Newcomer Introduction

Wanna know what I've been to since conception? First - you need a better hobby. Second - well, ok.

Life History or at least the good parts.

1970's - Idyllic childhhood in Richmond, Virginia filled with urban living, roller skating, dancing,reading and marching to the beat of a tune heard only in my noggin.

1980's - Discover boys, DIY fashion design, poetry, Prince, and an interest in theology. Go to college. Fail to fit in. Revel in that.

1990's - Throw away youth on formal education including seminary. Learn that hate is a word reserved for: endless committee meetings, traditional worship styles, cookie cutter weddings and funerals. Determine that organized religion can easily disintegrate into a 4 letter word. Tap into an unknown gift of calm and comfort in the face of death. Go into hospice work because death is not the worst thing that can happen to a person.

2000's - Have babies! Love babies! Have babies suck the life out of me. Brainwashed by unknown forces (aliens? ghosts? zombies?) to go back into parish ministries within "organized" religion for over 6 years. Transform the concepts of death rituals and worship experience for a small set of religious liberals who reward me greatly. Blog, rebuild some crucial closets and bathrooms of the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina, learn a ridiculous amount about death, dying, grief, funerals, cemeteries, and death related legislation. Leave parish ministry in search of sanity, time with the "babies", and a family business.

2010's - A roller coaster. High points include teaching hundreds of students on a variety of topics, writing, protesting uterus obsessed legislation, mentoring the "babies" in State Fair arts and crafts competitions, learning to play full body tambourine in New Orleans. Low points include family tragedies and marital dissolution. You can't have everything, right?

These days - Revel in the opportunity to provide my offspring with an idyllic childhood in Richmond. Rejoice in urban living, roller skating, dancing, reading and marching to the beat of a tune heard only in my noggin.

Luddite Lament

"And now I'm back... from outer space... you just walked in to see me here with that same look upon my face..."

 I have been locked out of the Jots world for MONTHS. Madness, chaos, misplaced passwords, rabid procrastination, technology continuing to advance while I wonder where I put the instructions for my stereo.

Oh, yeah, and now that I am back I see all the stuff I was trying to fix on this thing when I locked myself out. Ugh. No wonder it took me so long to get back. Luddite life - you never really put it behind you.

Well, this loooong silence no doubt separated the wheat from the chaff as far as my dear twelve fans are concerned. I have so much to update the remaining three of you on! There have been publications. There have been radio shows. There have been T-shirts designed! There are zines in the works. There was the world's zaniest birthday cake. Most importantly, I neither broke any part of my body nor had any catastrophe.

The only bad news is that I work six jobs in order to keep my children in shoes that fit. They are very tall and I daily wonder how that happened. The balance is that one of those jobs is paying for health insurance. I can't afford a co-pay yet but... baby steps.

So, if all goes well (toes and neck hair crossed) this is the first of several entries bringing us back together and caught up. Please feel free to say hi in the comments. I've missed you three.

Rosh Hashanah - the "boring" one

"But I don't wanna change."

This is going to be a tricky Jewish New Year around my house. I talked with the children again about Rosh Hashanah, the forgettable Jewish holiday in the worldview of the under 12 set. My offspring value neither apples with honey nor lengthy Hebrew recitations, so Rosh Hashanah is not-too-affectionately known as, "the boring one."

I'd like to chalk it up to their affinity for latkes, nightly candle lighting, building tree shelters, and matzoh ball soup; none of which are associated with this holiday. But the truth is that I have happy children. Change and regret have not become part of their daily lives. They feel no need to ritualize loss and hope. They're happy little Zen masters most hours of every day except when it's time to clean their bodies or their rooms. Or, G-d forbid, they accidentally touch each other. (That's their orthodox streak coming out.)

I love Rosh Hashanah. For years I spent the weeks coming into the holiday with a little book called Preparing Your Heart for the High Holy Days. I'd meditate and pray and read stuff and be an all around bore about it. Good times.

