PASSION!

Passion is a good thing. 

A few things it doesn't hurt to be passionate about:

Someone or Something to take care of. A plant, an animal, a family member. Right now, my husband is sick and I find much passion and fulfillment in watching over him. making someone or something else  "better," is I believe, one of the deepest and most primal passions. This is a bad picture, (better camera coming someday), but nevertheless, this Luis pleading (in the depths of a hallucinatory flu) to BYU during their game against Florida yesterday. "Please win for me....please Jimmer....I'm sick..." Well, we all know how that turned out.

He usually doesn't look like this. He can actually be QUITE perky. As he is here, at a business school party:

Ha ha. I have a feeling he's going to looooove this blog.

And this is one of Luis's passions, Justin, the sweetest tough-guy you ever met. I think he deserves an award for saddest-looking-dog. Those eyes! Don't mind the messy nightstand. We have a sick husband in the house so we get a free pass.

The Original Little Mermaid. She is... the best. All the vulnerability, tragedy, and heartache of a good tear-jerker. I recommend everyone read the original, or at least watch a film adaptation closer to the original fairy tale by H.C. Anderson. This is a small replica we saw in the Carribean, on St. Thomas Island. I was so touched to find a replica of this daughter of the sea so far from her home.

One more for today: Tomatoes. They are coming soon. Not the grainy winter tomatoes in the Sizzler salad bar, but the bursting, crimson, thin-skinned, dirt-flavored candy that pops up from the dry sandy soil in my mom's garden. I can still taste that sweet-tart, faintly dusty goo from last July...

When Our Hearts Are Full

I'm attracted to the dichotomies and paradoxes of life. Lately, it's been to emptiness and fullness.

1. I have no doubt battled feelings of emptiness. Were some of us born with an original emptiness, and the accompanying need to search, find and fill? Poets and crooners alike have lamented that ache, that hole, that space. Not that it's all that bad; it's just the diametric, corresponding feeling for fullness.

Ray Lamontagne's song, "Empty," is one of the my favorites. The lyrics are so rich with the bleak, heaviness of feeling "this way." When you're down, you see the cold, abandoning side of everything. (And while we're on the subject, it's interesting how we describe it as "empty," yet there is a weight.)

Ray wonders:

And of these cut-throat busted sunsets,

these cold and damp white mornings

I have grown weary.

If through my cracked and dusted dime-store lips

I spoke these words out loud would no one hear me?

2. But I have also felt that swelling in the heart, that grows and glows and electrifies with exuberant, swirling warmth. There are decidedly less songs and poems about the warm fuzzy stuff. A line from "You, Me and the Bourgeoisie" by The Submarines is a helpful one for me (the rest of the song is more of a commentary on consumerism but this part is nice):

Love can free us from all excess

From our deepest debts

Cause when our hearts are full we need much less.

Every day I wake up

I choose love

I choose light

And I try, it's too easy just to fall apart

The last line speaks to the inevitable entropy of all that stands still. As we go into dark or depressed times, we sink, we disassemble, we estrange ourselves. Our senses dull and we don't enjoy life anymore.

A daily mantra: Choose love, choose light, be full. My friend Michelle took this picture of beautiful BLOSSOMS  last Spring!

Out of that Rut

This blog's intended usefulness lies in providing a space to wake myself up, pull myself up and over the muddy ridges of life's ruts; to share poems, pleasures and delights, both Earthly and Heavenly.

Ruts are part of life, a trail hazard at all stages of the journey. They show up where paths diverge, or are trodden and wet. But sometimes we create them ourselves with a wrong turn or a prolonged inattention.

Here I go. Heave ho.

Enough of the life=a trail metaphor.

Oops, one more: Happy Trails.