Tag Archives: rest

Holding Both in Such Weak Hands

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flare
verb
to suddenly burn or shine brightly

flare
noun
an exacerbation of a chronic disease

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Can’t write much today because my wrists have been in pain for almost 24 hours now. Just trying to rest: pared down my to-do list to just three things, this blog post being one of them. Earlier today, I would not have been able to type it out. This evening, I am a little better.

I want to shine bright, make a difference, be a leader in thought and action. Sometimes it can feel so impossible with a body that feels like a leaky bucket: hard to store up energy when the most mundane things seem to leech power. Some days I feel like a rag that has been wrung out.

I know I am blessed with resources, privileged: I can afford pain meds and peppermint oil, my employer works with me and not against me, I have a support system that could make a king envious.

So, somehow, I get to do both. I get to flare up in multiple ways. Perhaps not at the same time.

But then again, with all I’ve learned of vulnerability: maybe so.

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Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash

Triduum: Hold On Hope

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It’s been a hard month, a hard year. Re-watching Scrubs and this song was featured. It stirs me every time. If you want to fully enter into my reflection below, press play and keep reading with this in the background.

It seems fitting that I’m feeling this way on this particular weekend– Saturday of Holy Week– when I do my best to reflect on how the believers felt this day, over 2000 years ago. A song I love describes it this way: “the cruel cross had crucified the hope of every heart.” Fearful. Empty. Lost. A bone-deep exhaustion. How could anything be right again?

2018 has kicked my butt. Truly.

I’ve battled intense loneliness and blasts of anxiety. I was burned so badly in 2017 that I’m now defaulting to mistrust, when that is certainly not my preference. Book stuff has me questioning my identity as a writer, my identity as a confident woman. Health issues continue to click into place, though I skipped using my CPAP last night and had a long evening of battle-packed dreams of war and betrayal that has left me feeling depleted. It’s almost April and yet it snowed three inches last night. Where is spring? Will it ever come again?

We wait.

The lifeless body in a tomb that Saturday . The grief and loneliness and ache of this one.

We wait. I wait.

Because I, with my 2000 years of hindsight, know what sunrise brings: resurrection, which has fueled hope ever since for people like me. Hope, big enough to hold me when I can’t hold onto it.

 

Keep Calm

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I have never really been neutral about anything.  I am an extremist, and I feel things in my bones.

I sometimes have a hard time seeing that the current situation will likely change soon.  This is a burden given to me by obsessive-compulsive disorder.  We OCs think things will always feel this way.

I am a writer.  Creativity is like air to me.

All of these things combine, and you have me, this volatile, passionate artist whose highs are marvelous and whose lows are dark.  When writing is not going well, I sometimes think it will NEVER go well again.

Years of this rollercoaster should have proved to me that things will level out again.  I don’t have to rush every draft like a linebacker, don’t have to wrestle it into shape.  I can relax, breathe deeply, set it aside for a (short) time, think and pray and carry on.