Wounded birds flock together

It seemed such an odd love to develop, given my age and work experience. Trauma and I have been in many battles together.  Between the injuries I've seen and the few I've heard or felt, it seems unlikely to want to fly in any way, shape or form. I was petrified the first time we took off on a machine to achieve that feeling - it was both petrifying and intoxicating. I learned the first day that you don't fly off a motorcycle willy nilly, and a good driver can guide you through the ride with ease and grace.

My wife got me a bike a few weeks ago. I cannot remember the last time I enjoyed a thing quite so much. Probably not since I was a kid, at Christmastime. I couldn't ride today, even though the afternoon was beautiful. It was Homecoming, and we had 3 kids going, so it was time to be a mom. Evening came, the long shadows of an autumn sunset, and I headed down to the garage to look at her, ending up hauling her out for a bath.

She's been through a battle, I thought as I washed the saddlebags. I found gouges in the crash bar on the back side and a little chip out of the paint. Her scars don't make me love her any less. I'm scrubbing this bike, and thinking of some old Scriptures I used to love...how God used Rahab the "harlot", Mary Magdalene, Deborah the Judge who stabbed someone through the eye with a tent stake. Scarred and battered women who couldn't be quelled by the evils they'd seen, the sins they'd committed or the men who tried to crush them. How those stories used to give me hope, used up, battered and scarred before I was old enough to make those choices for myself.

Loving something (or someone) scarred is to participate in redemption. Reclamation. It's an honor to be the one to put footprints in the dusty earth that bears the disfigurements of the war that passed through. To tend, to water, and finally, to harvest from that land. You'll never forget that the ditch there used to be a deep furrow - now covered in lush grass, your feet will still remember the gash exposed. Time - and love - heals all wounds.

My own scars have faded, from red to pink to flesh. Lines still cut across but I don't catch strangers staring at them anymore. My bike is a lot like me, scars hidden now, there only for the intimate touch, not the casual glance. I'm going to enjoy riding my bike even more, knowing those scars are there, that she carried some other rider out of a battle. May she be a part of my own Phoenix story, part of the healing.

Part of the reclamation of this battered old self.

Volume 2

There was a tornado last month in my old neighborhood. My kids and I were rather hilariously trapped in Kohl's during the warning, miles from the touchdown. We heard about the storm and it's aftermath almost incessantly for days and weeks afterward. Today, I drove by the site on my way back from my parent's home, marveling at how much damage was done now that the debris is cleared and you can see the gash the tornado cut through the very earth. It was also remarkable that rebuilding has already started, lots of new framing going up as survivors try to get enclosures up, belongings and livestock sheltered before winter hits.

It seemed a fitting analogy as I embark again as a writer in the ever more crowded internet space. I've been quiet for a long time, years. Writing was one of the buoys that kept me afloat when I was in the midst of the storms of life. For years afterward, as we began to assess and repair. And now the storm is but a memory, and life has carried me along on a rip current of both joy and new challenges that keep me off the computer and in the moment. I wrote through coming out, loss of faith, divorce, and rebuilding life as a single mom in a tiny apartment. I stopped writing when it seemed the story quit flowing from these fingertips, and because I gave in to fear. I could not write to the same audience, it seemed. I didn't know if I had anything worthwhile left to say to that audience, the Christian world, moms from homes that looked ever more different than mine.

So why write again? First of all, I'm not sure I will, or if this is just a brief hello to my old blog and old readers. I'm going to try. Most of all because it doesn't seem right to end the story just because I became afraid to tell it. And because I never know who might be listening, who might need the words I'll spill, the journey I'll share.

Today, I am remarried. I am a mom of seven kids, five of whom are teenagers. My oldest just got married herself. Two of my children have changed their names. I am no longer a full-time professor, but I work two jobs as a staff nurse and I teach part-time while still editing for a large educational publisher. I constantly feel like I have too many irons in the fire and something is going to blow up or turn out wrong. I am a rescue dog mom. I drive the same car. I love to drive my motorcycle. I recently quit smoking, a bad habit I picked up to carry me through the darkest times that seems silly now that times aren't so dark.

Life is good, and it is sometimes very painful. I continue to see a doctor at least every 3 months for constant changes in treatment to keep cancer recurrence at bay. I don't have many of the same friends and extended family can be a minefield. I don't know how to do this mom thing yet and that bothers me immensely. Stepmomming eludes me most of the time. I don't know how I relate to God, and I know that I don't relate well at all to religion.

Here I am, living life and loving it (most of the time). Still struggling with all the metaphysical questions that have plagued me in their ephemeral and gargantuan complexity. First to admit I don't have answers, I'm also first in line at the question window of life. How about you? What has changed about your life in the last five years? What questions are you wrestling today?

