the whispered giggle of tomorrow

Sometimes, the future happens so fast, you don't have time to believe it; it's been that kind of future for me lately.

Three months ago I lamented the great gaping silence that was issuing forth from the heavens and rending my soul, sure that any hope for the soon-to-come I was imagining was dead and gone, dried up and blown away on the bitter winds of Divine indifference. Then I thought I caught the faint sound of God giggling at me, and I just assumed that it was the derisive laugh of an angry Parent laughing at His little fist-shaking child.

I think now that this only made Him giggle harder. And He's been giggling ever since. What I was actually hearing was the sound of the Great Surpriser of the Universe hiding behind the door to my future with a bouquet of balloons and a chocolate cake, giggling like a schoolboy at the wollop-daddy of a surprise life He's had planned all this time. That door swung open on its hinges at the end of July, and I don't think I've been able to wipe the shocked grin off my face since.

It seems like I'm always drawn back to musical metaphors to neatly describe the messy business of my soul, and what's occurring to me at the moment is that the past few months have been like a really intense piece of modern serious music: a lot of dissonance-- an aching, uncomfortable sitting with a very long moment of no resolution. How any of those clashing chords could work themselves out in my life felt mind-rippingly impossible. I wasn't so good at seeing the possibilities, and I definitely wasn't appreciating the music like a good student should.

But then suddenly, that moment came, when the dissonance broke and just melted into a pure, sigh-heaving, eye-closing sort of sweet music that I couldn't even have imagined before. It was the music of Heaven, of the way being opened to me, of the crooked path suddenly becoming straight. It was a bouquet of balloons and chocolate cake and the grandmother of surprise parties. It was Glorious.

There aren't a whole lot of moments in life when we can really say that we've had a solid, immovable knowledge that we are just exactly where we're supposed to be, doing just exactly the thing we're supposed to be doing. Our purpose and direction are not, for some Divine reason, often made that plain to us. And I'm thinking that the reason for this is to help us develop a little blind faith that the chuckles we hear from Heaven aren't borne of derision, but of adoration; that the crisis we're in at any given moment can inexplicably dissolve into big beautiful; that there is a miracle tucked away inside of each and every moment of longing, just waiting for the door to swing open.

--Teri.

a quiet reckoning with the ashes

I've come to think of Colorado Springs as my hometown for a lot of reasons.  Most of my friends live here; it was my first home after Christopher and I were married; 4/6 of my children were born here; it was where I first fell in love with living in a city. 

When we lived within the city proper, I used to wake one of our children at random at about 4 in the morning during the summer, and we would set off, bleary-eyed into the urban wild with our walking sticks and a flashlight, to discover our neighborhoods before the sun came up. We covered miles of territory, my kids and I, and talked through anything and everything. We felt safe inside the quiet bustling of a city about to awaken and so charged with energy. It was almost magical, and it was everything I ever wanted out of living in a city.

A little over a week ago, my precious city became ravaged at the edges by the worst wildfire in our state's history.  We all watched helplessly as the fire seemed to tumble down the mountainside like a hideous lava flow, toward the homes of friends, and strangers, and the very heart of our community. With sick tears draining fast from terrified hearts, we snapped hundreds of pictures--the paparazzi of the damned, unable to turn away. Thousands of us drove aimlessly but furiously around town, driving ourselves deep into the choking smoke, desperate for any scrap of information or a better vantage point. The air was a thick stew of charred forest, until an altogether different smell began to swirl ominously through town: the acrimonious bitter stench of burning home. Someone on the radio said you'd never forget the smell of a burning house, and I wondered what he meant until Tuesday evening, when that inescapable, thick-as-tar smell permeated everything for miles and shrouded the sun. Despite the awful burning and the thickness we all felt in our chests, we stayed and stayed and stayed, watching from our perches all over town as house after house surrendered to the killing flame and was no more. It was our own little apocolypse right on the edge of town, more fascinating and frightening than anything many of us had ever seen or known.

