about hope.

I wrote today. I cranked out 2,000 words in a sitting. Just the start of something. I thought about things I haven't thought about in a long time. And there's no escaping that feeling of having sunk deep inside of yourself. You try to come back out, but the dim light streaks hot in your path and it's too hard to open your eyes wide again.

Now seems to be the time to write about resolutions. New Year, new life, right? I make casual resolutions every year, mostly a dialogue with myself. I don't always write them down. I just say it to myself: I will be better in this way or that. For several years, my only serious resolution was to quit smoking, which I failed at more times than I care to remember. This is the first time in five years that I'm not making that resolution. Seven months smoke free, which is quite surreal.

I know a lot of people think resolutions are stupid, mostly because we don't often keep them. You know, we're all going to go to the gym and drink lots of water and eat only vegetables....but then.

be here.

Some while ago I read something, I can't remember where. A post on a blog or maybe an essay. It was about fear and this reassurance: Anything could happen, but it usually doesn't. I've been letting my brain chew on this thought for a few weeks now.

I carry a lot of fear around with me. I don't usually acknowledge it to myself, or even anyone else. I am afraid of losing things and people that I love, afraid of people dying or abandoning me, afraid of them abandoning themselves, afraid of change and the unknown and feeling out of control. Usually my fear is something I push back when it surfaces. But lately it has been fighting it's way through, sharp pricks and wet eyes. I am forced to confront it every day and I am confronting it now head on. I am tired of living with the constant expectation that something evil is just around the corner.

Over the weekend, I read a piece in the latest issue of Poets & Writers that was about writing as healing and discovery in the face of a spouse's death. I read the first sentence, "On the night my husband died..." and immediately the black hole opened up in the pit of my stomach. Death, there it is, looming over me and everyone else I love.

memories of a gorilla suit.

I can't remember what I ate as a child. I know I ate things, I know we had meals. There are pieces, mostly memories of melting cheese on chips and watching I Love Lucy. There's the sugar bomb cereal that none of the neighbor kids were allowed. They always wanted to sleep over for the breakfast.

I don't understand why I can't remember the meals, years and years of my life. What was I eating? In my adult life, I structure my entire day around what I'm going to eat and when. I love food and I love to make it. I will gladly devote my entire evening to buying groceries and making a meal. I read food blogs like it's my job.

Memory is a funny thing. The pieces that carry through, the things you remember, and the things that are lost. Years of life, significant acts, eating, all lost. In this moment now, you can't imagine a time when you'll forget. Can't imagine not remembering the feel of that hand or the way the Boston air smelled after a cold December rain. But you might forget.

global climate change.

Check out my newest post at the Friendly Atheist:

Understanding Christianity and Global Climate Change

mapmakers.

A few weeks ago, Anthony Doerr posted a recommendation for The Story and It's Writer at The Lit Pub. It's a beautiful piece on the precious place that books and stories hold in our lives.  Towards the end, he evokes the image of a map, across our lives, containing all the books we've read.

Imagine you could draw a map of all the experiences you’ve had in your life, and superimpose it over a map of all the books you’ve read in your life. Here you worried your daughter was failing out of school, here you gave a nun a stick of chewing gum, here you saw a man dressed as a referee weeping in a Honda Accord. And here a boy in an egg-blue suit handed you an ornate invitation to a party at Jay Gatsby’s, here you met the harpooner Queequeg at the Spouter Inn, here you floated a stretch of the Mississippi with a slave named Jim.

Since reading that piece, I've been thinking over and over all the maps in my life. I could do a layover of walks that I've taken, houses I've lived in, friends that I've loved, and so on. Lately I've been stuck on the map of music in my life.

I'll be honest: I'm one of those people who obsesses over a song. I play it over and over until I kill it good and dead. I think that makes music especially defining in the emotional and intellectual landscape of my mind. There are dozens of songs I can listen to and be instantly transported back to a different time and a unique set of emotions. There was Bon Iver, Skinny Love and heartache. There was Old Crow Medicine Show, Wagon Wheel and old friends. There was Blitzen Trapper, Furr and falling in love.