Grasping the Dichotomy

I remember clearly how I countered atheists as a child,

"I would rather be wrong on the side of faith."

Life sometimes feels reduced to a risk-benefit ratio. Children grow at astonishing rates, far quicker than my aging parental intellect can adjust. The times are changing. Taboos are on pyres of social media before our own eyes. As in generations past, what was dangerous is not only cool, but a political stance, an identity defensible: our children mount heights both indefinable, ineffable, but conscious, decided, strong. They are the new warriors on the edges of social norms. Challenging ideologies and forging paths through a wilderness all their own. Yet I cannot but see them as the college men placing daisies in rifle barrels in the 1960's, my father's generation growing beards in defiance of gender norms in the 1970's, myself growing up sometime shamefully, sometime shamelessly dyke in the 1990's.

I am softened by the Catholic hospital I work at. The humanity and humility of people of faith who surround me astounds and ashames me. I am by definition a fence-sitter in faith: I cannot make myself plant a foot on either side of the fence. My empathy needs bolstering after years of being on the fringes, my seat amongst the outcasts. I carry my identify carefully and stand watch as my children (rebels and pioneers) blaze new trails, yet the priests and sisters who walk an old, established road that has fallen into disregard join them as rebels and pioneers while wielding tried and trusted tools to reach the hurting and restless of this world.

You say I'm stubborn and I never give in
You say I'm selfish, and I agree with you on that
I say we've only known each a year
You say, "I've known you longer, my dear."

You're so provocative, I'm so conservative,
You're so adventurous, I'm so very cautious,

Walking with each other,
think we'd never match at all,
but we do.
(My Same ~Adele, 19)

I look around at a house of mirrors. Faith has always been dichotomous to me: heaven and hell, righteous and sinful, lightness and dark. I remember a quote I loved long ago:

Muses of the gray, beyond your binary definitions, my children and I still adrift on our raft together, and now we gather souls - my wife, stepfamily, friends... trying to live life outside the margins but looking for other outliers. Longing for community, even when we have accustomed ourselves to being outsiders.

I feel the pull of the universe. The need to be right on the side of what is truly right. A song by a favorite bluegrass gospel family band haunts me. I wonder if I can again master the idea that God's hand is unchanging, true...but loving, accepting of difference, uncertainty. Master the dichotomy. I ponder how we all start out so sure of our intuition, fighting for the things we simply know as true, yet as we age, wisdom adds questions, not answers. Survivors and embracers of dichotomy. We are all on this journey, spinning through the stars, marking our short years in evolutions around a dying sun. Of the stars, embracing darkness in light, light in darkness.

Believers. Doubters.

Perhaps we all hold an eternal thread and tug in tension with all of humanity. The pull between knowledge and knowledge of limitations. Love and hate. War and peace. All a part of the dichotomous universe that cradles us in our unknowing. Each of us earth-shattering and brilliant, dull and muted by the mundane of our reality.

Time is filled with swift transition,
Naught of earth unmoved can stand,
Build your hopes on things eternal,
Hold to God's unchanging hand.
(Hold to God's Unchanging Hand, The Franz Family, Sorrow and Wisdom)

I reach into the dark, I struggle for faith. Struggle for vision that Christ is Love, that God, deity by whatever name known...that it is love that wins in the end. That my children and I can be loved with abandon here... and eternally.

Why being humanist means being a lover

Faith has served a purpose in my life. It provided resilience in the face of some of the gravest difficulties I'll ever face. It taught me to question, debate, and defend my ideas and dreams. It taught me the value of believing I am here for a purpose, that there was a metaphysical something that could see my potential in all my flawed humanity.

Because of the physical reality to which human knowledge is constrained at this point in history, it is hard for me to comprehend that something can come from nothing. All matter comes from other matter - there is nothing spontaneous about the development of our observable universe. Where did we come from? Were we created, either in a fully functional state as posited by the legends of the Bible, or as embryonic chemicals stored for eons in the stars and released by an explosion that transformed primordial soup into an evolving universe with an ever-changing genetic and phenotype landscape of mesmerizing, if possibly impermanent, beauty? Is it possible to live agnostic, accepting ambiguity, the I don't know answers to our deepest questions?

Perhaps what I conceived of as divine is actually human: I have a unique potential that serves me well as a professor - to see the hidden beauty and potential in the living, breathing miracles who cross the threshold of my office. I see the purpose concealed there, too. Perhaps this is love. To believe in people, to trust their journey and process, to have confidence in our ability to shape a future world in which respect defines us more than differences do.