September

Well, that was quick.  School is back in.  Still struggling though, mostly with death.  I know, I feel like Woody Allen.  And yet, I wonder, how can anybody not struggle with it?  It just gets close enough to think about, I guess, at a certain age.  Or a certain level of tiredness.  Or maybe it's that a lot of people and things that were important in my life aren't here anymore, and it diminishes my connection with this world.

It is weird to have a limited amount of time left here and yet to be squandering hours away.  Well, not really weird, more like scary.  My oldest son is on his way back to Afghanistan.  The last time he was there God gave me such a peace the entire time; it can only be explained in those terms.  This time I am sad, because he leaves behind a wife and two kids.  They have a great attitude about it.  I know he is only doing what he signed up to do.  I'm just proud that he signed up to do it at all.

My other son is finally getting his art career off the ground, I think. And I am proud of that too.  I knew he had the talent to do it, but it takes risk and persistence as well.  He was here for several weeks this summer.  Unfortunately it was the hottest most miserable summer I remember, literally, in all my life. It was good for him to spend time with his little brothers.  It was good for them too.  I got to reconnect, at least from my point of view, with my son who had become such a stranger.  I love him too much.

I love them all too much.  I am a spoiler mom. Not proud of that.

We have been looking into moving.  Spending money on the prospect too.  I hate wasting money.  Funny that I do it all the time.  I am really not clear on our future.  I had been feeling rather depressed.  But yesterday for some reason I got on YouTube and was listening to Andy Griffith singing "I'll Fly Away."  It made me smile, because he did recently do so.  And then I listened to Alison Krauss singing the same, which led me via sidebars to her version of "Beulah Land," a song I never before understood.

The hopelessness of this life has been leading me to nothing but dead-ends...Even though I have EVERYTHING a person could want on this earth...

"I'm kind of homesick for a country
To which I've never been before.
No sad goodbyes will there be spoken
for time won't matter anymore.

Beulah Land, I'm longing for you
and some day on thee I'll stand.
There my home shall be eternal.
Beulah Land -- Sweet Beulah Land"


And I realized where I need to be looking, on what horizon, and it awakened joy in my soul, like sunlight slipping through a cracking door.  










           

Ponderings

Soooo, a lot has happened since my last post, and yet, I'm still thinking about those same things. When I last wrote, I had just met a friend, via her cooking blog, and she had recently discovered her cancer was back, and only this morning, she died.

My son broke up with his girlfriend of four years.
We lost two large trees in our yard.
School is out.
I found a new babysitter (we had none).
My dad is in very bad shape, healthwise.
I finally met a neighbor I had been praying I would be able to meet.
I met my second grandson.

For a while I went through a very dark period, maybe the darkest of my life. It was about the fear I have of eternity. Though it threatened to tear me away from God, I am now closer to Him because of it.

My grown sons will both be here soon, the younger one in two days. He's the one who broke up, Tim. Chris is coming with his family in July.

I don't have any funny jokes or profound sayings tying all this together. Life just goes on, rushing like a river-- sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes high, sometimes low. That must be a plagiarism, sorry.

The photo is my husband, Ron, and me on our wedding day.  We are very happily married, still.  Back then I had worried about whether you would get bored with someone over time. People are much more complex than that.  I will never be able to spend enough time with Ron in this life.

Same with my kids. And so many other friends and family, some who are already gone.  I can't really say I'm not still afraid of eternity, but, "I know whom I have believed, and am persuaded that he is able to keep that which I have committed unto him against that day."--2Tim.1:12

What is Regular, Anyway?

I have been plunking away at the piano from as early as I can remember. I'm not very good, haven't studied or practiced nearly enough. Yet I still love it, and from time to time have had a few brief series of lessons. My last piano teacher was actually really good. If I had stayed with her, and pursued it, I'd probably be pretty decent by now. She taught me a couple of things I hadn't known about--though maybe I thought I did. One thing was she made me go out and buy a metronome.

I thought that was going to be a real waste of my $25. "I know how to keep time, duh," I thought. But I got the thing anyway, put the battery in, turned it on, and began playing. Whoa! What a colossal freakout! I mean, who needs drugs to alter your reality? Just get one of these things! The experience was mind-bending, or should I say time-bending. As I played at what I thought was an even rhythm, the ticking of the metronome seemed to speed up and slow down randomly all over the place! It was a real eye-opener, and still is.

To this day I have the same sensation when I use my metronome. I have been using it a lot more lately, as I am the accompanist for a monthly Hymn Sing. It is sobering to know that I am capable of speeding up and slowing down to the point of throwing those poor singers right off their chairs, like some out of control merry-go-round! Well, maybe it's not quite that bad. But they are "counting" on me. So the $25 turned out to be a really good investment.

