it's been a little rough

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. | Rainer Maria Rilke








xo.pa

twenty. fifteen.

This last year has been one hell of a ride. But the thing about life being really crappy for a really long time is this: it gets better.

Which doesn’t seem like much of a consolation, I know. But I don’t think it’s meant to be. It’s not the consolation, it’s the reward. It’s the everything-after.

It gets better. And that better is a delicious and meaty sort of that thing.

It. Gets. Better.

I say that with a deep exhale of relief and exhaustion and joy.

Like collapsing onto a bed at the end of a very long and very good day.

It gets better.

Shame recedes with the waves at low-tide. And gratitude rushes in. For everything. For the whole of my life. Not a part of it, but the whole messy lot. And for the grace that is that mess. The perfect ordered chaos of it. Because for what it is, it's quite beautiful. 

It gets better and good becomes a flutter in my chest. A constant hum.  And I become aware of the musculature of my own heart—how it pulses and expands and grows. And to be privy to the physical experience of that.…everything begins to feel like a prayer. A prayer of gratitude and wonder and a delicious sort of blooming. Every action an act of faith.

Faith.

I'm a religious person. So. Faith, that's the word that wets my lips and sits on my tongue and fills what once was empty.

Faith.

The thing that rolls out like the proverbial yellow brick road.  A path before you. And you don’t know where you’re going, but you know you’re on your way.

Faith.

Which makes fear beside the point. And makes tributaries of loneliness and sorrow and grief—small streams leading to a larger body of water, important and necessary but not the point.

Which disappears loneliness—transforms it—makes it sweet in its impermanence.

Everything worthy and good I learned through the lens of anxiety and depression and heartache. Which is something I struggle to explain—baggage is not exactly an easy lead in at any kind of party.

Now standing firmly on the other side of those things, the question of how I got better is one I’m often asked. And the answer is a simple and complex as this: I had faith I would. And so I did. And I still have faith.

And that very faith is what I move forward with into this new year. That nearly overwhelming stretch of time succeeds in distilling everything dark and complex and seemingly impossible into that one thing—that one word. And that one word will break me open—make me sturdy and soft and so very human.

Faith, the invitation to my very own ever-after.

 So there, 2015, it. gets. better.

xo.pa

...

To think you can love God without being changed by Him, is to think you can jump into the ocean and not get wet. To really love Him, you must understand that your life is going to be wrecked by Him, and built again into something beautiful, something lasting. T.B. LaBerge

Quotes from the tinies:

"What are some planets in our solar system?"
"Jerkeley"
"Ploodle"
"Urawenis"

"How'd you get that scratch on you face?"
"Well...well...I got all curled up in my bed and then I was rolling around because that's how I be comfortable. Then I got all twisted up and then got this scratch. And my mom and dad didn't come!"

"Would you like to make an indian hat?"
"My mom doesn't like that."
"Well what do you like?"
"Puppies."

Back shot of the tinies because they deserve their privacy. 

xo.pa

Quotes from the tinies:

Tiny Question:
"Do you go to church? The one that learns you Jesus and God?"

Tiny remarks:
"You know I make a really great pirate 'cause I make a spyglass with my hands."

"My mom tricked me! She told me she was gonna put ice on my face and she put peas instead!!!"
(Tiny was real upset over this trickery. And said she would have preferred a sandwich on her face in lieu of the peas.)

"Miss Peri, you have a pink shirt on and I have a little pink so we're kind of cousins."

xo.pa

this past year

My mind has been swarmed with the side-effects of a sinus infection. Which has me in bed for a few days reliving.


There was a moment, about four months ago while I packed to move, when what remains of my belongings were spread across my bedroom floor.

 Something about the sky and the cloud. And not seeing the one through the other.

 I don’t know how to write about this last year. Or how to talk about it. Or even if I’ll triumph through what’s left of it.

 I've laughingly told my therapist that this has been the worst year of my life. And once I explain–provide details and facts and a timeline of events, we just sort of look at each other wide-eyed and chuckle in that nervous way that sits at the back of the throat. Because, well, yeah, it’s not been all that great.

