Posted on February 6, 2019February 4, 2019 in Aging, Faith, Just do it, Poetry, Spiritual growth

A Prompt in Plain Sight

Found this a year or so ago on the sidewalk. I have kept it ever since. It is a writing prompt and in some ways a prod. How so? you ask.

If you have a broken pencil you cannot write much unless you sharpen it and determine to use it. And that is the prod part. Was I willing to use it and sharpen it? This was before I started writing the blog. For years I had been putting off actually writing with regularity and purpose. Once again, I was being given the choice of just keeping a broken pencil, throwing it away, or putting it to work.

And the prompt? Even the stub of a pencil can be used to write. What is to stop the finder from using it? Yes, some kid is missing a green pencil from their colored pencil set, but what about the senior citizen who found and kept it. Will she make use of it, even in old age and gray hair? Will she step out in faith and just do it?

You can scroll through my posts and see if you agree. I think I am onto the discipline of using it and helping the last years of the pencil produce a harvest! Not to mention, the older woman holding said pencil.

Steve Green summed it up nicely with the song “You Want To, Now Will You”

You’ve heard the words
And know they’re true
And now they ring inside of you
They’re calling you to come away
Now will you come or stay.

You want to, now will you
You want to, now will you
The truth that burns within you
Like a bed of fiery coals
Contains that power to liberate
A thousand captive souls
But if the truth will ever set you free
Depends on you
You want to, now will you
You want to…now will you

Posted on January 15, 2019January 14, 2019 in Amazing Creations, Nature, Poetry, Spiritual growth

Transfigured Rock

What if I told you a story about myself?

Once I was frozen in my feelings. Our alcoholic family of origin lived by the Alcoholic unspoken, but strictly enforced, rules of “Don’t think,” “Don’t talk,” “Don’t feel.” When I began attending Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings and Al-Anon I started breaking all of those rules. It was as if I was “breaking out of an inner prison” as I first wrote in 1982.

Someone at a Christian group told me about this book. The first time I read “Codependent No More” I bought my sister a copy and told her, “She lived in our house. She got in our heads. She wrote it all down!” I was truly amazed that someone else on earth not only understood the life in our house on Skyview Lane, but published what she knew!

There is a hillside on the way to my house now that is studded with stones. When the temperatures get frigid, as they are right now, the water might drip from the stones, but it quickly freezes into bars. It often reminds me of the prison I once lived in.

The stone that was once my heart has thawed and been healed in so many profound ways. I would be hard pressed to list all of those ways! I have been learning to think and feel and talk in appropriate ways for many years now. I do not ever want to go back to the ways of my upbringing. I spent hours in sessions of therapy trying to untangle the mess that was made in me.

In case you do not see her, here she is enhanced.

I am certain my husband and I made some mistakes while raising our children. We used to joke that they might one day need counseling as I have needed it. But “we did the best we could with what we knew at the time.” And I, too, believe that my parents did the best they could with what they knew at the time. Hope my children can understand how not having alcohol as a constant influence in our home set them free from many weird things.