It seems like my life since my mom died has been sliced into chunks by geographical location. Sometimes I forget that there were 19 months between the day she died and the day we moved to Florida. Those months were kind of a blur of work and homeschooling and turning my hair every possible color I could think of before shaving it off. 

Florida was bugs and anger and Disney World. It was coming to grips with the inescapable nature of my dealings with God. No matter how far I tried to get from God, I kept being hit in the face with the things that whether you want to call them God or not, are what I call God. Everywhere I turned, I found the concepts of the Gospel being shown in one light or another. 

Nashville has been about facing myself. It has been about coming to grips with the reality of my humanity and realizing that being human, made of flesh and blood, is not something that I should be ashamed of or despise... regardless of what I had grown up being taught. It's been about learning to acknowledge that the dirt that I am made of IS part of me and is just as redeemed as the spiritual part of me. 

It's been about recognizing the things that I've allowed to isolate me from other people... Every excuse that I have made about the necessity of holding back has been challenged to the point where if I didn't do or say something, I thought I would lose my mind. There was no escaping it. In the process of dealing with those challenges, I managed to alienate a few people and to gain a few valuable friends at the same time. I earned the respect of some and the distain of others. More importantly, I gained my own respect. Instead of being devastated by "losing" those people I alienated, I was able to see that they just weren't ready to hear what I told them. I was able to see that if just being myself, saying what I think, expressing what I feel, was something that caused them to turn away from me... then they were not people I needed in my life right now and it is ok to just let them go. The cool thing is, that it's not anything I hold against them. Whereas in days past, I would have censored myself and tried to keep fitting in, resenting the need for hiding my thoughts... This time, I was able to just be myself, for real, and allow myself to be rejected without resentment, without feeling condemned, and to actually be glad that I was turned away for being true to myself. 

Going to Zumba and belly dance has taught me a ton. There are some moves that simply cannot be done right unless you completely commit to them, attitude and all. There's this crazy weird balance between control and letting go that has to be found or it just looks stupid. To do any of it and not look really stupid, you have to actually WANT to do it. Anything half hearted just doesn't work. 

I recorded a song a while back and my friend told me, "It sounds great, but it's obvious you're holding back." I excused it by saying that if I didn't, I would overload the mic I was using. That was true, but part of it was also that I was so concerned about getting it "perfect" that I was controlling every note, every breath... and holding back anything that would cause a loss of that control. I was holding back the majority of the emotion behind the song, because that particular one had hit me pretty hard and I was singing it in my mind to someone that it was only true for in a fantasy that I wasn't ready to acknowledge yet. 

This desire for perfection had me record a song for the Christmas project we did, over and over and over again... because all I could hear were the mistakes and couldn't make it sound like what I thought I wanted it to sound like. 

Then I later recorded a song, and posted it here for a little while, as a joke for my husband on our anniversary. Again, I tried too hard to get it perfect, in spite of wanting to put my all into it, I got frustrated with it and that's what is in it. You can hear that I'm not enjoying it at all... and it's squeaky and pathetic.

The other day, a friend asked me to send her something to give her an idea of where my range is so that she and her husband could help me find a song to sing at The River before I leave. So, I picked a song by Jennifer Knapp that is recorded a capella on one of her CDs. And, I just sang it. I only re-recorded it once because I forgot the words and had to start over. I didn't listen to it before I sent it. I'll post it here when I figure out how... but her response was pretty cool... Then, later, I found a song that I want to do. It's a song I really like and have the music to the melody drawn out and hanging on a poster on my wall. (For those of you who've seen my "Lent board" that's the one.) I recorded this one only once and didn't listen before I sent it... I just stood in my bathroom and sang it like I would if no one would ever hear it except if they were listening through the walls... I'll post that one too... but... the difference between what I've recorded to "show off" and these recordings I've done just for the sake of someone getting an idea of what I sound like.... to me, is astounding. 

Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, the phrase "No holding back" just started resounding through my head. Like a scene in a movie, all kinds of cool special effects and whatnot, I saw this "vision" of a person in chains growing (kinda like the Hulk, but not green and not in anger) bigger and bigger and the chains were snapping off one by one with sparks flying. Different scenes from movies and TV shows that I have watched flashed through my mind of people escaping prisons, breaking out of being tied or chained up, dams breaking and flooding deserts, butterflies escaping cocoons, and all the while, with each one, the phrase, "No holding back" echoing through the scene. 

No one is meeting a "new me"... people who have known me all my life are just going to meet me for the first time...

