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.

chasing the what-if

The grass has grown long under my fingers since I last blogged, and I wish I could say that it has been the exciting life of this forest-dweller-come-lately that has kept me from it; in truth, it's been a lot of treading water and straining my chin upwards to keep that water out of my nose that's kept me sufficiently distracted to ignore my thought-life, or at least to keep it brain-bound.

But tonight I've managed to break curfew, and I have a backload of things banging around in my head and wanting to get out somehow. This probably means that the proceeding words will be heinously rambly.

So the idea that's captured me lately is the painful dichotomy I feel between sensing a need to develop a life of simple contentment in my current circumstances ("bloom where you're planted" and all that) and the deeper, more dangerous need to embrace without reservation the profound sense of discontent that has dogged me my entire life. Siddhartha would probably say that the answer lies somewhere in between, and maybe he'd be right. But that kind of thinking is way too temperate for a heart bursting at the seams with dreaming and plotting and what-iffing about futures imagined and hoped for, and so it feels like I either need to hunker down and discover the magic in a life of quiet contentment, or damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead with it already!

What I can't figure out is this: is it a base, soulish want I have, to be happy inside a deep unhappiness, or is it a higher, more spiritual thing I'm chasing after? Is it glorious or gluttonous to chase that discontent forever and pray I never catch it?
--Teri.

ch-ch-ch-changes

ch-ch-ch-changes…
Posted on May 25, 2011 by Teri
I’m sitting in a Starbucks in the Springs right now, surrounded by…empty chairs. And a dude immersed in a newspaper. And another dude immersed in his laptop. And another dude immersed in…wait. There are no immersed women in here! Except me.

Glorious.

Ohdang. A lady just sat down next to me, and she looks friendly. No!!

So why am I here? That might not be a question any of you would have to ask yourselves, but I have to have a pretty good justification for doing this. I’m in between appointments today, and am taking some time, at long last, just to be by myself. Christopher’s working at home today and is watching the kids for me.

I pretty much quit 75% of my life this week, and decided to make the remaining 25%, 100% for the time being. I hit a wall a couple of weeks ago and finally, finally, f i n a l l y realized that I could not keep up the frenetic pace of family and professional life that I’ve been trying to juggle, adding a new ball here and there since Asa’s birth, and usually ending up dropping most of them. The fragile ball of my family life is always the first to drop, and it has cracked in several places. It’s time for some reparative work and also to hold that sacred circle close and not let it drop or be juggled any more. The kids couldn’t be happier, though they never would have said so before, thinking I was happier with them on the back burner. Wake-up call!!

So I resigned as both Secretary and member of our local doula association; I put the word out that I will no longer be actively seeking birth photography clients, or doula clients, and I also put in a request for an indefinite hiatus from my work as a trainer through Childbirth International.

Some of those ties were very sad to have to break, though I’m confident that I can pick this up when I am better suited to it, but the effect of all this freedom has been staggering. I suddenly found my love of cooking again. I read several chapters of a book that I actually *wanted* to read. I discovered how much my baby really needs to hold me, and how much my toddler wants to have conversations with me, to debate with me, and to help me with tasks I never would have let him attempt before. I found out that Ben isn’t the only boy of mine who desperately needs a good throw-down about 3 times a day, and that Isaac’s anger management problem is probably in large part due to a lack of discipline on my part. I learned that Gabe is suddenly growing up on me and losing that small boyish face and starting to look an awful lot like a blonde-haired, blue-eyed version of his MawMaw. How handsome!! I discovered that Bonnie is patiently waiting for so much from me, and I re-learned where each of my children are excelling, and where they are struggling. I found out about their hopes and dreams for a happier family, a fun summer, and a larger family vision. This shouldn’t be new to me, but I guess I just haven’t been listening. It’s a shame.

But it’s a shame I’m rectifying now, before it’s too late and these little balls bounce away from me for good, out of the circle of our family influence. So I think it’s worth the sacrifice, and I feel so much lighter and more free, even though I just took most of my life-dreams and put them away for another time. Some of them might die while they’re on the shelf, I don’t know. But I think I’m okay with that, and I think I can finally be awake enough now to stop missing the really great moments which, it turns out, are a lot closer to home than I let myself believe.

–Teri.

on comfort

Last night I curled in my skin
Around you
And felt the long miles of memory
Stretched out behind us,
The bright ribboned highway of our passionate youth. 

Your breath was soft,
Dressed like the universe,
And splendored into a thousand stars,
The galaxies of your dreaming in rhythm with God.  

Each fiber of flesh,
Soft in the lull of sleep,
echoed faint with the catching of our vision-- 
The quiet smooth miracle of belonging.

--Teri.

all i never did

September gave way to a winter far more bitter than I ever imagined it would be, tinged only by a small sweetness in knowing that a tiny autumn seed I planted may have germinated in some way.

I wrote back in September that I needed to find a way around the roadblock of my tongue, a cowardice lingering around my heart, almost impossible to overcome. I needed to tell my uncle, my childhood hero, how I loved him, and admired him, and was inspired by him. I wrote that I needed to do this, before all I couldn't tell him, became all I never did.

In this moment, I'm sitting at the deathbed of that same man, ticking off the hours as he loosens the grip on his body and prepares to cross the threshold into the Infinite. He's dying in front of me, 6 feet away from me, and all I couldn't say to him is becoming all I never did--right now, in this room.

I asked him to read my post about him when it was written, and today I'm praying that he did, that he somehow understood my love for him, and that he carries that knowledge in his heart as he readies for his departure.

Love has no expiration date, though opportunity often does.

--Teri.

where have all the athiests gone?

I'm grappling with Death again, and it feels a little bit like he's winning at the moment.

I can look down at my hands and see death at work, the slow ebb of my youth leaving little lines and creases as it retreats. I can look in the mirror and see it in my eyes, a cynicism lingering there where optimism once was.

I worry about that sometimes.

So I'm putting it out to my friends, the ones who don't necessarily share my spirituality: What do you believe? And I'm having a hard time getting a response. I know I have plenty of friends and even some loved ones who are athiest, or at least agnostic, or existentialist, or Pagan, and I don't honestly know what you believe in terms of the human soul, of our permanence or transience, of what lies beyond, of what we're made of, spiritually-speaking. I know what I believe--the eternal nature of the soul, the permanent utopia where great ideas never go awry, the spark of the divine that lies within each of us.


Now what about the rest of you? I'm not asking for a debate, and I'm past the place in my life when I thought I knew it all. I don't want to change your mind or save your soul; I just want to know what you think.

--Teri.