This is what I know. Their baby was beautiful and loved by so many people. She looked like her dad. She could not have had a better mother. She changed all of our lives and now we are heartbroken & somehow still grateful. The rest? Why? When and if it will ever make sense? I don’t know.
T. S. Eliot wrote a poem called Ash Wednesday and in it is a line I go back to again and again when I don't know how else to pray. Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still. Only a handful of words and yet they are strong and broad enough to hold all my questions & inadequacies. I need to be taught to care for my neighbor better - how to love that woman, how to love Tim, how to love people who hurt me. How to love like Christ, because of Christ's love for me. I need to stop caring about the things that don't matter, the voices who really won't have a say in the final count. Thank God for these 40 days to learn to sit still, to turn, to listen, to change. Thank God that His grace is not limited by merit, time nor space.
This is a Lenten meditation in which she uses the words of the following confession, breaking it up and interspersing it with life experiences. You really must read it to fully appreciate it. It can be found in its entirety here.
Most merciful God,
we confess that we have sinned against you
in thought, word, and deed
by what we have done
and by what we have left undone.
We have not loved you with our whole heart;
we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We are truly sorry and we humbly repent.
For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ,
have mercy on us and forgive us,
that we may delight in your will,
and walk in your ways,
to the glory of your Name. Amen.
are a shaky foundation, of the danger of
drowning in a pool of my own whimsy
This is a larger composition. I just love the imagery here.
answer & some sentences
I was born in this small, scrubby town in the part of Washington that is never green. The air is very dry, the river is very wide, the sky is very big, and everything else comes in shades of very brown. The county fair is still a big deal. There are no good restaurants or traffic jams. "There are no good restaurants or traffic jams." Brilliant.
absit iniuria verbis
Nursing school has made my hands useful and I am thankful for this. In college, I hopped around between disciplines, trying to find the right balance of poetic & practical, a way to meld an inclination toward language with a compulsion to make a tangible difference. Chemistry was too academic, English too indulgent, so I settled on politics and its implicit room for negotiation. After college, I slowly drifted back towards words, burying myself in paper. I could look beyond my computer screen and see how the sentences might rise off the page, walk up the Hill, and maybe someday change things for someone somewhere. It never seemed immediate enough, though, and left me fidgety and empty handed at the end of the day.
When you don't know what to say how to string the words together
and then match them up
with your own roiled thoughts
if too much time has passed, sorry
sticks in your throat, or the nervous
syllables shrink and retreat
back down to the safety of your belly
sometimes it's best, the only
way really, to go with that
tried and true old standby
hello
As an inveterate lover of words and a sometime Latin scholar, the title alone of this post was guaranteed to get my attention. It's well worth reading in its
fullness.
Real things are not always simple.
Simple things are rarely easy.
Easy things are never real.
There are eight of us sharing a nice cabin (pictures here).
Every now and again, I discover something so good, so moving, I just have to share it. Not too many months ago, I discovered this blog, and I've been addicted ever since. 
So it has become somewhat of a tradition to wish her a happy birthday in cyberspace by posting pictures of birthdays past. Here she is on our first tour in Spain, where she was born. The rug was a birthday gift that she still has.
We think this was her 7th birthday. It's in Maryland at our Severn house before moving on base Fort Meade. Her birthday was on Easter that year, and our neighbor made a cake in the shape of a cross because of the holiday.
This was Spain, our second tour. Likely Bonnie's 11th birthday, seen here with friends and her sister, Hannah.+Birthday.jpg)