The rapidly passing days have carried the fire away from our doorsteps, and the valiant efforts of scores upon scores of courageous firefighters is only now truly coming to light, as images surface of thousands of homes spared from the encroaching inferno. We drove over to the scarred area of town last evening, and we clearly were not the only ones who couldn't keep themselves away from a closer knowledge of the terror that was. There was an eerie juxtaposition of residents, trying to pull their lives back together and act normal again, coupled with the almost reverential caravan of people on a nearly holy pilgrimage to the heart of the disaster. We drove down a few streets where the homes were untouched, and then turned down a side street where every house looked just fine until the third one on the right, nestled between two unscathed houses, and razed to the ground. The feeling that overcame me was not unlike seeing my dead grandfather in his casket at the funeral home when I was nine years old; I had known it was coming, but the shock, sadness, and abject awkwardness were unavoidable and overwhelming. Tears welled up again from that place in the heart that holds shame, and fear, and sorrow, and I couldn't resist the  grief for these distant neighbors of mine, now bereft of so much. 

As we drove on, we'd catch a view here and there of blackened hillsides, fences, grass, and the occasional house, and it was staggering to think that there were literally hundreds of destroyed homes up in the hills that we couldn't see, that we'd been breathing in for days whenever we walked outside. The smell lingered heavy, even as the cooling rains began to calm the air. There was an odd peace, I suppose--a deferential quiet on that whole side of town, like the ground itself was in mourning and was swallowing up all the sound. It felt wrong and unholy to even be there in the middle of what was happening, but we felt so drawn to pay our respects to the dead grass and the departed trees and the bodies of the homes scattered like fallen soldiers on the hills. There weren't any words we could have offered, even if we could have found them, and so we just stared, or didn't stare, whichever seemed more to honor the fallen world over on that side of town. 

After our solemn procession through partly-ravaged streets, we drove back to our own untouched neighborhood in the forest, grateful for the cooler, cleaner, sweeter-smelling air of night, but left with an indelible sense of the scale of the tragedy that none of us ever truly thought could happen. We felt so sharply the conviction that we would rebuild our community, we would begin to repair the tattered threads of the indomitable spirit that defines us, but that was tested and torn during the past unbelievable week. Mostly, we left with a deep sense that the fire did something amazing: it burned into the very soul of our city, and left  a communal solidarity etched into us forever.    --Teri.

"please tell me things get better soon"

Dear Friend,

You've been through a helluvalot lately. Your step-dad died last month. You thought you were selling a house. Your baby didn't make it. Your business isn't doing well. Your autoimmune disease flared up with a vengeance. Your kids have been sick. You are having family problems. You hate yourself lately.

You have no idea what your future holds, and that hurts.

Even if you aren't in one of these situations (every one of them is a real story that some of my closest friends have been dealing with; you're likely one of them), you can relate, at least to some degree.

A friend of mine and I discovered today that, although our paths haven't crossed physically in years, our lives are looking eerily similar lately. She's in the big middle of the same sort of disappointment and heartbreak that I was plunged into a couple of weeks ago, and while I'm sortakinda emerging on the other side of the dregs of depression and dispair, she's right in the big middle. So she read all about my story and realized that we have much in common lately. She said, "Please tell me things get better soon." I thought about that. I'd love nothing more than to give a hug and a promise that every-little-thing's-gonna-be-alright, but we all know that's a five-dollar answer to a million-dollar question, as an old pastor used to say. But I thought about it, and some tentative advice came pouring out of me, and I thought, heck. Maybe we could all stand to hear this.

And here's what I have; I'd love it if you'd comment below and offer your own suggestions about how you've dealt with the grief and the anger and the pain in your own life:

1) Pour your heart out to God about it. And then pour your heart out to your best girlfriends. I literally requested that my friends kidnap me and take me out for an evening. I'm not a party girl, but to be surrounded by wise women who loved me was very comforting. Good food and a glass of wine didn't hurt, either.

2) Keep a thankfulness journal. My best friend turned me on to a book called One Thousand Gifts. It is phenomenal, and because of it I have adopted the habit of keeping this journal. I just list any and everything I'm thankful for. During the most craptastic days (and there have been many), I force myself to sit and list things I'm grateful for: Chocolate. Sunshine. A job. No one puking at the moment. Whatever. It's not flowery or poetic, but it is real, and it re-aligns my heart a little.

3) Try to imagine the worst case scenario that your situation will cause. Homelessness? Bankruptcy? What's the worst that could happen? I know that sounds morbid, but it helped me to think, "Okay, what if all hell breaks loose? We'd be bankrupt. So what? No one will starve to death or die from lack of medical care. It would be embarrassing, yes, but nothing sacred would be lost in our family. So if I can handle the absolute mother of worst case scenarios, I can handle much less than that, which is what is most likely going to happen. And that means that I can handle today. And tomorrow. And the next day. (Now, I realize that for some of you, your worst case scenario is a nightmare compared to mine. I'm not making light of your pain at all, and for you, you are living your worst case scenario right now. For you I say wrap yourself in the love of whomever you can, and be as present as you can for today. And then tomorrow when it comes.)