So, for once in my life, I seem to actually be doing stuff rather than just writing about wanting to do stuff. We joined the YMCA back in April and it's been a really interesting experience hanging out there. One of the most obvious changes has been losing about 23 lbs. The first picture was taken the second day we had our membership, so early April. The second one was taken in June. The third picture was taken on July 4th. As soon as I get around to it, I'm going to try to take another picture, wearing the same shirt as in the first picture, but for now, the last one was taken about 2 weeks ago.                                                                                                  

There have been some less obvious changes too, but they're only really noticeable to people who know me well enough to see them. I've been going to Zumba. At first, I felt like it was the silliest thing I had ever tried to do. I am hardly the most coordinated person. Some of the music was almost... offensive? at first... definitely not my style, not something I'd voluntarily listen to. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've called the apartment complex office and/or the cops on people who were blasting it at 2 or 3 am... Strangely enough, now my Pandora play list has a bunch of it on it... (Tell Pandora that you like Shakira and watch what kind of interesting stuff ends up on the list... along with ads in Spanish... LOL) Over the last few months, I've actually gotten pretty good at it. There's still some moves I haven't figured out yet, but I'm working on it. 

So, that's why I haven't been writing on here much. I've been out doing rather than wishing. The other interesting aspect of it all is interacting with people. I'm actually making friends. REAL LIFE FRIENDS... not just names with words on computer screens, though I do occasionally interact with them on Facebook chat. I'm not that secure in it. I'm not always certain they actually want me around. I'm the oldest one in the group that hangs out after Zumba. The next closest one in age to me is seven years younger. I don't much care, I "missed" my 20s taking care of babies. Making matters even more interesting is that I'm actually hanging out with girls. Usually the only women I would hang around with at all were old enough to be my mother.

I'm learning not to be so invisible without being pushy. It's easy to let people forget I'm around and just be in the background. For a long time, I had an alert set on my phone that said, "Turn off the SEP field." Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy describes an SEP field like this: 

An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem.... The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot. If you look at it directly you won't see it unless you know precisely what it is. Your only hope is to catch it by surprise out of the corner of your eye.

The technology involved in making something properly invisible is so mind-bogglingly complex that 999,999,999 times out of a billion it's simpler just to take the thing away and do without it....... The "Somebody Else's Problem field" is much simpler, more effective, and "can be run for over a hundred years on a single torch battery.

This is because it relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain.

For a very long time, I believed I fit into the category of something that people don't see because they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. While I still feel very much like I'm unexpected or inexplicable, I feel somewhat less like no one wants to see me. I guess the opposite of an SEP field would be that thing that is so weird that everyone wants to come check it out. LOL 

I've found myself telling my "whole" story to more and more people. I still have yet to tell it here where just anyone can find it... but I'm working on that. A lot of my past posts will make a lot more sense when I do tell the whole story. My story needs to settle into a somewhat more permanent level of resolution before I'm willing to make it completely public. Though... there are some who would read it then as though the whole thing has just been a phase I've gone through and not something that is really part of me that I've been working through and deciding what to do with. Regardless, that's how it is going to work. 

So... no more wishing to do or to change things... no more just praying about it and asking God to do stuff for me... I've gotten up off my butt and started doing stuff myself, and doors to begin or continue to do the things that I've prayed and wished about have been "miraculously" opening. It's pretty wild how it has worked out. I've got to stop writing for now, but I've got to remind myself to write about the different people involved in all of this and how they've made an interesting impact.  

I finally got around to finishing The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I had started reading it about three years ago when I got a copy for free (or maybe for like $.50) because the library was getting rid of some of the extra copies of "older" books they had. It caught my interest because at the time, my kids' school was using the seven habits as a foundation for their overall curriculum. I got through the first chapter or two and was kinda put off by it because one of the first things I read was a story I'd heard before... you know the one, about the kids going wild on the bus and the dad not doing anything about it, and it turns out that the mom had just died... (or mix it up with any number of parental/grandparent relationships). Perhaps people have gotten that story from that book, and I just didn't know it, but... since it was cliche to me... I kinda lost interest in the book after that.

Anyway... I wanted something to read at the pool while the kids were swimming and didn't want to be too caught up in something that could hold my attention, so I brought it along the other day. I can't even tell you at the moment what the first two habits are. But the third one is "Begin with the end in mind." The chapter starts with a visualization exercise where you're supposed to be picturing a funeral and suddenly realize that it is your own. I totally expected this "sudden twist" given the title, and I just kinda skimmed over that part. Why? Because death isn't something I tend to dwell on in regard to myself or anyone else close to me. I realize that people believe it is an inevitability... but to me, it's kinda just one of those things I don't care to participate in... ever... much less anytime soon. This is not to say that I fear it. I don't. If anything I see it as a nuisance that doesn't deserve my attention... But the remainder of the chapter kinda hinged on the idea that life ends. 

