Thanksgiving

Work is finished for the week.  The turkey and ham are thawing in the refrigerator.  And the pies are in the oven, filling the house with mouthwatering smells.  Tomorrow the counters will be filled with more food than we can eat.  And for the next month, we will revolve through a seemingly never-ending celebration of friends and family. 

My family has never been big on traditions.  We trade off holidays with in-laws and no two years ever look exactly the same.  From the time I was young, someone in my family worked somewhere where the holidays were the busiest time of the year.  My mom was the Postmaster in our small town - and had her busiest days in November and December.  My brother works retail and barely sees daylight during this time of year.  I'm now working on a rotation schedule to assess ER patients for mental health issues and traffic only increases during the holidays.  Some of my husband's family has duties that don't always take a break for Thanksgiving or Christmas Day.

So we've learned to be flexible.  We gather when we can.  In smaller groups and gatherings when and where it works the best.  Sometimes we have traditional fare.  Sometimes we order a pizza or throw a steak on the grill or fix enchiladas.  We've sliced turkey and eaten pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving and we've been on the ski slopes on Christmas day.  We've had huge family gatherings and intimate times with friends.  Santa always finds us wherever we end up or comes a day early or late if we make a special request.

This year we are having a traditional Thanksgiving at my house with my husband's family.  Then we will start making Christmas rounds in a couple of weeks in order to carve out time for various configurations of family.  This year we may be done by Christmas and have a breather the week after, but sometimes our celebrating goes right on through the New Year.  More than once, my immediate family of four has found ourselves alone on Christmas day.  Sometimes we stay in our pajamas and watch movies all day long.  Sometimes we drive around and look at Christmas lights.  Sometimes we hang out with friends who find themselves in similar circumstances.  This year, we may take a mini in-town vacation to see some of the local Christmas wonders.  No matter what - we enjoy the day.

And as Thanksgiving Day 2010 lurks around the corner - I want to be a bit trite and list some of the things I'm thankful for this holiday season.

Family that flexes and bends and reconfigures to meet new challenges and have new adventures every year.  People that have known me all my life and will know me to the end, that share genes and habits that I see in my children, that can sit with me in silence because the stories are known by heart.

Friends that enrich my life, challenge me, support me, stand with me, celebrate the triumphs and mourn the defeats.  Friends that will pick my kids up with a simple phone call and that are part of the village it takes to raise my daughters.  Couple friends that indulge in adult beverages and conversation when even the village doesn't seem enough.  Kindred spirits to share with and laugh with and love.

Two amazing daughters who are growing by leaps and bounds and who have the markings of incredible young women.  Fierce and tender, compassionate and zealous, sweet and sassy.  They are the loves of my life and the reason I keep putting one foot in front of another.

A husband who is truly my soul-mate.  Who loves me unfailingly, who holds me up when I don't think I can stand, who is my biggest cheering section and my support system all in one.  A man who preferred daughters over sons, who can fix an engine or put tiny earrings into little ears, who teaches his daughters to fish and navigate by the stars, and who isn't afraid to fix a meal or mop a floor.  He has given his life for ours and we love him with all our hearts.

A career that is brand new and fulfilling beyond imagination.  I LOVE what I'm doing every day.  I get to see the divine wrapped in flesh and hold space for the suffering of others as they face unimaginable odds and daily put one foot in front of the other.  I am grateful beyond words to be a witness to the life journey of others.  And listening to their stories and feeling their pain humbles me and makes my heart overflow with gratitude for the life I have.

Tomorrow I'll sit with some of my family and eat way too much.  We will laugh and talk and celebrate.  And that celebration will continue on through the next month.  But the things I've seen along the way this year on this journey home to myself make me more thankful than I have ever been before.

Having Some Fun

There's lots of super serious stuff going on over here.  Stuff I'm not quite ready to write about just yet.  Plus I've been VERY busy getting my new jobs all settled in.  So I've been away from this space for a while.  But Lindsey at A Design So Vast posted this little questionnaire and it seemed like fun.  So here I go.  Play along if you like.

Where do you live: Allen
Favorite art: ???  Depends on my mood.  I'm not a huge collector.
Pets: Molly - 75 lb Great Pyrenees and Border Collie mix, and Shadow - from barn cat stock
Favorite neighborhood restaurant: Italian Villa
Favorite cocktail: margarita on the rocks with salt - with GOOD tequila
Who inspires you: my clients and my friends, and the people who write the blogs I keep up with
Necessary extravagance: My analyst
Favorite place in the world: San Fransisco, Old Town Vienna, the mountains around Taos NM

CLOTHES
Designer: Coldwater Creek
Jeans: Eddie Bauer or whatever fits
Underwear: Jockey
Sneakers: currently Avia
Watch: Timex
T-shirt: JCPenney
Day bag: something seasonal from JCPenney or Target
Evening bag: don't really have one
Favorite city to shop: Allen - we have EVERYTHING now
Lipstick: Elizabeth Arden - something pink
Mascara: Elizabeth Arden Barely Black
Shampoo: Pantene
Moisturizer: Neutrogena
Perfume: Don't wear it much - but if I do I like Ysatis
Toothpaste: Arm & Hammer Whitening
Soap: Ivory and Dial
Nail-polish color: Anything OPI - love the new Swiss line.  Currently wearing A to Zurich on my toes.  I don't usually keep my fingernails painted.
Who cuts your hair:  Dana Coddington - Imagination Salons
Who colors your hair: same - about every 8 weeks to cover up the gray

