In quotes three

Anne Lamott, Grace (Eventually):

It's fine to know, but not to say, that in some inadequate and surprising ways, things will be semi-okay, the way wildflowers spring up at the rocky dirt-line where the open-space meadow meets the road, where the ground is so mean.

In quotes two

Serrin M. Foster, The Feminist Case Against Abortion:

No compassionate person, pro-choice or pro-life, wants to see a teenage girl drop out of school and face a lifetime of poverty because she became pregnant. No compassionate person wants her to suffer the pain and anguish of abortion.

In quotes

Wendell Berry, Standing by Words:

One cannot love the future or anything in it, for nothing is known there. And one cannot unselfishly make a future for someone else...
Because love is not abstract, it does not lead to trends or percentages or general behavior...Love proposes the work of settled households and communities, whose innovations come about in response to immediate needs and immediate conditions, as opposed to the work of governments and corporations, whose innovations are produced out of the implicitly limitless desire for future power and profit.

Beyond Easter

When I ask God for what I want, it goes like this:

Help me do better teaching a class. I wish to remember what I saw in myself last time, that ugly need to look like Somebody. You brought up short this clawing creature, revealing poor motives. I struggled. I cried for help. Let me move forward this next time, doing better.

God says, "Okay."

I do the class better. Recalling flaws from last time, I make fewer. A student even mentions I was smooth. Inside myself, I'm all Yes!! and leaping onto furniture.

But God's priorities and mine differ in the largest sense.

A situation sails in out of the turquoise, and here I sit. Stuck. Exposed. Complex motives to sort, good intentions gone awry. Questioning, raging, then.

Oh, God, I see the wrong in me. Help.

Either God is a sadist, or.

The priority isn't to move forward, doing better (as much of a grace and gift as that can be). The one necessary thing involves - requires - keeping sight of what's real about me (not pretty, but it's such a relief to remember mercy) and what's actual about the God who has a clue.

Involving the economy of contentment

I will attempt to comment upon current events.

Now that my hearing and other senses are returning, after nearly two weeks of being more or less under weather and beneath covers, I pick up from morning news shows a snippet about home sales.

"If people don't buy houses," the anchor person intones, "you'd think it's only a problem for the sellers, right? But this hurts the whole economy, because..."

(OK, I don't remember the reasons; my brain fogged out again.)

Sipping hot orange juice I recall days when restlessness struck me each time I passed a for sale sign stuck into the lawn of an intriguing house. It was years ago, the kids were young, and life, though interesting, sometimes begged for a hint of romance, adventure. A different house and neighborhood might fit the bill, I thought.

Then Tim's TV station built and transferred to a new building. I convinced myself, for my husband's sake, we ought to move. He likes riding his bike to work, after all, and the new station's miles farther away. We ought to live closer (in one of the well-to-do surrounding neighborhoods).

It had been one thing to desire a new residence after we'd moved a couple hundred miles and while we were living in a too-tiny second floor apartment with ceiling heat and no air flow. Back then after much effort we'd found our own home to buy, and with the joy of a prisoner released I'd asked God to keep us settled for a good long while.

Five years later I passed those beckoning for sale signs, in front of houses that were, well, if not the most fabulous, at least a step up from our 1950s-style 'hood, and, besides, they looked so...different. I wanted different. I longed for change.

We made one offer. Rather a long shot. The next day people from California offered cash for the seller's price. Oh, well. I sighed. I drove over to that street a few times afterward, and sighed again.

Today I'm glad. Thank you, Californians. We might have done that different thing, but as it turned out we can now glimpse the end of the mortgage tunnel on this house. It's still a ways ahead, but in that other house the debt journey would loom long still. Or would I have tired quickly in that place and traded up again in a few years? No progress, because we'd progressed.

