I am sitting here in my living room, watching a plane's final descent into LAX just beyond a palm tree.


The movie "Iron Man" is playing for the umpteenth time at a low volume on the television.  

Emotional support background noise, if you will.

And I am sitting here, attempting to summarize the past year for perspective, and prepare for whatever comes next in the new year.


While I haven't done much writing (or reading, which I deeply regret, and would love to remedy in the new year) I did come to the realization that it is good for me to have actual conversations with people every now and then.

I admit to being fairly introverted.  I can be social when necessary (see: singing in choirs), but I don't actively seek out occasions to interact with large groups of people, and I mostly try to avoid the forced gaiety of group activities.  I also freely admit to being socially awkward.  Anyone that's spent enough time either being ignored, or being mocked mercilessly when they do join a conversation, is going to learn to contribute infrequently, and in small measured doses.

In a way, social media helps the socially awkward by avoiding any face to face interaction, and the subsequent possibility of rejection, by being a platform by which anyone can drop by at any time, and express their opinion on any subject in writing.  Hey!  Writing is something I can do, and do fairly well. Although there is still there will still be disagreement, most people will be civil when they disagree (most of the time anyway, internet trolls notwithstanding).  Unfortunately, social media hurts in the exact same way it helps:  By avoiding in person conversations, there are those who use the relative anonymity of the internet to say the foulest things imaginable while avoiding any accountability for their rhetoric.

​What I did notice this year, is that the occasional in-person conversations that I have had with those I don't see very often have been so good, not just for me, but for everyone just getting to see and/or interact with each other.

The occasional conversation with a sibling on the other side of the country that allows us to catch up on each other's lives in real time.

The conversations enjoyed during long car rides with a good friend that I rarely get to talk to as we are both busy during the day, and generally exhausted in the evening.

The wide ranging conversation had during a spontaneous pool party with a couple of great friends that absolutely renewed my soul at the end of a much too short vacation.

The spontaneous drop-in on a dear friend, my daughter's former sitter (and alternate mother figure!), that provided a wonderful opportunity to catch up after a particularly trying year for all involved parties.

My take away from this is that, going forward, I need to make sure that I communicate with others, in person, even if I do fear negative interactions during these conversations.

Over these past few years, I have found myself facing quite a few of my fears, whether I intended to or not.

As we walk gently out of this year and into the next, I find myself dealing with a few of my most serious fears staring me down from far closer than I am comfortable with.

What I plan to do, is to continue on how I have thus far: Keep Praying.  Keep handling anything that comes up to the best of prayerful wisdom and my abilities.

And to keep having these conversations when I can, so that I can know that I am not completely isolated, and can even be an ear to others when needed.  Which we all need sometimes.

See you on the other side.

, It is 3:00am, and once again, I find myself awake.

What to do in this, the "witching hour", as it was once called.

This is when the troubles of the day tend to make their return visit, reminding me of tasks not yet completed, and beginning to set my to do list for the coming day.

I try to soothe my mind by attempting some reading on my phone, but social media has begun to make for far worse anxiety than that which woke me in the first place, so I think that is probably not the best possible way to return my mind to a restful place.

So I get out of bed, as I am not going back to sleep anytime soon, and I go into the living room for Classic Arts Showcase on KCET (a local station), and a light snack,

And I let my mind wander with the beautiful music and dance pieces.

To dreams of travel to exotic places,

To possible resolutions to lingering issues.

To prayers of thanksgiving for received blessings, and petition for emerging challenges.

To flights of fancy, and frankly, escapist daydreaming, that sometimes come to occasionally lonely middle-aged women wide awake at a time they should be sleeping.

And to you, Dear Reader, whom I haven't had a real conversation with in quite some time as I have struggled with profound writer's block.  We shall return to regular visits, this I promise you.

But I may need to get some rest first.

When I was a kid, I used to watch these educational cartoon musical shorts called "Schoolhouse Rock" on ABC on Saturday mornings.  One of my favorite shorts was called "Conjunction Junction", which taught about the importance of small words that held sentences together, sometimes changing the idea of the sentence, or simply enhancing the meaning.  The three that they focused on were the words and, but and or.

If any three words could be used to summarize how 2022 went for me, And, But, and Or are absolutely perfect.

