Tag: Happy New Year

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Do You Believe in Magic? I Do Not.

I don’t see magic in the world. I can, at times, acknowledge its beauty, which is where my photography comes from: a place of awe– at the faces of my children, a massive tree, long shadows, or speckled sunlight on anything.

I do believe, have always believed, in compromise. Since I was a young child I learned to be silent. I learned it was easier to have no opinion than to be punished for having one. Punishment may not be a beating (spanking is such an innocuous word don’t you think?) usually it was stern, mean words or public shame, or heart-stopping fear.

The only way to keep the peace was to kill your spirit before he had the chance. And peace was always my goal when facing my dad’s rage.

How can something be both expected–“He always raged” and unexpected? “We never knew when he would.”

This combination of predictability and unpredictability was nauseating for me.

And so I lived with a chronic stomachache and fear. It bore a hole right through me. Now I have a hernia. So I take medication to keep the bile from choking me still.

It’s so funny; he is still choking me though he’s been gone 20 years. Perhaps the migraines are his legacy too. Stress causes them, so says my neurologist. We’ve had our share of that.

Compromise lingers inside me; it formed me from a young child and made me who I am.

I find I am unopinionated in everyday life.

I feel unable to know me.

Disassociating helps. Then I’m less aware of the vast emptiness inside. Drinking helped in that way, but I’ve been sober now for so long that I rarely think of it as an option. It’s not but I toy with the idea in my mind. I’ve never slipped.

A person who doesn’t know themselves does not know anything.

That’s what 2025 will be for me. Discovery. My therapist of a decade will say “It’s about fucking time.” I’ve never actually heard her curse, but in my head, she does.

Sounds so silly but here goes:

What do I like? Who am I? What do I want with the rest of my days?

What other questions would you ask?

And Happy New Year! Am I happy? Not really. Why do we want everyone to be happy?

There’s another question: What would bring me happiness?

What questions are you asking yourself in the new year that could help me?

What Is a Good Life?

For months the words have toiled and churned inside me.
The black letters absent from the page.
A heavy, nagging problem. A writer’s liability.
Rather than anguishing over this loss I have lived.

Then with an intimate slow unfurling
I deliberate on these first scarce stanzas.
I feel their drumming.
Echoes in the chambers of my heart.

Still I have a constant awareness.

Sufferings, anxieties and troubles have come to be our life.
Both waking and sleeping.
Still delight and joy are wondrously present.
Each day’s lesson cracks me open bringing a Spirit-filled reliance.

To live, to love, to be, to give, to fear, to hold, to weep, to laugh,
to wait, to hope, to doubt, to accept.
The silence teaches.
Life is lived in the moments in between.
And all together this is a Good Life.

“Happy” New Year

ocean in maui
As anyone who reads this blog knows, I question everything, I resist, I am a seeker. My soul howls and it cries.

My heart is frequently conflicted, questioning, keening, searching, longing than finding and being at peace.

This causes me to doubt.  This brings great fear. This causes me to wonder if I’m any further along than I was last year.  This brings great heart ache.

This is a spiritual state of being and it is how I wake, with a daily, heart racing state of mind, filled with wonder, yes full of hope but always longing for perfection. And as I have been coming to know myself better this year and accept these things about myself, it’s been a hell of a year.

This I know.
This life we’ve been given is a long miracle.

This life is full of heartache and pain. I feel it, not only in my own life but in all that surrounds me. I wish I weren’t emotionally absorbing the bitter and acrid, heartache, loss and sorrow of others. I carry it all internally and it weighs on me, it hurts inside and sometimes even physically.

This I am learning, to feel it and not allow it to crush me.

I’m learning, surely, that God does not promise us happiness; all the while we continue to pursue it. How can we not, it seems we were created to long to be happy?

We’re owed happiness?

Or we can embrace our lot, and find a sense of joy amidst life’s hardship and pain?

And I have asked many times, where is God in the midst of it all? Why does God seem so silent? Why do I so quickly move to doubt, when I am or those I love are suffering?

It was Julian of Norwich who said this:

See that I am God.
See that I am everything.
See that I do everything.
See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally.
See that I lead everything onto the conclusion ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it.
How can anything be amiss?

(Revelations of Divine Love)

The Holy One is working, if only I can slow down, listen, and discern the movement in my life.

And this is happiness —  a spiritual life. This is real more than ever, in the middle years of great sorrow, heartache and pain as I am slowing down, I am full of longing for God

to speak. All that Jesus did or said, all the pains he suffered and sorrows he shared, our sorrows and suffering, he took in obedience to his Father.

This is my heart’s longing and prayer, to be more like Jesus.  To be able to listen well to others, to love deeply and to take on other’s pain.  This, I know is a part of what I am being called to and as I learn to be strong, not in myself but in Jesus, this is a holy and happy life I am being called to, but it’s a long obedience and it is not, at all, what I imagined.

In this new year, and as I lay down the old year, I know that this will be a quiet place of contemplation and solitude.  It is something I never imagined.  It is, even so, full of joy and hope.

May you find the things the Holy One is calling you to in the new year.