(4) Don't be afraid to grieve the loss. It might seem silly when you think about all the people out there with "real" problems (death, disease, financial ruin...), but your pain is real, and it's legit. You're not whining. And your kids aren't, either. My kids have seen me crying a lot lately, and as weird as that feels, it's given me so many great opportunities to draw them out by being honest about it. When I'm sitting at the dinner table and start bawling because the smell of lavender tea reminds me of how I can't take my kids to the lavender farm on the island I was supposed to move to, I'm just honest about that. And then the kids are, too. And that's a good thing.

I think maybe the greatest thing about pain is that we're never really alone with it. I believe God designed our shoulders just a little wider than normal, so they could help carry the burdens of a life that just sometimes gets too heavy to carry alone. Another friend and I were talking about burden-carrying the other night, sitting in her car, the both of us just about as tapped out as we could be. I reminded her that she needed to reach out for help, especially from me. She reminded me that I, too, am carrying a big load right now. But this friend has made more time for me in her life than I can tally, even when she was underwater with burden herself. The big secret, I think, is that our staggering loads get somehow lighter when we take on someone else's, too. We're just designed that way, and it's magical. >p? And in its own way, when we share and open and grieve aloud, it does get better.

--Teri.

old crappy poetry of the soul, or, i'm still the same old nerd i was in high school

On a dare, I promised a couple of my girlfriends to brazenly post some poetry from my high school and post-high school days, when I was brooding with nowhere to go. This was primarily done to prove to them just how bad that poetry was, even by the standards of my more recent writing. And so you've been warned. I give you...Old Crappy Poetry of the Soul. By Teri Messec.

Birthday

(written for my friend Rachel Espinoza on...what else...her birthday.)

1997

One more year

Tucked somewhere

Under the belt of your life--

Telling without words

All that your eyes have seen,

That your heart has known.

Joyful days that have danced

Their way through your life

Sing now upon their exit,

Granting you mirth

On this bright day.

(Note to self: Eliminate the words "upon" and "mirth" from vocabulary for eternity.)

Chaos

(written on some random day a few months before I met my husband, when I was feeling really, well, chaotic in my life.)

1997

Swallowed whole;

Seasons of disjustice

Force me

From timeless dreamings

And larger hope.

In that blackness

I swim,

Straining towards Reason

But caught in the deluge

of Chaos.

Insomniac

(written after one of my many sleepless nights in 1996, when I thought, because I was too tired not to, that I was really, terribly clever.)

1996

Sleep came not for me last night---

Sleep and me, we had a fight;

Oh, t'was a struggle sleeping tight,

For sleep came not for me last night.

(har har har, snort, har har...)

Pantothenic Rage

(Written in '96, when I was 19, with 2-foot-hair, trying to grow my bangs out like a hippie.)

1996

I have these episodes,

This pantothenic rage

Flares within.

My mind,

In utter anger,

Screams--

A single thought;

I HATE MY HAIR!

To Self

(Written in 1995, just a few days before I graduated high school. This is one of those "Dear Me-of-the-Future" poems. Eerily salient, even 17 years later.)

1995

I've lived with you all these years,

Through your hours of sorrow,

your days of ineptness.

I've seen you gazing, tearful, at your angry mirrors,

While you silently cried at your self.

I've seen your agony

At being shunned by the world--by your self.

I've seen you mock yourself, scoff at your self,

Hurl hurt at your self.

And I've seen you look sadly back at your self,

Wanting so

Just to love yourself.

Empathy

(Written in the big middle of my lustyangst for Ireland, when I was sure I'd die if I wasn't borne straightaway to the Emerald Isle. I'm still trying to get there and this poem is just as sillily true as it was the day I wrote it. I had met Christopher by this point, and was flirting with the idea of marrying this dude. This explains why this poem isn't as horridly black as the ones from 3 months prior.)

1997

I see through my mind's eye

A picture tainted

With the sweet poison of empathy

And yet I am taken

By that utopic scene

And puzzled

At my indescretion.