Trusting Love

Julie Daley has a wonderful post up on her blog called Extending Love.  These paragraphs took my breath away and I've been grappling with what it means for me since I read them:

We are being asked to trust in love, and I sense we are being asked to go into those places where we learned not to trust in love, for those are the places that hold us back, those places where we didn’t receive love. It’s not about rehashing these stories, for I know all too well that the story stays alive as long as we keep breathing life into it.

It’s about feeling. Feeling those old places in our bodies where we stuffed the pain of not receiving love, and perhaps even developed a strategy that feels vindictive, a strategy that says I won’t love because I wasn’t loved. Being with these painful places, as we would be with a small child that is in pain, a child that wants to be held and loved, so she can know that place within herself.

I have stories, stories that tell me I can't trust love.  And I rehash them and keep them alive.  Because feeling my way into the pain sometimes costs more than I can bear to pay.  Especially by myself.  So I build up walls.  I react to words and scenes that threaten to touch those places.  I get defensive and withdrawn and sarcastic and hurtful.  When I am wounded, I inflict pain in order to deflect it.  And then I hide in my room and I cry, wanting desperately for someone to wrap their arms around me and hold me and love me through the pain.

I also just finished watching a clip of Jon Stewart's closing speech at the recent Rally for Sanity.  In twelve brief minutes, he paints a picture of the rhetoric that inflames the differences instead of highlighting how we can and do work together in all our diversity.  I buy into that rhetoric sometimes and let it drive me into rehashing my stories of mistrust.  During this last little bit of time leading up to a mid-term election, the rhetoric runs hot.  Criticism is constant.  Difference is villainized.  Polarities are highlighted and emphasized.  And we forget that we can and do co-exist in the real world, each and every day - usually through extending just a little love and compassion to a fellow human being.

But right now, in this moment, I feel stuck.  Stuck in the old stories.  Stuck in the pain.  Unable to move forward, deeper, closer.  Because when I hear vehemence from someone who stands on the other side whatever the line, I fall into fear.  Those critical words peel back the layers of my defended and walled off soul, and threaten to inflict pain and I hide behind my ugly defenses.  My story says "don't show them who you really are, don't offer up any tender part".  When I do, and criticism or cynicism or simple apathy is offered in return, the old wounds flare.  I don't know how, under those circumstances to extend love.  All I know how to do is fight or run.

The constant stream of media in our society today exacerbates the problem.  My girls watch a repeating feed of pre-teen drama.  The airwaves are filled with political messages that seek to divide.  Social media provides a forum where courtesy and decorum are easily forgotten and divisiveness gets inflamed.  We don't talk.  We post or text or tweet or feed ourselves a constant stream of hate and fear from the pundits.  And we forget that the person on the other side of the divide is human - and divine.  I forget.  I forget to extend love.  And I recluse into fear and pain.

And in the midst of all of this, our sense of community starts to break down.  Where do we have safe spaces to move into the pain of our stories without fear of being ripped apart?  Where do we go to be in the presence of others to feel our way into those old stories and start to heal?  Our families?  Hardly.  Our churches?  Certainly not.  Our circle of friends?  Who has the time?  Where do we find or how do we create community where love and compassion rule, regardless of differences?  Where do we manage to do what Stewart suggests and work together through a series of small compromises to keep moving forward?

I wrote a few weeks ago about my experience of a weekend.  As I've faced old pain over this past weekend and retreated into fear, I thought about the weekend of which I wrote.  I've never experienced the sense of safety in a group like I did throughout that weekend.  For three days, we came together in love.  During the entire time, I never heard a cross word.  I never heard criticism or negativity or gossip.  Some of the group knew one another in real life.  Many others were acquainted.  Some of us were strangers.  Yet we melded together seamlessly.  It was a singular experience I cannot remember anywhere else I've ever been.  I've been on other retreats and always, groups are formed, gossip and critique are a part of the conversation, time is spent in negative sentiment, whether about the current group or rehashing outside events.  But this weekend none of that was present.  We laughed.  We teased.  We talked.  We hurt.  We cried.  We loved.  We dreamed.  We saw the divine and the abject humanity in one another - and we laughed and loved and hugged our way through.

I know that real life doesn't work that way.  But I wonder if it could.  At least in pockets.  In fits and starts and small gatherings.  Do we have to have a perfect combination of ingredients to trust love enough to be there in that life-giving way for one another?  Why do we have to give into the cynicism and fear?  Do I have the faith to trust love enough to bring a piece of that weekend into my everyday reality?  Can I face my pain with enough courage not to hide myself behind a wall?  If I can, and if she can, and if he can - would it change the world?