This past year felt like the year of the pile on.  So many things happened in such rapid succession that it was often all I could do to stand there and watch it happen with my mouth stuck in an open position while mentally uttering an endless string of "Oh, SHIT! Are you KIDDING me?  What the ACTUAL FUCK?"

I knew that starting with my daughter turning 18 in January (which got all kinds of weird as several of her friends came down with Covid, so no big turning 18 get together, which I tried to mitigate with a family Zoom call, which worked.  Sort of) that the Spring of her Senior Year in high school was going to strain the living daylights out of my little budget.  My daughter started working part time, and we economized where we could so that she could enjoy the newly restored post Covid rites of passage that come with graduating from high school.  The first surprise came courtesy of a red-light camera ticket that I never saw as I was turning behind a box truck.  The enormously expensive ticket arrived in the mail, and I ended up engaging a service to help fight the ticket (Surprise!  I still had to pay the ticket while it was being disputed.  The kicker is you get a refund if you win.).  All of this happened smack in the middle of Prom/Graduation season.  I freely admit to robbing Peter to pay Paul to get through this.  Every time I paid one thing, some thing else popped up.  I figured once she walked across the stage, the worst of it was behind me, I could catch up on bills over the summer, and possibly, we could look at moving into a bigger place in the early part of the new year.
​
BUT...

In early July, I and everyone else in the commercial building that we lived in, were informed that the building had been sold, and that we would all need to vacate our rooms by the end of August.  No formal written warning, and I had to practically fight them to get any kind of relocation assistance.  We ended up moving out of our room over the course of one day, jamming as much as we could into storage (AND losing a few items along the way!), driving off of the premises at 11:30 at night with no clear idea of where we were going, or if we were going to end up spending the night in the car.  We spent three very expensive weeks in a motel, before being blessed to find an apartment in a very unconventional fashion.  Again, way more money that I really had, but we had to go somewhere.  Here, is a 3rd floor walk up not far from two, soon to be three, major entertainment venues in the City of Inglewood, CA.  I am sitting in my bedroom typing this post.  

AND...

My daughter was starting college while our living situation was very much up in the air.  While she was trying to change jobs, as her part time job was giving her less and less hours as their business waned.  Understandable, but the timing could not have been worse.  All while stopping her ADHD medication for college.  The end result of her tumultuous first semester is that she is taking a year off from college to get her head around what she really wants to do while continuing to work.

AND...

In the middle of all of this, the oil check light went on in my car.  I got it taken care of.  Not cheap is an understatement.  Two months later, it came on again.  I have found out that as my car model ages, it is going to start going through more oil.  So more trips to the garage to top off my oil more frequently for the foreseeable future.

BUT...

The year had some bright spots.  After much prayer (and weeping and gnashing of teeth), I started to be honest about the big stuff that my daughter and I were experiencing, across numerous mediums.  I was continuously surprised at people reaching out to offer assistance, because I was taught to keep my issues to myself, and handle my business quietly.  As worried as I will admit to being, we always ended up with exactly what we needed, exactly at the minute we needed it.

BUT GOD...

In the middle of all this, I was also interviewing for promotions.  Two days after I found out that I might just get a different apartment (the rent was slightly above what I wanted to spend), I found out that I was going to be promoted within the department that I was currently working in.  AND I found out a couple of days after that that I was going to get this apartment, for slightly less money, and the location wasn't going to be as hard on my daughter (she doesn't drive yet, and needed to be near a decent bus line for school and work), as I previously thought.

OR...

There were a lot of ways that I could have dealt with the constant curve balls being thrown at me this year.  I had to make a lot of choices, some of them quickly and without a lot of information to work with.

Do I keep praying and step out on Faith, OR do I just go with the cynical world view that stated that my daughter and I were likely to end up homeless and losing everything?  After all, it certainly looked that way at least a few times during this particular trial.  The numbers weren't always adding up, we were losing money on credit checks for apartments that were being rented as we applied for them, my credit is terrible from multiple go rounds with Identity Theft, among other things, and my daughter has no credit history at all.

Faith, logic and reasoning were always meant to be used together.  I never gave up my faith that things were going to work out, I kept my prayer life realistic according to what I knew was needed and what could be done, and I used logic and reasoning (and more than a touch of Godly intuition!) in how I conducted the day to day activities to get us from point A to point B.