Sing with Me at Daybreak

(Written for my little brother Matthew, who was probably 11 at the time, on one of those rare days when I actually woke up before 10:30 and discovered that the morning was amazing--so amazing that it was killing me to let the little rascal sleep instead of hanging out with me on the front porch watching me shiver and write bad poetry to the sunrise. Poor kid.)

1997

Sing with me at daybreak,

Quiet sleeping one--

You who paint the dreams

Inside your slumbering head,

Wake with me and feel

The quiet of morning,

The glory of dawn.

Slip the bonds of hallowed sleep

And find the sunrise

Creeping over the night--

Magic is deeper at daybreak,

Oh slumbering child.

Sleep no more--

Wake to the miracle

And sing with me at daybreak.

(note to self: abolish the words "oh", "slumbering", and "sing" from not only your own vocabulary for eternity, but also see about having them legally banned from the English language, as well.)

So that's a taste. Gagging yet? I'm pretty sure I win the bet.

--Teri.

my little concussion

Let me tell you about my little concussion.

It was the perfect day for exploring, and I am a consummate nerd. My family was delighted to finally get our dusty feet on the trail up to the curious ash-rock cliff dwellings that make up some of the most interesting parts of Bandalier National Monument. After wending our way up a narrow picturesque staircase that led up to the caves that were hollowed out and expanded by the ancestral native peoples of long ago, we were excited to see pueblo-style ladders--an invitation to explore. The kids lost no time in climbing up into the little caves, and our littlest, Asa, was right behind them, his short, chubby two-year-old legs barely spanning the rungs, which were suspended at a 45-degree angle to the ground. It would have been a nasty fall for him, so I rushed to his aid, only to discover that he was perfectly confident and didn't need anyone's help to get up that ladder. It was a moment (ya know?), discovering that the baby of our family is suddenly able to keep up with the big dogs, and so I drew back, cell phone camera in hand, to take a picture.

It was just that one step.

The one step backwards, over ground I'd just covered and assumed I knew; the one confident step onto what was supposed to be solid ground--and it was, just not the type of solid ground I was expecting. Where flat ground was supposed to be rose a little solidified volcanic ash-heap, the funny little leftover of a long-ago explosion that no doubt rained down fire and brimstone on a very different-looking landscape. It met my foot with what I am not entirely sure was not a bit of enthusiasm, and I must have looked like Yosemite Sam slipping on a banana peel at that moment. I flew--or tried--and missed the sky by quite a bit. Instead, my head came down first, onto another pernicious little outcropping of ash-rock, with a kind of sickening BOINK. Christopher said he heard a weird mushy sound (thanks, Honey...at least we know now I'm not as hard-headed as we'd once suspected!), and he turned to find me somehow sitting up but cradling my head and saying something stupid, like, "I've never done THAT before!" My first response, after violently addling my (evidently mushy) brain was to try and act like everything was fine. How typical.

So I tried to resume the adventure, even while incubating my very own goose egg right there on the side of my skull, the labor pains of which were a dull, somewhat sickening headache. I thought I'd be okay, but then the sun began beating down on me in ernest, and the wooziness began to grow. I sort of stumbled back to the shade of the parking lot and sat drinking iced Coke and reciting the alphabet and even numbers and the pledge of allegiance in Spanish and now-is-the-time-for-all-good-men-to-come-to-the-aid-of-their-country and my kids' birthdays and my anniversary, in my head so I would know I wasn't losing cognitive ability.

As the day drew to a close, I began to notice a growing sense of uneasiness in myself. We looked up symptoms of concussion and were surprised to find out that sensory sensitivity is one of the long list of evidences of a concussion, and I was definitely experiencing that, and it was growing by the minute. I wanted the kids to shut up. I wanted to get out of the van. I wanted iced tea and tater tots NOW. I clawed my jewelry off of me because I couldn't stand the feel or the sound of it. I started crying uncontrollably and begging for a hotel room. I didn't want to go to a hospital. I was just freaking out, and my poor husband was at a loss of what to do with me. Finally my begging won out (my head was getting harder, I guess!) and we holed up for a night in Los Alamos while I relaxed and sucked down my Sonic iced tea like it was a life-saving IV. But beyond the relaxing and resting and chilling out, there was nothing that could or even needed to be done; this wound had to heal with time and with awareness.

