Beans 'n Rice

I'm moving this week. It's an odd move. I'm putting everything in storage so I can do a little self imposed sabbatical and get lots of writing done.

Most of the world would welcome my make shift accommodations . And I've loved assessing a n of my things as I pack them away. Each item has a story, a lovely story that has added to the family story. Some of them are stories the family inherited.

Downsizing is making me think about simplifying the decisions I have to make each day. Simplified decisions means more time for the creative.  So I think about making a pot of beans and rice and calling it good for eating off of during the days ahead while I focus my attention on the creation of documents that will , hopefully, be encouraging of either support or courage.

And then I realize that what I consider a simplification in my world is a staple in the rest of the world.

I count my blessings and promise myself I will think of it, consume and savor like a feast.

Love,
Deborah

Mac n' Cheese

I gotta be honest. My daughter was the one who helped me realize I was missing the most obvious draw for you. Meals...food...everyone is about food. You have your organic, your comfort, your haute cuisine, your fast, your nuclear -- is that what they call that new food that is all about chemistry and using dry ice or hot torches?

Anyway...so let me tell you about me and food. I love it. Almost any kind.

From a generation forced to eat liver and onions once a week because we supposedly needed the iron, who grew up thinking Chinese Food was called Chung King and came in a can, taught to cut iceberg lettuce with a knife to get our greens and ...well...also used Aqua Net to keep our hair that had been rinsed in beer in place, food has acquired and developed a deeply meaningful place in my life.

Add to that a lifetime of dieting that began when I was put on my first 800 hundred calorie 'Calories Don't Count' diet in the fifth grade --- they're called boobs Mom, not fat-- and dieted my way up to a goodly poundage, and we're talking complicated relationship...me n' food that is.

But now I have this really healthy attitude towards food and great appreciation for the show 'Chopped'. I've read everything I could about food, come from the geography of the Anti Inflammation Diet and fresh roasted coffee and fair trade chocolate.

As to Mac n' Cheese...well...Five Cheese Wisconsin is my favorite recipe. I discovered it when I was planning Northwest Cooking Camp for some young friends. When you take a bite, the strands of cheese just  sort of float towards you like a good taffy pull and the butter drips off the strands back towards your plate.

I'm here to say there is absolutely nothing wrong with comfort food. It serves it's purpose.

My first comfort food was Sugar Pops; gigantic bowls of Sugar Pops consumed during the few minutes I was home alone after school before my brothers arrived from school and Mom returned from work. They accompanied the watching of a show called Merv Griffin and if I was lucky dribbled, literally, into the afternoon movie.  Or maybe it was the other way around. I was hoping to go into the entertainment industry at the time so I was more invested in the guests Merv had and trying to watch all the Shirley Temple movies in which Arthur Treacher, his side kick , had appeared.

It was only when comfort moved into the category of self medicating that I got into troubled waters. Well..water would have been an improvement.

But I'm here to say, you CAN sort out that which you are using to self medicate and back yourself down to the level of comforting.

Comforting pain is giving yourself a good pep talk everything is going to be OK.  Medicating is saying, "I can't feel this pain because it is unbearable'.

You can bear anything. It takes companionship, a willingness to be human, stamping your foot or whatever it is you do to stay grounded and a look to the future as a bright possibility.

Mac n' cheese, in the right quantities, is not only a lovely indulgence, but can build your calcium level in good ways. Sugar Pops...that's called dessert.  That's a treat, not a way of life.

The ingredients of your life count. Take note. Go for comfort. Keep dessert for special occasions of celebration or infrequent moments of ' Happy Mouth'.

Well...at least that's what's workin' for me.
Love,
Deborah

Before and After Blessings

Like a cloud that has held it's rain so long it can no longer keep the moisture and drenches the earth and the people and the animals in a deluge of drops, so has this last ten days been raining blessings. Showers of blessings have been falling to my delight and awe. One after the other, issues which I had long considered impossible have burst into thoroughly quenched and nourishing possibilities.

How appropriate this should happen in a month when the tag 'April Showers...' is so often used.

I have been so thirsty that my heart towards heavenward the way my mouth would if this were physical parchment. I keep my heart open and chant to myself, "I like to receive, I like to receive!"

That is my chocolate epiphany this year. Each year, but one, in the last decade I have chosen to give up all forms of chocolate for my act of Lenten contemplative practice. It may seem silly, but chocolate really is my drug of choice. Every day I eat some healthy from of it; dark, 76% or more, but nonetheless, chocolate. And each year God has honored my deprivation with an astounding , desert Mother like epiphany. This year, I heard in my heart that I needed to learn to like receiving.