As I aged and suffered more losses, the metaphor of the books of life and death and who will be inscribed in which became more and more meaningful. The literal image is a nightmare, but coming to an understanding that we all have a limited amount of seasons has been transformative. I enjoy the meditative mood of the holiday, and the days of awe are aptly named for me. But try telling that little soliloquy to 8 and 11 year olds.

So there we were in the chapel where I give all of my spiritual guidance (the car) and I shared with the Buddha babies my incredibly brilliant, thoughtful, and laudable idea to celebrate this year with the kid-appropriate ritual adapted from Tashlikh. Smartly, I didn't put it that way.

"So what we will do is tramp down to the Mighty Mighty James River and write what we want to change about ourselves on biodegradable paper and then we will cast them into the river and watch them float away!"

My son gave his diplomatic nod which means, "I am still young enough to refrain from derisive snorting. Revel in these days, madre."

My daughter declared decisively, "But I don't wanna change."

How is it that the parenting coup of raising happy people from scratch becomes a mega-fail in celebrating my most favorite-ist holiday? Crap. Being a responsible, spiritual adult on my own is hard. Raising up little spiritual chicklets in my personal direction is a bear. Zen masters aren't necessarily good little devout Jews. That's fine with me. Well-adjusted Unitarian Universalist kids.

With that goal in mind I took the puddins to the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Glen Allen yesterday. They had a great program planned and the sermonizer was rumored to be tolerable. You know what that means. Yeah, I was preaching. I led the children's worship talking about Tashlikh and how Rosh Hashanah is happening during the start of the new school year. Thanks to the tepid reaction of my own offspring on the subject, I mixed it up a little for child-relevance sake. I invited the children, of whom my daughter was one, to think of changes in their school life they wish for this year. One wanted to be better in math, another in English. One was positively, absolutely NOT going to be bullied. (Amen to that!) My daughter had her hand up for awhile.

"Yes, madame. What will you be changing this year?"

I'm stumped. Her grades are good. She's a happy puppy and she already has made it clear that change is not on her mind. Then my daydreaming began. Oh, please please please let her vow to become a morning person. Or an overwhelming desire to wash all the dishes from now on. Pleeeeeease.

"I'm going to quit choir this year!" She announced with triumph.

"What? This..." Not mornings. Not dishes. Yes change. Poop. "(Stammer). You... (sputter)," finally I had to drop the Rev. and just be Mama right up in there in front of everyone. "Choir? Really? Darn it. And this is how you tell me? In front of dozens of witnesses. You..." I was thinking how lovely her little voice was practicing "Man in the Mirror" last year. Then I remembered she didn't actually sing half the songs at the concert, just looked nauseous and well-behaved in the front row. Sigh.

"Well played, little bird. Well played. Way to embrace change." I high fived her.

The little church pumpkins then commenced telling scraps of paper their secrets for transformation and metamorphosis and throwing them in a "river" (wheelchair ramp) by the pulpit. I whispered "Fear" into mine as I had told the children I would, and tossed it high. My daughter gleefully threw the choir away. While the others tossed bad grades and bullies down the ramp with flourish, some huzzahs, and even a bit of dancing with celebratory fist pumping, one little curly haired cherub came up to me. I bent down to her and she cupped her hand around my ear, whispering, "I'm not going to be afraid any more either. Just like you." If that isn't an engraved invitation into the days of awe...

So this is how we will be doing Rosh Hashanah this year. I'll be praying in services and my secret prayer spots for two days, then we'll all tramp down to the riverside. I will prayerfully put my hopes for the New Year on a piece of thin paper and ceremoniously toss it in the river. My little imps are welcome to make boats, swans, airplanes, arrows, rockets, or whatever else they desire to celebrate the New Year in whatever way they want. They can include secrets, hopes, pet peeves, or name the projectiles George, as long as they send them soaring. Whatever they choose, I doubt it will be boring. Shanah Tovah, y'all!

Drunk Texting Gene Roddenberry

It happens to all of us. A little beer or other spirits, maybe even just too much caffeine. A moon in a cool summer sky. Then an electronic device with internet or phone connection just a little too close at hand. Suddenly... POW! You've made a memory, baby.