No one was more surprised than me that we ended up with this apartment.  The day before we had to check out of the motel because we were about to run out of money (I had the money for the apartment deposit stashed away, and not to be touched.)

We moved in here in the late afternoon on a fall day, with the assistance of my son and his dear friend grabbing what we could out of storage, and stretching the few little dollars we had left after paying the deposit to make sure we could sleep comfortably (we had no furniture) and eat.  There were a few issues when we first moved in, but the majority of it was resolved within 6 weeks or so, and things have now calmed down to a dull roar.

I am typing this while waiting to go pick my daughter up from the job she started shortly after we moved in.  The hours are adequate for her, and she has set about putting together the bedroom that she has always wanted.  With the new hard wood floors, she also bought herself some slippers for around the house:

As we prepare to quietly close out this doozy of a year, I can only hope that if And, But and Or, decide to show up in our lives in the new year, they show up in a more peaceful way.

Joy AND Love AND Peace AND Gentleness

BUT no Lack of Kindness OR Missing Patience.

Be well in the New Year.

​See you on the other side.

It seems as if every seven years, I go through some sort of housing crisis.

It's not intentional mind you.  Far from it.  There are days when I wonder if seven is simply the number at which momentous change is meant to occur for me.

My 7th Birthday was memorable because my mother brought a Cinderella cake to school for my birthday, and that was the year we went to see The Wiz.

I turned 14 during my freshman year in High School.


I turned 21 shortly after my son was born.  

By the age of 28, I was deeply mired in the Housing Issues that would plague me for the next 20+ years,

And here I am again, doing the one thing I swore that I would NEVER do again.  Unfortunately, I am also at my wit's end attempting to keep my daughter and I afloat while we wait for our housing situation to shake out.  Again.

Here is the ubiquitous GoFundMe link: https://gofund.me/03e35986

I appreciate any and all assistance, as well as anyone that would like to share.

​Thank you.

I am sitting here, in front of a laptop that I have had for several years now, preparing to tell you my thoughts of "home".

My now adult daughter is in the kitchen, preparing a salad for a late lunch, as we tend not to eat at prescribed times on weekends.

"Here" is a small, efficiency apartment, located on the premises of a motel, on a busy commercial strip in the City of Gardena, a working class suburb in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County.  We have lived here for the past 7 years, after leaving our last place which I chronicled in great detail here: www.houseofperpetualdistraction.com/thoughts-feelings-impressions-blog/understanding-job



Soon, we will need to move again.

The newest trend, since the start of the Pandemic is "renoviction": the removal of long-term tenants in order to renovate their apartments, and thus charge more money for them. claremont-courier.com/latest-news/longtime-tenants-blindsided-by-threat-of-mass-evictions-67391/?fbclid=IwAR2Ob--uqEHf4zdfZd4j0Y3woGduY-Vg2c_9JrdSoeQKyY853gvISYW2bMc

And this is far from a California only issue: youtu.be/KgTxzCe490Q

Everywhere you turn, anything evenly remotely affordable is being gobbled up by corporate entities, and the long term residents being forced out.  Although this has existed in some form for many years, it has recently reached epidemic proportions.  It is utterly heartbreaking, what is currently happening to the working class, the disabled and the elderly.

Being inside of the trend is no walk in the park, either.

I have spoken of my housing issues several times in this space.

I just sat down and calculated, that between 1992 (my first attempt at moving out and living on my own) and now, I have moved house no less than 20 times.  This includes one homeless shelter, one maternity home near the central part of California, two long term motel stays, two alternating stints of living with other people, and one attempt to live out of state.  And if you are doing the math, my son was on the majority of this journey with me, and took a lot of the brunt of my seeming inability to keep it together for more than a couple of years at a time.  In a lot of ways, I feel for him; it could not have been easy being the child of someone that was still in the process of growing up herself, and trying to cover all bases while trying not to look "weak", or seem as if she couldn't handle "it", whatever "it" happened to be at the moment.

I received the type of education that I would not wish on my worst enemy.