 The worst year of my life (or one of, if we look at the spectrum despondently). Which is true, but only in the short term. Because, really, this will not be the year I look back on when I’m old and at the end of my life (should I be so lucky) and recount as a way of detailing loss and desire and pain. My humanity wasn’t revealed in the muck of this year, more my durability.

 A year of very specific lessons. And some quite expensive ones.

 But so many of the mistakes I now find myself glancing sideways at and wondering if they weren’t actually blessings.

 Not-good-things in service of better-things.

...

I saw Macy just a few weeks ago. She took my picture one of those first weekends in January. It was so cold and a few (but not many) things had already gone wrong, but we laughed and sipped steamers and talked about all that had changed and all that was now good, and how all-that-is-now-good almost always rushes in after all-that-is-really-not. 

This go round, these eleven months later, I picked her up at the PHX airport, collapsed into her arms and began to well up.

We talked about this year. The all-that-is-now-good. Begging forgiveness, immediately, for having to work and being tired in that way that sees my mind slipping off the back edge of a cliff and into the ocean below.

But it felt important to bookend the year. To finish it, in the same way it had begun. (Only this time we sipped Arizonas and I'll see her before the years end.) I wanted to see what was on the other side of the lens. Wanted to see if the last however many months were made visible on my face, for better or for worse.

They were. 

...

I own so little now. Got rid of so very much. Missionary work and moving will do that. Cast everything in a new, very harsh light. Suddenly so much was extraneous.

And so I whittled. And so two weeks before twenty-one, I quietly let go of nearly everything I own. 

Which isn't totally true, but is true enough. (Because I now own eighteen pairs of leggings.)

The pretending is over now. 

Less. Less stuff. Less pretense. Less pretending. 

...

At every turn this year I’ve had to ask for help. To say things out loud. To reach in the direction of the open hands around me. And I’ve been so lucky to be met with so much generosity. Offered work, opened home, a diet coke whenever I craved, encouragement when I felt I least deserved it.

 

But asking for help costs something. Is not easy to do. 

I talked to a newish friend months ago. A woman I've known for only those short months, but well enough to say that she is good and kind and better than most.  And talking to her, struggling to keep a steady voice and the incessant leak of my left eye, she said, Let me help you. 

No, no, I casually brushed her off. 

But the thing was, I did need help, and so I took a breath and said, Actually, yes, I need to talk to you? 

So I sat there, wiping my eye, listening to her voice. 

It was such a small gesture. And yet. And yet and yet. 

I didn’t have to ask for her to do it. 

I didn’t have to ask for help in that moment. It was offered freely. 

And it took my breath away.

...

A sympathetic pumpkin pie, an extra set of hands. A lifetime of not always having to ask. 


There's so much to look forward to. 

...

There's a Dear Sugar Essay that I constantly go back to. More like essays. But in this moment there is one that I'm thinking of: 

Perhaps the good that can come from this terrifying experience is a more complex understanding of what God means to you so the next time you need spiritual solace you’ll have something sturdier to lean on than the rickety I’ll-believe-he-exists-only-if-he-gives-me-what-I-want fence. What you learned is that your idea of God as a possibly non-existent spirit man who may or may not hear your prayers and may or may not swoop in to save your ass when the going gets rough is a losing prospect.

 So It’s up to you to create a better one. A bigger one. Which is really, almost always, something smaller.

 What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?

A bigger one. Which is really, almost always, something smaller.

A pumpkin pie. 

Book endings.

Something smaller. Something less.

Less in the service of the more. 

A really terrible-no-good-very-bad-year in service of  a better ever-after: a simpler one. 

xo.pa

Quotes from the tinies:

Tiny quote:
"I'm 46 inches. I think if I eat all my vegetables I will grow to six feet by when I turn six."

Tiny conversations:
"I like your watch, Miss Peri."
"Thank you. I got it yesterday!"
"I have a watch at home. You know that?"
"Why didn't you bring it to school? How will you know what time it is?"
"Oh, I know what time it is. It's either lunchtime or it's not."

"My grandpa wears pants over his shoulders."
"Are they overalls?"
"Yes."
"Is he a farmer?"
"Yeah he says E-I-E-I-O."










xo.pa