For someone else, that is. Your out-of-it tail doesn't have a clue 'til the bliss clears, the headache starts, and your friends are mocking you mercilessly.

For my friend, whom we will call "Giddy" to protect her dignity (as if), this happened in the form of a Facebook post. The spirit was wine, the moon at about half glory, and Neptune kissingly close. I'm not sure what the occasion was but Giddy is a slight gal and I can't imagine it took much fruit of the vine before she was reaching for her phone, accessing her Facebook account and typing...

STAR TRKK IS THE BEST FIREVER ALWAYS

That's my girl. Kinda brings a tear to my geeky eyes.

I think there must be something in the air this summer: a siren sci fi song that is making mild-mannered retro, steam punk, alternate reality, and time travel loving geekettes get buck wild. This post is my proof but the signs have been multiplying.

Exhibit A: I butt dialed a co-worker while in bed with my children reading China Mieville's Railsea. Twice. She said she screamed my name a few times to shut me up, then finally gave in and listened as I read aloud and the children and I discussed the post-apocalyptic Moby Dick on rails. She's asked to borrow it when we are done.

B: One of my book club homeys begged me to get some saki with him so we could process Freedom TM without book club supervision. Gasp! That means... we could... say... ANYTHING! (Including our true feelings about the appropriateness of Philip K. Dick's name and that "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" still makes us cry a little in the same ways as The Smith's "Meat is Murder" album.) As cruel fate would have it, I was called into work and missed that golden opportunity for unfettered cyber armageddon based bacchanalia. But for a few days there that risky business was on this girl's Google calendar. Oh yes it was.

Then... THEN! (Dear heavens I hope you are sitting down for this.) I realized that Red on "Orange is the New Black" is none other than Captain Janeway from "Star Trek: Voyager"! (I know you are perfectly aware who Janeway is, but my mom reads this blog so I do what I can to communicate clearly.) The realization made me sit straight up in bed and frantically email my book club buddies in the dark.

So when Giddy drunkenly took thumb to iPhone and essentially drunk texted Star Trek's progenitor Gene Roddenberry for all to see, I was thrilled to know that it wasn't just me feeling the love.

On a brief tangent, this ain't just about the ladies. My buddy who lets me dip in his deprivation tank every now and again loaned me his copy of Starship Troopers. It had a bite mark on it. Perfect teeth imprint halfway down the pages. I'm not afraid to taunt a benefactor.

"Hey, Dude. You getting a little out of hand in some old school cosplay? I didn't even know they did Heinlein, but it looks like hard core bad boy stuff from the bite mark."

"My dog, you dweeb."

Yeah, right, Big Man. (Mama, I'll explain all this later after I come up with some way to link this to Doc Martin or that Abbey thing you dig.)

Back to STAR TRKK, Giddy inevitably opened the door to trash talk from some backwoods homunculus Facebook friend of hers.

"You misspelled it. That is W-A-R-S," the slug typed with his tiny antennae.

Oh, please. No woman worth her ovaries would ever publicly text George "I am an overgrown Ewok" Lucas on a tipsy summer's night. To quote Giddy herself when I met her years ago: "The prequels were an abomination for which Lucas must forever march in shame and without female companionship."

Not that we don't love those Amidala costumes but, come on, given the choice between Alec Guinness or Patrick Stewart? Exactly.

I'm off to boldly go into the laundry room and start the dryer now. Prepare to find a point in all this... Engage.

Endings

I gave a service in Virginia's beautiful Northern Neck this week. The topic was endings. I was asked to put this excerpt on the blog.

The common thread between our stories is that most everyone I know at some point in the past thought that they would be different at this point now.  I credit that difference to our lives being non-linear, our development coming erratically, and to put it diplomatically: our self-awareness and worldly wisdom being not exactly, well, on point.