Although I knew that I was to get and keep a job and pay my bills, I wasn't sure what I was supposed to do when I didn't have enough money, and I didn't have the childcare available to cover either a 2nd job, or continuing education to get a better job.  I discovered that temp work in offices (Receptionist, Secretary, etc) paid better than retail, but found out the hard way that the only way to keep working was to be registered with more than one agency at a time, and try to string the assignments together with as little gap in between assignments as possible.  I also found out that most companies saw the majority of temps as tainted in some way, as well as VERY expensive (one place told me point blank that they would not pay for employees) and refused to hire permanent employees from temp agencies.  Up until I finally started working for the City in 2005, I had settled into the mostly horrific pattern of working for a while (usually, just long enough to settle into the apartment, and being able to make all of my payments on time), then not getting assignments for just long enough to lose whatever apartment I was living in (read that however you want), then getting picked back up in just enough time to find another place.  Rinse, Repeat.  During this time, a former friend also introduced me to the quick fix (with dire consequences!) of signature loans and payday loans.  The less this horror is discussed, the better.  I knew so little about credit, loans, and the like (the internet not being what it is now, back then) that I was living off information from dubious sources that did not have to directly deal with the consequences of my not knowing any better (or thinking I was smarter and knew better than I did at the time) until it was much too late in the game.

By the time I found a wonderful little place in Hawthorne in 2006, I had learned many hard lessons, I finally had a car, and I sincerely hoped that I could take what I learned and do better.

Well, yes and no.

Although I was able to remain in that place for 8 years, between a change of owners, and almost constant car issues (currently on my fifth car since 2003, between stints of not having one), History is a bitch that keeps on giving, and now here I am, this time through no fault of my own, back in the position of trying to overcome a need for housing on short notice with of course, inadequate funds.

The building we live in has been sold, and the new owners want to renovate.  Which means all long-term tenants need to leave.

Please know that I wasn't trying to live here indefinitely.  But I wanted to leave on MY terms: when I had adequate money and time to finally fix my credit issues once and for all, and wasn't rushed or in a panic.

I have been dealing with this, nearly non-stop, and eventually with two children, since I was 20 years old.  I am now 50.  Between my children and myself, there is definitely some collective PTSD around moving and housing security.

I will retire in the next 10-13 years,  It is my hope that by then, I will have finally landed somewhere permanent, and never have to move again.

I can only hope. And Pray.

Did you know that I hadn't been able to breathe through my nose since 2003?

It became a topic of conversation early last year when a former co-worker and I discovered that we would both be having sinus surgeries, albeit slightly different ones, within a couple of weeks of each other.

When we both returned to work after our surgeries, as people that have been through these situations tend to do, we started comparing surgery and recovery stories. Around a month into shared stories of low dose pain killers, constant bodily fluids, and grindingly slow healing, he dropped this line:  "You know?  It almost feels like learning to breathe all over again."

There is something to that.

A lot of my life has been holding my breath: waiting for some situation to end; waiting for the other shoe to drop; waiting for the next day, or payday, to handle business or just waiting for the calm after the storm.

​What is it like to breathe?

What is it like to finally get all of your credit cards paid off, without wondering how you will deal with an expensive emergency that you can't afford to ignore until you have the cash to pay for it outright, and you find yourself right back where you started?

What is it like to watch your child make progress and applaud without being constantly worried that it won't be long until, this, too, passes due to incident or circumstance?

What is it like to not wonder if you will EVER be able to change your housing situation for the better?

What is it like to breathe?

I am honest enough to admit that I have spent a lot of my life flailing: swimming against a tide of unfortunate circumstances, decisions made out of desperation due to aforementioned circumstances,  and merely trying to hold it together no matter what.  Oh Dear Dog, there was a great deal of "what".

I prayed. A lot.  I changed my approach to almost every area of my life: work, child rearing, relationships, financial management.  Some changes worked out, some definitely made everything worse, some were almost exceptionally neutral in that they produced zero net gains or losses, so I counted them as wins.  And Boy Howdy, did I learn some hard lessons along the way. Like don't take every success story you read at face value.  There is often some little tidbit that gets left out of the story that makes the end result a whole lot less heroic, or as easily achievable, as they are making it out to be.  And not every debt management plan is for everybody.  In fact, some plans will absolutely destroy your credit that you were trying so hard to build up.

