Date night...

Ella and I had a night all to ourselves, as Melissa's at the beach and Evan's off to a campout with some of his friends. We got ready to drop him at the friend's house, and Ella put on her new shirt from the grandparents, her new purse, and matching "clomping shoes" to prepare for our date. They are referred to as that, due to the extremely loud clomping noise they make. It's like a clarion call that "SOMEONE IS DRESSED UP AND READY FOR SOMETHING SPECIAL!" Her choice for dinner?

The hibachi spectacular. Everything tastes like the two sauces they offer. Mediocre sushi. But there's fire, and lots of knife throwing. And that's pretty fantastic.

We shared some teryaki chicken, and enjoyed the show.

These sorts of reactions are becoming standard. She's a beautiful little nut. We finished, and she suggested that "...maybe we could go to chuck e. cheese's...and just play games, since we've already eaten dinner." $3 later, lots of tickets won, some meaningless plastic toys exchanged, and we were headed home.

We had to stop off at the store to get some milk, fruit, peanut butter, etc. (I'm in charge of these details, can you imagine??) While we were there, we got some cookie dough, made cookies and capped the night off snuggling in bed watching her christmas favorite, "The Happy Elf." She snored away as I watched the Daily Show. My heart was full.

The cycle.

"All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain...you can obey commandments, believe doctrines, and attend church services all your life and still daily abort your soul if you run from the necessary cycle of loss and renewal..."

"The real point is not an endurance contest, but a course in listening, waiting, and hoping, which has the effect of deepening and clarifying desire."

"...By trying to handle all suffering through willpower, denial, medication, or even therapy, we have forgotten something that should be obvious: we do not handle suffering; suffering handles us - in deep and mysterious ways that become the very matrix of life and especially new life. Only suffering and certain kinds of awe lead us into genuinely new experiences. All the rest is merely the confirmation of old experience."

Richard Rohr
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I desperately want to know what it means to feel life fully, and for that to feel shitty. And not try to fix it. Not try to medicate it.

I'm quick to fix. I long to numb my heart, because I am wired to believe that (lesson after lesson) I somehow deserve pain-free living. That's a lie I tell myself, and in such opposition to this gospel I profess.

When pain comes, I want to yell aloud, also find some stillness, some silence, and listen. I want to learn from the hard lessons, the painful renewal, not just get through it....as I realize that I can only offer to those I love only as far as I have come.

Some new vocabulary...

As a now indy artist/small business owner, I've taken on quite a bit of new response-a-libities. These are all welcomed, however. Life has taken some large changes, some for the better, some seem to be that part of life happening. All in all, I'm learning a lot about myself, and that's eventually a good thing. For answering the where have you been question, go here.

A friend gave me these quotes from Buechner...

"...the air cleaved and folded back like a tent flap, to let a splendor in...and in that moment I was filled with such a sweet panic and anguish of longing for I had no idea what that my life could never be complete until I found it....It was the upward-reaching, fathomlessly hungering, heart-breaking love for the beauty of the world at its most beautiful, and, beyond that, for that beauty east of the sun and west of the moon which is past the reach of all but our most desperate desiring and is finally the beauty of beauty itself, of Being itself and what lies at the heart of Being.

Today I pray for response in my responsibilities. Something in kind. A signal.

I'm learning that my heart depends on it, and it's a much more serious pursuit than I've ever realized. God help me and those I love to find some beauty today.