I believe the Buddhists really do have an edge on the rest of us. The state of mindfulness takes all the painful zing out of an unexpected ending. If we have been in the moment accepting now for what it is, then the ending is just another version of this moment. When we live in the now and stop the monkey mind from yelling “What if???” and “It’s supposed to be like this not like that!”-then we see that all endings are pretty surprising.

This past week I visited with patients in a large Richmond hospital as part of a continuing education program I am in to become a certified chaplain. I have been there only three weeks and have already given up on the elevators. Taking the stairs is a superb tool for mindfulness training.

When I take the elevators, I walk in the box. The doors of the box close. The doors of the box open. I see a patient or ten. I get back in the box.

The doors of the box close. The doors of the box open. I go down a hall that looks identical to the last. I see another patient or ten. I get back in the box. The doors of the box close. The doors of the box open.

When I take the stairs I have a better understanding of where I am in the labyrinthine hospital layout, and where I am in here {pointing to my heart} and I begin to see patterns that were invisible when I traveled via box.

I leave the chaplain office, climb the stairs three floors, and turn right. There I meet premature infants as little as a pound in size. They live in boxes but the doors neither open nor close. When I step back, turn left, and walk down a hall I meet pregnant women confined to the bed so that they may have infants who are larger than a pound.

They look like sci fi mamas because often they are not allowed to move off their backs so all I see is a head, a belly, and pillows. When I exit and turn left down another hall I meet families who had normal labor and seven pound babies. Sometimes they are mad about hospital food and the sound of construction in halls and often are wondering how their hair looks. I get very confused on the third floor.

I walk up a flight and I turn right where I meet men and women of all ages who are being monitored at all times by machines. They look out their windows as they worry about their families and homes. I met two young men in two rooms who were despondent because each was depressingly certain he was the youngest person on the unit. Their rooms were nineteen steps from each other but they were together in concern and in youthful spirit. I was with each of them when their lovers visited and saw them gaze at their girlfriends as if starlight were trapped in women's bodies.

Nineteen steps down  from them and around a corner is a man in his nineties whom I visit next. He is a bit confused, but when I lean over his bed he reaches up and gently strokes my hair which has fallen over my shoulder. He says, “You are such a pretty girl” and as I look into his face I see the reflection of starlight in his milky blue eyes.

I go back to the stairs and I walk up to the top of the hospital where the intensive care unit sits right beside the psychiatric unit, both closest to heaven. In intensive care I visit with a wife in her 30’s who tells me about how the man in the bed on the ventilator stole her heart when they met and how she asked him, “Why steal it? I would have just given it to you.” He has already spoken his last words but we pray that he will live just one more day. “I just don’t want it to end today,” she says.

I make the few steps next door to the behavioral health unit for a group session where the patients are walking their twelve steps but not with their feet. They have strong bodies and perfectly healthy hearts. “We are dying,” they tell me, each in her or his own way. Their families say they just need to go to church. Or they need to just stop taking those drugs. If I took the elevator I might agree with their families. But I take the stairs and I know that they are dying. There may very well be a cure, but right now they are dying.

There are endings to each of the stories I walk in on in the hospital. I rarely learn the ending to theirs, not that ours are any clearer. As I walk up and down the stairs I think about the endings, all of our endings. I fear some of them. I hope for some of them. I go home and I wonder about all of them.

But I can’t enjoy supper with my kids when I think of all the people I see in a day in terms of endings and beginnings. Such thinking puts a timer on our stories. If when I am sitting with someone in their now... if I am thinking in terms of endings then I can’t concentrate for all that ticking.

While I take the stairs I have been thinking that wherever I am in my life there is someone a few houses down, a few streets over, a couple of seats away in the labyrinth of life struggling with the same thing but calling it by a different name. How our stories will end seems overwhelming but isn't that because we are not the authors? It is not our place to say when the story is over. We can control some of the action, we get to write all of the emotion, but the ending is not ours to know.

What makes not knowing bearable is that in this moment... right here... in the eternal now.... if we are being who we are meant to be... the ending doesn’t matter at all.

May it be so.