In those rare moments when I have found time, space, and the ability to breathe a little, it finally occurred to me that these moments are fleeting.  For everyone. The most profound statement I ever heard regarding these fleeting moments came from a gentleman at church, speaking before the altar call: "Right now, either everyone has just come out of a storm, is going through one currently, or is about to go through one."

There is so much truth to that.

The key thing in learning to breathe again is just remembering that the physical process that you adopted to get through your difficulties doesn't have to go on indefinitely. Moving from only short inhalations through your nose because that was all you could do, and mostly breathing through your mouth because you had no choice, to full deep breaths; slowly in through your nose, then out through your mouth, quietly, rhythmically, filling your lungs and regulating your breathing in the healthiest possible way.

We will get through this.  All of us.  Whatever "this" is for us currently.  Some of us will pray, and lean on our faith.  Some of us will put our efforts into doing the absolute best we can, to the best of our knowledge, to help our situations .Some of us won't be able to do much but hope for the best, as we have already done all we can.

And it is my sincerest wish that somewhere in the middle of all of the striving, and praying, and hoping, and working, and occasional chaos,, that at some point, we all have the opportunity to stop for a quiet moment.  And breathe.





​

The picture on the left is on quite a few drains in and around Los Angeles County.  It warns people not to dump garbage into those particular sewers, as those drain directly to the ocean. Seeing as no one wants to swim in garbage, this seems like a pretty non controversial idea.  However there are those who would argue that it doesn't matter whether or not we dump things into the sewers that would pollute our waterways.  Garbage has to go somewhere, right?

Hold on to that thought for a minute.

I read an old Facebook post I made several years ago.  It dealt with my loose interpretation of Karma:  whatever you put out into the world, be it good, bad or indifferent, always comes back to you in some way. Although I have always tried to watch what I project, I haven't always been careful, and have let the negativity flow in my unguarded moments.  I spoke of this briefly in a post I made about my son's rough summer a few years ago.  Someone felt the need to kick me while I was already down, and feeling like I could not hit back (I did eventually), I let the garbage flow out of me onto whatever person, object, or behavior was the object of my ire at the particular moment.  After some amount of contrition, I reminded myself that everything we do has some residual effect on someone else.  I could have ruined someone's day over a minor slip, and I would never know it.

I do not have the time or energy for a mid-life crisis.  What I have had, instead, is a series of revelations that helped me put a great deal of what has gone on in my life into some sort of perspective.  It's that perspective that informs how I relate to the world around me, and thus, how I treat others.  I try to stay away from toxic positivity; mostly because that is merely hiding my own discomfort with another person's life issues and emotions behind meaningless platitudes meant to make me sound profound.  I strive to be genuine, and really be present for those I interact with.  Of course this isn't easy; what worth doing in life is?  The best any of us can do is navigate the path of our lives in all of it's glories and messiness without inadvertently taking any of the worst bits of it out on anyone else.

Like most social media users, I post a lot of memes: funny, sarcastic, uplifting, informative.  My attempt to keep from boring people by posting a lot of the same types of memes is also me projecting the kaleidoscope of my personality out there, in hopes that it is giving them the permission to do the same thing.

Walt Whitman was right.  We are indeed vast, and we do contain multitudes.

And, yes, while the negative is a part of that multitude, that's not the part I want to put on anyone else, if only because I want to lighten the load of the next person.  I have borne the burden of someone else's bad day, and I never want to burden anyone else that way if I can help it.

So I remind myself in many ways that my attitude is my responsibility, no matter what else is going on around me: by quiet morning meditation, by pleasant conversation, by smiling invocation.  By words, and pictures, and blue waves on concrete, am I reminded that I have the choice to either make, or ruin, someone's day.

​I choose peace.

"The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it." - Galadriel's Prologue from "Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the RIng" (Fran Walsh and Phillipa Boyens, 2001)

I haven't written a blog post since this day last year.

In between, I have started at least five different posts, but was never able to finish any of them. Between exhaustion, defeat, heartbreak, profound disappointment,  and good old writer's block, it was difficult for me to convey exactly what went on this year.