Over the last few days, it's been getting better; I notice I start to get easily agitated, and I know that backing off and isolating myself or jamming earphones into my ears for a few minutes is enough to stave off the freakies. But that little disagreement with gravity back at Bandalier has done a couple of really useful things for me. I think it opened a door in my mind for a little while, where all of my pent-up crazy-angst of the past 2-3 weeks could finally escape. That slip on the rock, that sudden, unexpected flying into the ground, that sickening thud at the end, were all a metaphor for my emotional life lately--a metaphor I had no choice but to feel and to fully experience and to find a way through.

And what I have discovered is this: I was darned lucky that the fall wasn't worse than it was (I'm speaking in parallel here--this applies to my emotional banana slide just as much as my physical one); sitting on the ground and acting like I was fine was really assinine; I needed a strong arm (or arms, as is the case with all of my wonderful friends surrounding me with so much love and wisdom this week) to help put me back on my feet, guide me down the mountain, and force me to just stop for awhile.

I think the most important lesson here, though, is this, and it's what you've all been trying to tell me all week (I have let your words be like a soaker hose to my soul, slowly dripping in and saturating even the driest parts): this fall wasn't fatal, and it's slowly getting better. I'm still bruised and it's still a headache lurking around every stress. I'm going to be feeling the effects of this for a very long time, and honestly, my feet won't be falling so cavalier on the ground any more; I'll be a little bit jaded and a little bit careful and a little bit scared. But I know now, at least, that the adventure is still out there, in all of its danger and glory and stupidity and solemnity, and the hard landing really has toughened me up just a little, even as I've felt smaller and more fragile than at any other time of my life.

--Teri.

dreaming in coma

A week and a half ago, I began in ernest the hefty job of packing up 8 lives, deciding what was necessary to keep, what was necessary to let go of, what was necessary just to throw away. The day went quickly, and by the end of it, 6 children were declared temporarily homeless--a sacrifice each of them was happy to make because that first night spent in a sleeping bag on the living room floor heralded the advent of the biggest adventure any of us has ever been on: our grand move to the Pacific Northwest.

We were that sure.

Christopher had a wonderful interview (they all but offered him the job right then and there) 3 weeks ago with the perfect company on a beautiful island out in Puget Sound, and I had gone along to scout out housing and to get a feel for life on the island. I guess I've never been on an island before--I fell hard in love with it, and began piecing together in my mind the details of a slower-paced life, away from droves of harried people, where our schooldays would be sometimes spent tinkering with marine biology in an outdoor lab the size of our dreams. Where food and flowers grow without irrigation. Where, instead of Interstate and sirens, the only ambient noise would be the siren call of the ocean. Where we would ride the ferry to the mainland on special days and sip clam chowder on the deck while watching the orcas play in the Sound. Whidbey Island suddenly became everything we ever dreamed of, and it was all a hair's breadth away.

Monday morning--one day after we packed up most of our upstairs--Christopher was informed that he had been passed up for the job on a bizarre technicality. It wasn't lack of skill, or of a personality conflict, it was a jot and tiddle on a piece of paper that seperated us forever from that idyllic dream. We were devastated. We were shocked. We were crushed. And we were now castaways in our own home, suddenly living out of boxes and bags on the living room floor, in a house that no longer felt like ours. The shame of having "counted our chicken before it hatched" was so palpable in the house; we have never hit such a low place in the life of our family.

The ensuing days have become,instead of slowly easier in that put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other way that keeps life trucking forward despite our worst efforts, only more difficult and bewildering. We left for an extended weekend to New Mexico, to celebrate Christopher's birthday, to see the marvel of the solar eclipse with my dear cousin and her family, and to fill up on plenty of our favorite Mexican (and New Mexican) food; but the larger reason was to put some miles between our sad home and our sad hearts, and to try and think, in a way that we can only do while the highway is rising up in a constant duet with our van tires. I truly hoped the New Mexico sun would burn up some of my many hot tears.

The long drive home last night filled me with more and more uneasiness as the miles slowly melted away to our front door. All that we had managed to escape and forget about for 4 days now loomed so thick and black just past that doorway; our children, who have been sleeping on a hard tent floor in a sleeping bag, didn't have beds to come home to--only more hard floor and the same dusty sleeping bag. There wasn't much to unpack, because what we took with us to New Mexico was mostly what we kept out for the move. But instead of arriving on the other side of the adventure into a new place, we landed back on square one, as though tethered to the prison of our empty home.

