notion that this tissue could possibly be as old as science assumes, the headlines read, "70 Million Year Old Bone Marrow Found!" If we're intellectually honest, is it really easier to suppose that blood cells could survive for 70 million years in the ground, than to raise the uncomfortable question of whether they're really that old?

Another issue that plagues my mind is the fact that biology was so unsophisticated in the 19th century, when it was assumed that, on a cellular level, structures were pretty simple and lacked the complexity of larger organisms. Darwin couldn't have imagined that, 200 years later, we'd be peering into the heart of the atom and being amazed to find still more levels of complexity and precision, something that likely wouldn't have fit well into the idea of macro-evolution. What will we find when we finally dismember a quark? My understanding here is vague at best and probably grossly under-informed at worst, but wasn't it Darwin's assertion that life arose out of simple structures and gradually became more sophisticated through selection, and that on a cellular level any organism would bear the imprint of its primitive self? As it turns out, pond scum is more complicated than we could possibly imagine, and the deeper we look, the more complicated it gets.

I realize that a good debate hardly ever changed anyone's mind, but I do believe that it's the spirit of informed, respectful dialogue that reveals the intellectual core of any system of thought. As much as I have a problem with half-cocked creationists dreaming up half-baked arguments to support their beliefs, I have an even bigger problem with self-assured Darwinian evolutionists smugly failing to ask honest questions. If one theory or the other is credible, it should be able to withstand the rigors of cross-examination, and I think it's only reasonable to assume there should be a reasonable discourse between the two.
--Teri.

voice

There's been a vague thought trying to surface in my mind for maybe years now, and it's only now becoming clear enough for me to identify the fuzzy edges of it and begin to see it taking form enough to make its way to my fingertips. I've been putting off writing in any appreciable way for years because I was afraid I didn't have anything to say, hadn't found my voice yet, I thought. But now that I'm in the thick of life and have arrived at the uncomfortable reality of being a real live grown-up adult person thing, it strikes me that I'm really afraid of losing my voice. I guess this means it must be in there somewhere already, waiting patiently to get out, not wanting to go away in the maelstrom of children and work and school and life and humanity.

I find myself thinking about the consequences of global events in terms of what'll happen to my voice if I'm caught up in it all--if the economy tanks and my family loses everything, what will become of my voice? Will I lose my voice if I have more children and end up drowning in homeschooling for 15 more years? If we move to a third-world country and become missionaries, will there be a place for my voice there?

Part of my reason for diving into blogging at long last, I guess, is really to give voice to, well, my voice. Maybe I should start capitalizing that, or give it a name, if it's going to become a friend of mine. For now, I'd like to introduce you to my voice; it's still young and somewhat timid, but I hope that my voice and your voice find something in common and find a nice place to get to know one another here.
--Teri.