This presented an interesting challenge in making the rest of the book fit into my off the wall way of looking at it. I am more or less completely unwilling to change how I view death, but it is also almost completely incompatible with how the habits in this book seem to work, because value is placed on things that matter "in the end." A simple adjustment of my understanding of "the end" is enough to overcome this challenge... "the end" does not necessarily have to mean the end of my life. It can just be whatever it is...

This morning, I was reading through a special Facebook group page that is dedicated to Dr. Hirt. Dr. Hirt was one of the first professors I had in college, he was also probably the best professor I had in college... probably the best teacher in my entire education. He passed away on April 3, 2012. As I read through what people were writing about him, I was just floored by how many people he impacted and how deeply he influenced our lives. People all over the world have written in about how his teaching completely changed their worldview, shifted their paradigms, and challenged them to love and show kindness to people... and he never came off as preachy or pushy or "holier than thou." One of the students wrote that sometimes more of the class would be spent going over prayer requests and praying for students than actually going over the course material. What's funny is that though this is very true, most of us learned more in his classes than we did in the ones who stuck strictly to the curriculum. Even funnier... he'd give us the questions that would be on the tests before he gave the tests. Granted, it was up to us to LEARN the answers... but he never played those games that some profs play where they dump a whole ton of information on you and you have no idea what might be on the test so you cram to try to learn it all and end up missing some minute little point that you never dreamed would be important but that was put on the test just to stump you. 

So, I was thinking about this whole idea of "begin with the end in mind" and remembering the things that Dr. Hirt taught us... and I realize that he very much had this idea in mind. He knew what would matter in the end... what would matter when there was nothing else left. He often said stuff kinda like that, but not in so many words. He was one of few people I knew back then who really listened... with interest in whatever it was people came to him to talk about. He definitely had opinions, but didn't push them on people or insist that they were the only right ones. I keep thinking about the seven habits presented in this book... and though I'm pretty sure he was doing all of this stuff long before the book was even written, I don't think I could find anyone who lived them out better. He lived with God's love in mind. He really did always ask the question "what would Jesus do?" Awesome thing was, it was never that religious churchy answer that most people give when they're asked that question. 

I can't think in terms of writing my own eulogy... but I can think in terms of wanting people to say the same kinds of things about me, but not as a teacher. I'm not a teacher. I'm an artist and a writer. I want to infuse the same kind of just genuine love into whatever I create that Dr. Hirt infused into his teaching. I want people to walk away from what I've written or drawn or painted or sung and be different than they were before they experienced it. I want people who come into contact with me (or my work) to be changed for the better. I want them to walk away with a sense of having been truly and genuinely loved for just who they are. I want some people to stick around and learn and grow with me, too. 

I look at my mom's life and how people remember her. They were always impressed. She did stuff that blew people away and impacted literally thousands of children and adults over the course of time. (She did Children's Ministries and Vacation Bible School programs at various churches in the US and Africa.) She was quite memorable. But in my own mind there was such a duality to it. I remember her temper. I remember her anger. I remember her lack of followthrough on anything she dreamed about. Her dreams were huge. Her visions were grand. And she did do things. But there's a "but" to everything she did. I realize that some of it was because of the opposition she faced at our church. They had a tendency to bring out the worst in people, very much misogynistic and ridiculously patriarchal... with an odd sense of the fact that it was really the manipulative women who were in charge, and my mom had to fight that. It wasn't really in her nature to be manipulative like that, so her frustration came out in other ways. 

I don't want people to have the same "buts" about me. I especially don't want my kids to have the same "buts" about me. I'm sure I have my own "buts"... LOL I would hope that my kids will look at their childhoods with happiness and even though there is definitely some confusion and frustration in their early years, I want the stuff they remember about me from here on out to be that I was still the coolest mom in the neighborhood. LOL I want them to remember this time in their lives as a good time where they were allowed to express and grow into themselves. I don't want them to look back on their teenage years with the same distain I have for mine... LOL. I would rather my kids look back and say, "Wow, my mom was patient with me." or "My mom really listened to me." or "My mom treated me like a real person with thoughts and opinions of my own, and even though we disagreed on some things, it wasn't a fight or an argument." That's the kind of mom I want to be to my kids. I don't want to be the mama bear who tears into people because they hurt my kids either. I'd rather focus on consoling my kids when they're hurting than fighting their battles for them. I'd rather listen to them vent their own frustration with life than add mine to it. 

I want to instill hope and not fear into my kids. I want to instill wisdom and love and not fear. I want them to make right choices based on love and not fear. Yoda is right. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering. 1 John 4:18 says, "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love (KJV)."