And it continues to illustrate to me more truths about how my perspective can be really off; and how my reality, though sometimes imperceptible to me, is warped. I am teaching a drawing class, and we have been discussing issues of perspective, naturally. If you want to drive yourself crazy, try drawing a piece of paper lying flat on a table. Okay, now, hold it up. Is the paper lying flat or is it tipping? The difficulty of this exercise is exacerbated by the fact that the angle at which your eye sees while drawing is probably not the same angle at which you are holding up the paper. Nevermind.

When I became a new Christian, I acquired a set of Bible memory verses put out by the Navigators. One of the first verses was Galatians 2:20--

"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and
gave himself for me."

I memorized it, but never understood what that verse meant, though I tried. Sixteen years have gone by, and I have grown in my understanding of the Bible and in my walk with the Lord. It has been slow-going, as I have had a tendency to keep myself on the throne of my heart, instead of Christ. I was afraid to trust in Him alone. Though it seems silly, I really felt like I had some kind of control over my universe, and did not want to relinquish that. My tiny little fingers clinging, petrified, to an illusion.

The good thing about getting older and things falling apart is that you finally, finally lose the false sense of invincibility. Many people have this maturity before they begin to age, but I didn't. I have been blessed, so blessed, and used it to my detriment. I kept half my hope in God and the other half in me. My "superpowers" are beginning to fade, and I'm getting a little more desperate. That is a good thing.

On Sunday, my pastor was talking about the cost of discipleship. He talked about "taking up our cross," which really means dying to self. He explained, and I finally understood, that this is the meaning of Galatians 2:20

Okay, I'm Ready to Talk About it Now

A while back people were posting on their facebook status a certain year, and what was happening with them then, like their favorite song, what they were wearing, how old they were, etc. If you "liked" their post they would give you a year. Seemed fun, until I got my year, 1975. That was not a good year for me.

Recently, two of my (new) friends have actually published novels (!) which of course I immediately read--well, one I am still reading. Interestingly, they are both about 13 year-old girls. Though the stories are vastly different, they are both dredging up for me some pretty untidy emotions. I was 13 in 1975.

I am not going to lie, it is not all better yet. What I am talking about is that there has been a lot of "working through" things in my life...Thought I was all done with that. When given the year 1975 on facebook, I quickly shut the door on that festering little pocket and did not expect it to come up again--so soon.

I don't even read novels. If these ladies weren't my (new) friends I never would have picked up these books. And really 1975 is just representative of the years surrounding it--between one horrible situation and the next. I actually don't even remember too much of that year. On one side of it I was a dorky kid who was so depressed with my home, my school--thank goodness for the one light in my life, my siblings. I was the oldest.

But then there was the divorce, and we were split up. They stayed with their mom; I went with my dad. I was on my own. Ironically, at around that time I was reading Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time, which so effectively dug around in my soul and reflected the horror of the situation I was actually going through. I don't even remember the story, just the feeling.

My second (new) friend's novel, Whitestone, deals largely with the huge themes of loss, sanity, and God. I can hardly say how gut-wrenching it is for me. And I'm still not done with the book, so maybe it will help in the end.

But the title of this blog refers to this: I am depressed, again. And sometimes I feel like I almost choose to be this way because it's somewhat of an escape; only it doesn't work very well. I mean, I know how to deal with depression, having had the disposition since third grade. The hardest thing is getting out of bed in the morning.

And then there's the shell. I sometimes think back to that nerdy pre-divorce period of my childhood when I had these three really sweet friends: Gina, Indriati, and Debbie. They descended into my gloomy life like angels sent from heaven. But I blew them off. And of course after the divorce I never saw them again.

Many times I have thought what a shame it was that I hid from those nice girls. One of my best memories of that time was a sleepover at Gina's where we watched cheesy old black-and-white horror movies late into the night. But then I shut them out. I just couldn't deal with anything. I felt so raw.

I have three nice girlfriends here in the neighborhood now. (Funny how history repeats itself). I find myself pulling inward. There is a lot of pain. I'm sorry. I know there shouldn't be. Life is great, and I'm a Christian. But that's just the way it is right now.

Kinda Like It, Kinda Hate It

When my big boys were young they invented the saying, "Kinda like it, kinda hate it." It was a description of how we feel about certain slightly weird foods, like McDonald's pickles. Or black jellybeans. You get it? It was the perfect expression for that little phenomenon in life when you're attracted, for some inexplicable reason, to something kind of yucky. I guess some would call it "acquired taste," but I loved the term my boys made up. We even had a song for it. You just sing it to the tune of "Camp Granada." Kinda like it, tch tch tch, kinda hate it, tch tch tch...

Maybe it's because, for me anyway, things stick in my craw if I don't quite understand them. Not things that are way over my head, like how a computer works, or even a radio for that matter. But things I kind of almost get, but not really. Like what exactly is that yucky pickle taste? And the smell of the black jellybean in my nose that maybe reminds me of... rootbeer?

