What's the Other Option?

This morning I have been catching up on some of my favorite blogs.  Sometimes this is one of the most encouraging things I do all week.  Sometimes it is one of the most overwhelming.

I am especially drawn to blogs about those helping children in extreme poverty right now.  That is happening, ...right now.  And I am prayerful about how this longheld passion of mine is intersecting more and more closely with my personal life.

To look at the number of lives, projects and leaders in the sub-culture of engaging poverty is the overwhelming part.  It feels like a big sea.  A big, big sea.  The internet torments me.

And then I look at my own life: Project I See You in the Dominican Republic.  In La Victoria, in La Canita.  What is that compared to all this?  What are we doing???  Someone else should be doing this for sure.  Someone with a better website on the internet.

But as I quiet myself, I hear my friend's voice: "What's the other option?  The other option is to not go."    And that is what I know to do, right now.

Happy Birthday Dan

Happy Birthday, Daniel Craig Wagner.  You are a good man, my favorite companion, and a heck-of-a dancer fun-time. xoxo. 

the good old days (aka - learning how to post blog photos)

 I have always had mature taste.  Maxing and relaxing, with Mickey and Sly.

Mersi and me bonding over conversation hearts. 

Beach Body Talk

Elly and I sat at the shallow end of the ocean where the waves break for the last time.  She had dug a hole when the tide was higher that had filled with water we sat in.

“Would you like to come to my spa?  Ellyanna’s Spa of Rest and Relaxation?"

 “Why of course, of COURSE.”

 “We will start with a sand and mud treatment..."

She spread soppy, goopy sand all over my bare legs.

“You have thighs like Nonnie’s,” contemplates aloud my sweet, soft bodied, 7-year old niece. 

Yes.  I do have thighs like Nonnie’s; squishy, shapely, noticeable.

“I do.  I do have thighs like, Nonnie’s!  Isn’t that great?” 

Isn’t that great? ... It is.  It is great. 

(I have thighs like my mother’s.  And my grandmother’s.  And my great-grandmothers.  Isn’t that great?  My thighs have a story and a legacy and speak to the strength of genes, God-intention, connection and the comfort of the knowledge of where they come from).  

She leans in, belly on the sand, probing my eyes, taking my emotional temperature.

Slow seconds pass with her so near me.

She smiles, unlocking the search.

"Yep.  It is.  Would you like this sand and mud treatment on your arms?  You will have to sit up..."   

And we are back.  Thighs and souls in tact.

Blog Birth

I started this blog October 2010: at my kitchen island, with a (second?) glass of wine, whilst my husband sautéed mushrooms in a cream sauce to go with our filet mignon, on a Saturday night; bluesy music playing.

After a soul-crushing-ultrasound Wednesday, a black-hole Thursday, a hallowing-surgery on Friday. 

…questions, projections, recollections…swirling.  When life is a blur, we eat steak.

When hell threatens my core again, apparently I start a blog…and eat an expensive steak.

I had thought about blogging for years, but there was something about this loss, at this point in my story, with this movement of grief that made me say, Oh hell no.  Hell no.  This time, this fear, this loss, will not shut me down, or shut me up.  I’m writing. 

Thanks be to God.

And so I started this blog, yet held this blog birth close.  Close and protected.  Until now.  Because part of my writer’s block is blogger’s confusion: not so much what to write, but when.  So, now I weave in to this a fabric of motherhood.  Even though today we have no children in our home.

There is a very real space in life that needs more and more hopeful, loving words.  That holy, inward space; womb-like.  Lets put out there and celebrate it, no matter how the story unfolds.

There Be Dragons and Whitney Houston's Funeral

I just found this blog post that I never posted...sometime this year around Whitney Houston's funeral.  I can't really understand what I was trying to get at, but I put it out to my brilliant public nonetheless. xo,People.  xo.


Dan is in the middle of his four day, 12 hour a day work week.  Today is the one day I will have "off" for weeks.  So, I am embracing it.  I am by myself, which is really the way I like it (for a while).

Last night I watched "There Be Dragons" about the 1930s Spanish Civil War.  That bit of history in that part of the world was as brutal as only civil wars can be.  It is a story of two boys that were friends: raised in the same time, in the same town, that loved riding bikes.  And then family values, relationships, and experiences; "seeds"; grew into the men finding themselves working out their own enmity towards themselves and one another on opposite sides of the dividing line. "Many seeds are planted in a child's heart, and you never know which one's will grow up..."

This morning I am watching Whitney Houston's Funeral.   It was on CNN and Tyler Perry was speaking and I am kind of fascinated with him recently, so.  And I am kind of blown away; in a few paragraphs he shared the Gospel in the context of her story.  In some ways, these are my people: Christian, Baptist (with a capital B).  (And yet maybe a little different: mostly Black, Famous (with a capital F)).  It is fascinating to see my faith background, and some ways my family history, represented in such a public way. 

So, these two storylines are dancing through my mind, weaving together.   I know the doubts that shroud star-studded events and figures like Jesse Jackson.  I'd rather not kick that sleeping giant, but just acknowledge that he is there.  And that he is there in all of us: seeds that are growing, dragons that will be.