I wonder this morning. Might this housing crunch, as it's called, cause other families to breathe thanks a few years into the future? Maybe staying put rather than selling one place to snatch up another can relieve a lot of us. I've come to appreciate my neighborhood more than I could've realized. Might others focus energy closer to the four walls in which they must stay put? Reach out to neighbors, build a corner grocery, a park? Or even simply wash windows, coat walls with fresh paint. Not for buyers or in order to move on. For this little same old place.

Tim still rides his bike whenever possible to work. He's buff.

The better part of three days this week I spent home by myself. I chatted with this unfortunate creature from beyond a back fence, as he mourned, as usual, his family's absence during the day.

Even flowers abloom couldn't cheer the poor guy.

If you know me, you've noticed I can sink a tad into neediness. The self-pity engine sometimes chugs on for a bit.

Though for years I've seen more clearly the unloveliness, I haven't conquered the tendency to travel to the state of poor me. Perhaps I'll struggle with it until my final breath, but here's hoping I wipe the lenses of insight more quickly as time passes.


My time alone this week did not, though, find me howling like my little friend. I savored what felt like a vacation. Weird me, some of the neatest flights I've taken into worlds of deeper understanding and even escape, have occurred while (to quote a goose from Charlotte's Web) I've sat quietly-ietly-ietly at home.

So this week I journaled, using a neat lap desk friends gave me.Cool, huh?

I read, did laundry, cleaned house (some), read, cooked taco soup, watched a video, and read.

In between, new horizons of thought dawned. I recalled that I'm a creature, like the beagle out back only different. Caused to exist, and therefore valid. Is that logical? Well, if I weren't valid (and still assuming I was caused to exist), then the Causer would have eradicated the mistake that was me. Same with every other whining, howling critter. From my newly tweaked perspective, I see I tend to ask the wrong question when the unpredictable occurs (that is, most every day). My foundational views often are colored by thinking I'm supposed to prove I was meant to be, or even to prove others are intrinsically worthy of existence.

But what if that's simply a given? The Causer perhaps only created that which was planned. So, if so, then there's some other underlying query I'm supposed to formulate. I could ask, say, about the circumstances I'm experiencing. What might I be meant to learn from them, apart from any worries about my validity? Hm. Maybe something regarding another person, or morality, or my family history, or... Hey. Lotsa stuff. Whatever is being caused to happen, by this intelligent One I believe in, must be pretty intelligent.

Emotions interfere with logical proceedings, and so does my inherent rebellion against the theory that I'm not the cause of trouble, or of reality. But beyond these, at the horizon of consideration, sits this possibility: I can grapple with what's going on before me, while shedding insecurity about my validity within it.

I guess it's an old preponderance revisited, and I'm not likely making it clear. But I sure had fun gnawing on it in my own little spaces.

And hubby brings it home again

For sixteen years we've managed all right with a secondhand stove that gives its all.
Last night, though, Tim and my son tossed it out to the garage and replaced it with an only ten-year-old secondhand stove. I'd told Tim he could give me a new toilet seat for my upcoming birthday. But I never imagined this.
Self-cleaning oven. Woohoo!!!

In this low

Music I love. Lyrics: The moon is aching; my heart is blue.

An emailed response from an agent I respect: Thanks very much for letting me see this, Deanna. I think I'll say "no thanks," but I'll encourage you to continue exploring your possibilities. Some of the writing is very nice.

Husband stretched the couch's length, watching Cops. Nestled on his back like a soft-furred kitten, I breathe scents of outdoors: sun warmed woodpile; the yard stretching as if a child beneath blankets awakens; weeds tugged from matted mud by the house corner.

Whiffs also of the attic where husband lifted and dragged and carried boxes: a daughter's stuffed panda, velveteen rabbit, alongside dishes china perfected for future evenings at tables where laughter and talk will accompany wine poured, music imbibed.

Sunk low earlier today, I donned magic shoes and trotted to more favorite tunes. Life is real, I thought. I get to keep doing this. Some of the writing is very nice, after all.