On the macro level, I have marveled from afar at man's increasingly open inhumanity to man, as they hide behind the anonymity of the internet to utter things they would never dare say to anyone's face for fear of retaliation.  Or at least some wouldn't say out loud.  Hatred now has many and varied soapboxes from which to shout, and uses them all as often, and as loudly as possible.  Insults and broad characterizations have replaced any kind of meaningful dialogue about differences, and we are further from any kind of understanding and moving towards the grey areas that unite us than ever before.  Social media has become a metaphorical slaughterhouse, where even the most innocent of comments can be targeted for a political bloodbath for any reason, or no reason at all.

There are glimmers of hope, and those working towards getting help to those that need it.  I find that I have to focus on those to keep from losing all faith in humanity.  That, and baby, puppy, and kitten videos to cleanse my social media palate.

As the circle moves closer in, I found people moving on in different ways:  changing jobs, either by choice or force; changing states: spiritually, emotionally, and sometimes physically; generally preparing for what would come next in life.

Here we get into the micro level:  2021 began a year of profound changes for my family and myself.  We are all preparing in some way for the next phase in our lives.  My older sister is preparing to become a 1st time grandmother.  My younger sisters both have toddlers, and are preparing for the K-12 marathon.  My son continued on his mission to create the life that he knows he is capable of, numerous hiccups aside.  My daughter started her Senior Year of high school in person, after a year and a half of distance learning, and suddenly returned to the kind of student she was at the beginning of her academic career.  She knows that this is the beginning of the end of her childhood, and there will be no more free do-overs.  Everything she does from now on goes straight toward her adult life: she got her first job, she is applying for colleges, yet still remaining flexible about how she would like the next part of her life to play out.

This is a profound change for me as well.  I turned 50 last month, and next month will become the parent of two adult children.  The everyday, day to day, hands on supervisory (Ok.  Micro-Management.  Who are we kidding,) part of my job will end, and my role will become more advisory:  I only step in when specifically asked, and then only to the extent specifically needed at that time.  

After nearly 30 years in the same role, this will be quite the transition for me.  As I will also now have to figure out who I am outside of my identity as "Damani and Ashley's mom".

All of us are in some stage or another of transition.  My family, Our government, The World at large.

I can't say anything profound right now.  But it is my sincerest hope that we are transitioning into the greatest possible version of ourselves; the loving, caring people we portray ourselves as, and show the very best of what we can be to the world.

See you on the other side.

Around a month or so ago, I found myself watching a documentary about Steven Spielberg on HBO Max.  Being a fan of biographies, documentaries, discussions of the creative process, and his movies, this seemed like a perfect way to wind down at the end of one of my usual busy days.  One thing that absolutely stuck out to me, was his realization that he had a tendency to re-visit the same subject repeatedly in his movies, albeit in different ways.  He posited that perhaps that was his way of dealing with the issue subliminally.  He sort of chuckled softly, then stated that "Art is therapy".

Hmmm.....

I haven't written much over the last three years.  I admit it has become hard for me to concentrate.  I have fallen into a pattern of barely getting out of bed in enough time to get to work, horrific eating habits, crawling home at the end of the day with only enough energy to eat, make sure my daughter is at least kinda, sorta okay, then engage in endless scrolling on social media to numb myself enough to kinda sorta sleep, so I can repeat the process the next day.

I participate in both individual and group therapy to deal with both current and lingering issues.  One thing that I notice that comes up in both instances is the suggestion of journaling:  writing down everything relevant to your journey in order to help you gain perspective and assist in your own healing.

I am almost 8 years into this exercise of writing and maintaining a blog.  For the first five years, when I was writing regularly, I admit that I didn't really know what the blog was about.  For me, it was a place to practice my gift, by jotting down whatever was going through my mind at any given time.  Sometimes funny, sometimes angry, sometimes thoughtful, and occasionally mundane, it was just me, unfiltered and mostly off the cuff.  Even through a few rough patches, sustaining the blog was the one thing I could regularly return to as an outlet for whatever was going on with, and around, me.

The last three years, especially this last year, has sorely tested everything that I thought I knew about myself and the world around me.  The exhaustion, the mean spiritedness, the loneliness, the isolation, and not always being able to adequately express it all in conversation led to the aforementioned mindless distraction tactics.

Then a mindless distraction tactic yielded a truth bomb that hit me where I lived.

Art IS Therapy.

