So it's Easter and I am supposed to feel joyful, but my ex husband has my boys and all my friends are going through something difficult and I'm still dirt covered and smell like an armpit, wandering out in the desert.  I know I can't go home until I'm open enough to receive.  And I know that openness isn't coming because I have work to do, and I'm naturally lazy, and keep thinking if I just do it this way, things will work out differently.  And they don't.  I keep trying to find meaning in the superficial, and it just isn't there.  I can gratify myself temporarily, but the consequence is always emptiness, like I just wasted what I didn't realize had value on something stupid and useless.  I look down at my hands and see only lines going nowhere.

What seems to need to die are my plans, laid out of concern about what "they" will have to say about me if I am just me.  The things I make more important than listening to and playing with my kids and my students.  The agenda that dictates how much time and how much money is allotted to this and that.  But I don't know how to do it.  I don't know how to be that radically open and still actively give, still work with some intention.  I need help.  I need the hand of someone stronger than death to walk me through it.  And he showed up again today.

So there's this thing lately about change.  It started with pennies: in the mulch by the sidewalk on a run, actually on the sidewalk on another run, beneath my feet on the asphalt as I got out of my car, and somewhere else I don't recall.  I remember thinking, someone else needs to find those and receive their "luck." Days later I saw a quarter, shiny and expectant, in the crease of the car seat.  A dime a few days after that peeked up at me from the gray rubber seal of the washing machine.  Then I found a quarter and a nickel together, and things got weird.  

Having just paid property taxes, by myself for the first time, money is very tight right now.  I've been planning fairly large scale changes in my budget to keep this from happening next year, staying prayerful and grateful for the abundance I have all around me and for the lessons in being frugal.  But I totally missed God trying to tell me that it is in minding the small things that grace comes.  This is true not only with money but with the changes I want to make in my life.  Running three and a half miles at a strong pace without stopping is something that happens a little at a time.  Changing the way I think about those I love happens the same way, as one by one I pry my fingers off their lives and let them be.  Accepting those pennies, that small change, is a metaphor for life.  

It began with "hello..."

At the urging of friends and colleagues, I open this weblog.  I hope the ancient Muses and the divine being I call God bless its existence.  Considering its purposes, I understand two: it is a forum for (hopefully) the exchange of ideas, and it is an opportunity to connect with those who might be interested in participating in my writing research.  Thank you for reading, and I hope you'll respond.