Some things are intriguing/repulsive because of their weirdness. For little kids it's monsters, for bigger kids maybe the opposite sex? How about insects, and many other animals--strangeness! Sometimes even other people are so different from me, my family, my friends, that they just seem--undecipherable. I used to just ignore them, pretend they weren't there.

But lately I have been realizing that the God I feel relatively comfortable with (in a reverential way) is also the God that created all this strangeosity. Giant spiders, flounder eyes, and people with tiny noses...all His designs. I seriously used to think I could categorize things from my surface-y point of view, and one of the categories was, "doesn't count." Like as if I can make that call.

Just Happy to Be Here

I love my blog. It's so nice, when at the end of my rope, there's a place to unwind and let my thoughts out. It is also a bit of a discipline, to get things aired without disclosing too much (it being public), and also just to try to fit vague ideas into words at all.

I am a stiff-necked woman. In the Bible God refers to the rebellious Jews as being "stiff-necked." My neck is seriously messed up, physically. It crackles and pops and gets stuck, and sometimes I think the Lord may be pointing out my spiritual condition with this discomfort.

I also love to play piano. I am finally reading "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain," at the suggestion of my artist son. In it the author discusses the aspect of being totally absorbed in what you're doing. Like when you're behind the wheel, thinking about all kinds of things, and you suddenly realize you don't remember driving for the past several miles. That is how playing piano can be sometimes too.

As I was practicing the other day, an unusual thought came to me. I think it was underscored in my Bible/prayer time, though I don't remember the words. What occurred to me at the piano was the proposition that, perhaps, I was unteachable. This was a shocking bit of news. I have always regarded myself as one who seeks out mentors and teachers, a collector of wisdom and advice...but maybe it has been only on my terms...

I have been struggling quite a bit with some relationships in my life (like everyone else, I guess). But the hard one is with a child of mine. I am always wanting him to change. I am always thinking of him as being unteachable. The idea appeared in my mind...that maybe...I was the one who needed to learn the lesson. And that somehow, (this may not be correct) if I were to become teachable, then so would he.

Being Cool is Overrated

I'll admit it--sometimes I'm driving kind of fast, windows rolled down, blasting Mozart's 40th Symphony, feeling like I'm pretty cool. Then I see a copper and snap out of it. No, not really cool. But actually I'm very thankful for the willingness to be uncool.

In fact, my life pretty much depends on me knowing that I am not hip, slick, and "all together." Sometimes I bemoan being a basket-case, but then I remember the alternative. That would be, for me, running amok in a state of delusional grandeur (picture Homer Simpson in the "Land of Chocolate"). There are lots of people who can pull it off, who can handle life well, or at least look like it. I kind of feel sorry for them.

I can recall when all this began, this knowledge of "cool," for me. I was in seventh grade, in a new school where I met my new best friend, Jade. Up til that point I had been listening to Liza Minnelli and the Carpenters, wearing plaid polyester pants, and not plucking my eyebrows. My world was about to go through a major transformation.

Jade taught me about Levi's, Alice Cooper, and the Columbia Record Club. With the assistance of that membership, it didn't take long to make up for lost time. Soon I was sewing more denim into the bell-bottoms of my dragging-on-the-floor jeans, hanging out my second-story bedroom window smoking Marlboros, making "suicide" from my parents' liquor cabinet, lying on the floor of my room, head jammed between two speakers cranking Ted Nugent, carving boys' names into my arms, and you know, all that cool stuff.

I also learned how to lie to my parents, which was necessary to keeping up all my cool activities. I would sneakily wipe off my eye makeup before I went home from school, and say I was going to "Junior High-Jinx" at the YMCA, when we would really be out prowling the neighborhood smoking...etc. I also learned how to steal, and was proud of how good I was at it. Before long I began having boyfriends, which made me feel even more supernatural. I was on top of the world. I decided at this time that getting good grades was for nerds and although I had to work at it at first, I got the hang of acting, and becoming, really dumb.

Well, this could be a really long story but suffice it to say: being cool never got my anything but trouble. And the trouble was not the glamorous affair I had romantically envisioned. In the end, it's like a movie that you're acting in for yourself. Nobody else cares. For a while other "cool" people want to hang out with you if you're being properly "cool." But if you decide to do something they don't approve of, or if they get bored with you...well then.

But the real reason I'm glad I'm not cool is that I had to fall apart. I had to do this to begin my life again. But then, even after that, I had to come to the end of myself. I had to find what I was searching for, and sometimes avoiding, my whole life. My pastor said on Sunday, and I've heard it said before, "There is a God and you're not Him." I knew he was going to say it. I say it to myself a lot.