So I'm here today, completely unsure of what the next month, or two, or twelve, holds for my family. I don't know if the dream is dead, or in a coma, or will awaken any moment with a silly smile and a big appetite. But I can tell you what bothers me most. It's not the feeling of limbo (although I hate this worse than I ever thought I could); it's not the aching, crushing disappointment (though I find myself crying over this randomly). It's the knowledge that I put every ounce of faith I had into following a dream that we all thought we were being led into. I walked right into the swirling river that I've written about in the past, and for the first time, the time when the stakes were so high for my family in every imaginable way, the foothold evaporated just at the critical moment and left me naked, cold, and sputtering there, foolish in my child-like belief, moronic in my assurance that something great and exciting and solid was going to happen.

A week and a half later, I've thought of or read or heard or been told or prayed every imaginable platitude about why this happened, what lessons I'm supposed to learn, how God operates, about larger plans and wills and opportunities. I understand all of it, and I imagine there's a good bit of truth to it all.

But good God, I'm bleeding. I'm battered and soaking wet and bruised and without solace, and I can not imagine a single way forward that could erase this feeling of rejection and abandonment, save for the last 2 weeks to be completely erased. And I'll let you in on a secret: I have always been a fearful person. I've been afraid of all kinds of stuff--being unheard, being unloved, being unknown, being misunderstood. But probably my greatest existential fear--the one that wages dirty war on my belief system, the one that whispers venom in my ear when I dare to dream of bigger things, the one that twists itself around my soul when I'm trying hardest to surrender to my God--is the fear of being made a fool. Of trusting in something that turns up empty. And that is precisely what happened on Monday morning when the phone rang and the bottom dropped out of my future. And what I'm left with now is an ugly spiritual wrestling match that looks like this:

God: I know the plans I have for you.

Me: Then why won't you make them plain to me? I've asked so many times.

God: Plans to prosper you...

Me: But I'm not prospering. My family hasn't been prospering for months.

God: Not to harm you...

Me: I'm harmed. I'm so harmed. Even when you prune a branch to make it grow, there is still so much pain. Can you not see the bleeding?

God: Plans to give you hope...

Me: But I feel hopeless.

God: ...and a future....

Me: My future, my present, everything is a wreck. I don't even know how to get to my future now. My future is blocked by the mess of my present. And when I trusted you to clear the way, and make that future happen, like I really thought you said you would, it evaporated. It's gone.

God:

Me: The gaping silience is worse than the gaping wound.

I completely get that I am unfinite, trying to stare into the Infinite. I get that I cannot know the wonderful things God may have planned for me. But what if He doesn't? And what happens now that I've strained my soul to the heavens to hear for His voice whispering the way forward, and heard wrong?

--Teri.

A little rambling thought

pulling away to draw near

I've sensed a need in the past few months, fairly deep inside myself, to try and find a peculiar balance in the way I'm relating to my world. I'm drawing closer to maybe the most central part of myself and of my spirituality, in a vortexy sort of way--that inexorable feeling you get when you can't help but surrender to the sensation that you have to do something. Except instead of doing, I'm beginning the process of being. Being in a way that I've never quite been before, being more fully alive, more fully myself, more fully my God's. And this requires, as all great religious stories do, a sacrifice. I don't think it's a coincidence that this Easter morning is when it all is starting to congeal for me.

I'm coming to that place in my mid-thirties that I'm staring hard at all the decisions I've made. I haven't made a lot of super-bad ones, or ones that I'm having to pay serious consequences for, but I have made decisions that made sure there wasn't going to be a lot of time for spirit-feeding in my foreseeable future, and that set the course for the sorts of friendships and priorities I'd be able to have, at least for a couple of decades. In other words, I made sure that my life would be something of a crazy madhouse of activity, over-run by that sacred "pitter-patter of tiny feet" and by the needs of 6 sentient spirits looking for guidance and blooming. And that's been maybe the grandest adventure I could ever have imagined.

But I find myself looking ahead to that spot in the road where the traffic eddies out a little and I'm left to my own devices and needs, and I want to make sure that there's a person of substance and soul waiting there. I have to begin to make some tiny course corrections now in order to make sure that happens. So I've been pulling away in small ways, trying to draw near to my central self and the relationship that lives there, and it's not easy or even sometimes very nice.