What I never realized was that this blog was just me journaling.  I am happiest when I am writing, and when I began to doubt myself, and question whether or not I should write what I actually felt, the form of therapy that had served me well fell away from me almost as quickly as it came. It was never far away, as I made lengthy, thoughtful social media posts, but ultimately, the little angel on my right shoulder would whisper softly in my ear that I knew I missed writing, and that I should return to it.

What this blog is really about, then, is survival.

Through hills, valleys, depression, anxiety, triumphs, failures, exultant highs, and crushing lows.  Keep going.  Through people that spend as much time building you up as tearing you down, and they are often the same person.  Keep going.  Through that day job that you keep because jobs are scarce, rent doesn't pay itself and groceries are expensive, even though at times the job is absolutely soul-crushing.  Keep going.

For me, that means keep writing.  Writing is art is therapy is survival. 

If I take anything from this year of absolute clarity (2020 gave us more clarity than any of us asked for or wanted), it is that I am ultimately the architect of my own survival, and perhaps going into this New Year, I can finally begin to move from mere survival into actually living.  And continue writing, of course.

See you on the other side.

There are memes floating around about how that has been the Lentiest Lent most of us have ever experienced.

A global pandemic has challenged everything we thought we knew about the world around us, the people we interact with (or don't), and our very definition of the word normal.  Especially as we enter into the conclusion of a High Holy Season and find that all of our annual rituals have been disrupted by a disease that is no respecter of persons, class, creed, color, age, religious persuasion, or lack thereof.  All it needs is a host, and anybody will do.

This was going to be a post about how this will be the first Easter in almost 20 years that I have been un-churched.  I parted ways with my church home of 18 years late last year, and as with all long term relationships, I have chosen to make sure that I am healed, and have done some extensive internal work before entering into on another relationship.

But a global crisis was declared, and among many social distancing edicts issued, it was suggested that religious institutions move their observances online in order to reduce the spread to those most at risk of serious complications from this disease: the elderly, and those with underlying medical conditions that render them among the immuno-compromised.

So now, at least physically, we are all somewhat un-churched.

One of the rituals that we practice during this season is the stripping of the altar.  Performed in complete silence, it involves the removal of all of the vestments that are normally on the Altar, and the wiping down of the Altar itself.  And while I know that it is meant to symbolize one very specific thing, I can't help but find myself moved by the thought that there is something else being shown to us as believers as well.  

Everything we cling to as "normal" has been stripped away during this Lenten season.  We may have chosen something to fast from on Ash Wednesday, but perhaps our Spirit has been shown what we REALLY needed to eliminate not just during this season, but going forward:  the artifice that we construct to make our lives appear acceptable before others so that we can be acceptable to ourselves.  Our judgment of people that we see as beneath ourselves, even if all they are is different.  What the great Commandment ( Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” - Matt 22 37-40) really means, do we believe it, and are we prepared to follow that to wherever it leads, even if that place is only our couch.

What has been stripped away, I think anyway, is the "religion" part of our rituals, leaving us to focus on the relationship part of our connection, not necessarily one to another, but absolutely between God and ourselves.  Deep down in the most private parts of yourself that no one but God can see, who are you, really, and have you been honest enough with, and about, yourself to get real with God?  Spring cleaning isn't just about your material possessions.  Lent is the opportunity to clean out he internal mess that keeps us stuck in places that we should have moved on from long before we were ready to admit that we were in a place that was doing more harm than good, even if it didn't start out that way.  Habit is a brutal taskmaster, and our Lenten promises to replace bad habits with good shouldn't just include the physical manifestations of our internal struggles.  We should be moving to clear our mental and emotional closets as well.  Perhaps by having us forced to stay home, and abstain from everything we use to distract ourselves from ourselves, we have been given the opportunity to clear every closet in our minds and spirits, and finally let go of ideas, habits, rituals, and whatever else no longer serves it's intended purpose.

As we go forward into this Holy Weekend, we are of the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ set us free from the sins of the world.  We hold ourselves in bondage by clinging to internal things that we consider sacred that have little or nothing to do with our relationship to God, but everything to do with wanting to maintain appearances of whatever gives us comfort.  This season has given us permission to finally, let these things go.

Go forth.

​Be free.