I decided the other day that I just couldn't do Easter this year. You've all heard my Christmas rants and how much I hate the tide that washes over western humanity for months on end; this year it dawned on me that I'm feeling the same way about Easter. I can't center myself on the earth-shaking reality of a risen savior when I'm thinking about ham and eggs and baskets and the bastardization of the whole Oestre season. So I'm skipping it this year. It's time for church and I'm sitting in bed. There is no ham. No baskets. No resurrection eggs. No scarlet cloth. Just me, alone with my thoughts and the present quietness of me-n-Yeshua, hanging out in the silence after all the fanfare has passed. And I wonder if He's gotten as tired of my contrived Easterness as I have? I'm pretty sure He has. I'm pretty sure He's a party kind of guy in His own right (let's not forget how He saved that wedding party from being a severe bummer with plenty of primo vino at just the right moment), but I also sense that He's been kind of left in the dust in my life while I've made sure the Easter table was set to perfection and the kids' noses were all wiped.

So this pulling away is happening in other ares of my life, as well, in more subtle ways. I'm feeling an emotional pulling away from the beautiful place I have now lived for over half of my life. My connection to the landscape and all that is Colorado is fading in my heart, and I'm watching, a little amused, as it all happens. And as it happens with places of an oldish life that need to be let go of, like how I've always operated within my marriage, within my family, and within the context of my larger self and how I relate to the world. I'm becoming, slowly, much more myself in so many ways, finally shuffling off old, dead ways of thinking and doing. It still scares me to my core to think that these changes won't be welcomed by everyone I love and cherish. Some don't understand, but then, some never really have. I don't love them less, but I am coming to the place where my life isn't revolving so much around the sphere of public opinion, but is gravitating to that faintly glowing circle of my true self, alive and waiting for me to draw ever nearer.

--Teri.

have kids, will travel, part I

Ive had a lot of people ask me about how on earth we manage to make epic, 2500-mile or more treks with a van that's fairly bursting at the seams with what I've affectionately termed "my huddled mass of humanity". It sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen to most people, apparently, and it tends to baffle them that we could possibly enjoy or even crave these kinds of adventures. I guess it's in the blood, at least to some degree. Christopher is related to the guy who chiseled out the Bozeman Trail through Montana to the goldfields of the Pacific Northwest (so if you ever saw my last name and asked, "You mean like Bozeman, Montana?", the answer is yes). And I am directly related to William Clark, of Lewis and Clark fame who, well, pioneered the great American West (with no disrespect to the Native Indians--they didn't have to pioneer their own home, I guess). Somewhere in my DNA, my husband's DNA, and now doubly in the DNA of my children, is a hard-wired lust for adventure and westward movement. This explains a lot. Maybe.

But this post isn't about all that. This post is about the nuts and bolts of actually doing a real-live adventure, of living to tell the tale, and of somehow getting a really big kick out of it all. So I offer up my top 3 Teri's Travel Tips, while they're still fresh on my recently-traveled mind:

1. Plan your route carefully.
This seems like a no-brainer, but the fun is in the details. The longer your trip, the more diversions and distractions you're going to need in order to stave off boredom, fatigue, and mutiny. I like to have a couple of handy references at my command when charting a new journey. Google Maps tells me how far and how long and which route is best, and on my iPad, will even give me a couple of alternate routes, in case I'm feeling super-adventurous. I usually am.
Once the basic route is chosen, it's time to decide on where the best lodging can likely be found. For a family of epic proportions like mine, this can be a problem. We call around to every hotel in town sometimes, looking for someone who will take a family of 8, either in one room or two adjoining rooms. This can get pricey, but there's little alternative if tent-camping is out of the question. We've recently begun looking into AirBnB.com, where individuals rent out their extra rooms or entire houses on a nightly basis to whomever they please. Cool idea, and looks relatively safe.
The next part is the funagonizing one. You need to decide what sorts of attractions/sights you want to see during the course of your adventure. The fun is that you wouldn't believe how many cool things there are to see in this country, even on a short trip. Take a look at Roadside America for thousands of quirky attractions--paid and free--that you'd never know were right along your route. I also bust out my handy National Parks Passport map, which give me the low-down on where every National Parks Unit in America can be found. Every.single.park.unit has a Junior Ranger Program where your child(ren) can spend anywhere from an hour to a day learning about the ecology, history, anthropology, paleontology, and culture of some of our greatest landmarks. At the end of this little adventure, kids earn a shiny Junior Ranger badge and/or patch and a certificate (and often, a nifty pencil!) and are sworn in by an actual park ranger. Our kids have collected somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 of these little trophies, from South Padre Island to Yellowstone and everywhere in between. This is a *major* part of our travels, an always hotly-anticipated discovery when we begin trip-planning. Now, the agonizing part of this is that you'll inevitably have to say no to some of the exciting things you'll discover in the planning phase. This is a severe bummer, but at least it gives you 1)a deeper appreciation for where you're traveling and 2)a reason to return!

2. Snack-time is sacred.
Road-tripping in our family is the only time we really get to snack out, so this ends up being one of the most exciting aspects of travel for the kids. We try to keep it relatively healthy, with cheese sticks, yogurt-in-a-tube, carrot sticks, and whole wheat crackers. But I'm not gonna lie--we have our share of cookies, and chips, and--gasp!!--cheese in a can. There is no quicker way to make my children happy than to pull a can of Easy-Cheese out of the snack bag. It's like magic.
But the trick here is not just to snack non-stop. I bag up all sorts of goodies in little snack-sized ziploc baggies, and I only dole them out on certain occasions. One of those occasions is when the little sailors are getting mutinous (read:bored and tired) and have had it up to here with being crammed in an over-packed van with half a dozen siblings. When attitudes sour, it's time for something special. I also like to keep things exciting by doling out schnackies at certain way-points, like when we hit the 140-mile marker on the Interstate, or see the first roadsign for our destination town. So here are some of my all-time favorite road foods:
*Cheerios
*Teddy Grahams
*Austin Crackers (those little 6-packs of peanut-butter and cheese crackers)
*Easy-Cheese and Wheat Thins
*Cheese Sticks
*Yogurt in a squeeze tube
*Those neat little cartons of (very expensive) organic chocolate milk
*Dried fruit
*Nuts
*Tangerines (the smell of the peels helps to, you know, keep things fresh)
*Stainless Steel water bottles, filled with delicious iced-tea from home (we usually travel with 2 or 3 gallon coolers of home-brewed iced tea in a variety of flavors. During this last trip, I made a yummy concoction of rooibos and peach detox tea, which was not only aromatic and delish, but also completely caffeine-free and loaded with antioxidants and minerals).
*Prunes (inevitably, somebody gets plugged plumbing during a long trip. Prunes are a quick remedy!)

3. Save the cheerleader, save the world.
I view my role in a successful trip as several-fold. I am a driver, a navigator, the resident oral historian, the event planner, the food-banker, the referee...and the cheerleader. Kids on long trips need pep talks. A lot of them. Sometimes the only thing standing between a large family on the road and World War IV is that valiant, optimistic soul who can single-handedly fight off the doldrums with a rousing, morale-boosting chat. Kids need to know how much longer this leg of the trip will last, where is the next attraction, what is interesting to look at out the window, where you'll eat (and what), and what special something awaits them if they can just hang on to that last thread of gooditude. They need to know that they each play a crucial role in the success of this venture, and that without them pulling through, the expedition may well be doomed. Give them a sense of immediacy and urgency, as though it's life or death. Because psychologically, at least, it is.
Ahh, but how to save the cheerleader? What keeps Mommy from becoming the fire-breathing despot of the front seat? For me, it's several things. Good chocolate always, *always* accompanies me on any journey. This is completely non-negotiable. Convenience store chocolate is a craptastic substitute and should only be consumed in dire emergencies. Otherwise, stock up before the trip and make sure that you have control over the food bag. I also pack hoity-toity drinks that I can't purchase easily on the road. My recent fave is sparkling lemon water from Knudson's. The kids know that this is for Mommy only, and they don't even ask for it. I also reserve the right to purchase some new music of my choosing before or during the trip, and to bury my head in headphones for a little (or long) while to clear my head and drown out the noises of humanity coming from the back seats. Aromatherapy is a nice touch, too, and I travel with a few of my favorite essential oils. When the air gets thick in the cockpit, I drip a few drops onto a napkin or Kleenex and stick it in a vent, to disperse the scent all over the van. Or I just sniff it straight from the bottle, if I'm feeling naughty. You'd be amazed at how much sanity can be saved by just observing a few self-care and self-pampering rituals during travel!

So you have a foundation, at least, of how to make a successful trip. I'll be checking back in and posting more specifics about little necessities that help save the day on our voyages.
--Teri.