Realizing to me that receiving has always contained a bit of shame and/or guilt that I should have some need or require some act of charity was astounding. For the last two decades I have been so dependent on others and could not figure out why the Lord would make me carry such a burden. But the minute I felt one small twinkle of 'like' in my spirit when someone blessed me, blessings poured forth and he Graced me with so many opportunities for self sufficiency I find myself working at double time to keep up with taking advantage and making the most of all of them. I wake up at 2AM excited for the days work ahead and will myself back into the sleep my body needs. There is an intense look on my face, I'm sure, but my heart has a big ol' smile on it.

Now, when someone blesses me I say thank you with nothing but gratitude. There is no inner dialogue of 'please God don't let me need so much'.

It reminds me of when Catherine Marshall, the wife of Peter Marshall who was the chaplain of the US senate, and was such a spiritual powerhouse herself, was fighting, trying to heal from Tuberculosis. It lingered and lingered and lingered until at last one day she said, "Lord, if I have this forever it's OK" and bingo. Healed almost instantly.

And after we have such a more dimensional understanding of surrender and humility and more so God's enormous benevolence and love for us.
Amen...more, more, more. May it be so for you as well.....
Love,
Deborah

Tuesday News

This Tuesday morning finds me feeling the Peace and Grace of God in ways that allow me to focus on the tasks at hand in the midst of a storm of controversy at the outer perimeters of my life. I have waited a lifetime to learn how to do this.

Growing up in an incredibly dysfunctional home, I was always thoroughly distracted by the sturm und drang of people around me who were just miserable and had no hesitancy to either show it or project it onto me, or share it in violent and demeaning ways.

Yet now, finally, in 2013, I am in the middle of a bunch of people who are having an angry, violent time and I am just smooth sailing. Ah me! I am so happy to have learned this skill.

It is an internal skill. It takes the renewing of your mind of the things of God that are eternal and deep and meaningful in a larger perspective. It is a skill that requires one to carefully stay connected to the external. One must also stay connected to one's emotions and physical state.

I've turned the heat off for Spring and Summer and the little bit of chill to the air helps me stay just a bit more alert. I've made some chicken soup ...homemade...and the matzo meal is in the fridge ready to be made into balls to drop into the delicious liquid that this time will be better because a friend, a very good cook who happens to be a 'y' chromosome ...male...gave me the tip of sauteing my veggies before I add them to the liquid. He also told me tarragon is the spice of choice.

Additionally for the first time I can involve myself in creative and technical aspects of writing all the while knowing there is this tornado of anger in the center of others.

I have done this. I have translated the skills I use everyday with infants, children, tweens and teens ...for adults!   Yea! Hallelujah!! Freedom to 'be' under and in any circumstance!!!

One of my clients asked me what maturity is. It is this, as I have always shared, 'to feel one way and act another'.  But this today I can also pass on. The definition of 'healed' is to keep your peace, maintain it, enjoy it and walk in it, while others are gnashing teeth and filled with heated emotions.

Well... I think that merits a 'Praise God'!  For another time...how I got there :)
Love,
Deborah

Fits and Start

They say that most people quit their blogging sooner rather than later and so it has been a goal of mine since I began these blogs to never quit. I'm not a quitter. A slow bloomer, a slow and steady wins the race, a never say die, certainly that I am. But a quitter? Never.

I  know there is another pace of life. There are those who are driven and push through despite their health needs or  family needs or personal desires for something other, but I cannot keep that pace.

It used to be I would quote this quote that I thought most profound. It goes like this: "There's no such word as the word 'can't'; either you don't know how or you don't want to, and usually it's the latter.

Then in 1991 I got to 'can't'. Full stop. I had so many toxic relationships in my life I couldn't breathe or move or feel any joy or happiness. I'd begun to measure my life in terms of 'doing' instead of 'being'. I needed to be me.

Unfortunately being me wasn't an option because I was serving the needs of so many people who had absolutely empty buckets. No, let me put that another way. Their buckets had holes in them that meant what ever was poured into them quickly leaked out.

I went to this soothsayer in the early eighties when I was taking everyone's advise but my own and she said something about how I was in the middle of a prairie and the wagon was broken and I was completely reconstructing my life.

Now I don't much believe in soothsayers and I only went to that one because this supposedly good Christian pastor friend of mine went to him and said even his mother, who was a Bible Study Fellowship leader, went to her, so I figured it was spiritually safe.

I discarded the past life stuff and re-framed it into her picking up on what was deeper in me I hadn't discovered, but two things stood out. The one I want to share is the one about taking my part a life. I actually just surrendered to God. Following the Holy Spirit, which I was really lousy at when I started to identify the process, I did what I was lead to do.

Last week,  lo and behold, I picked up a book that had seemed revolutionary to me, at one time, about women who please men and the men who take advantage of them and it was like some distant irrelevant foreign language that I was so beyond I couldn't remember what it felt like to be in that place when I first read it.

It's been thirty years since I started that process. I've had moments when I was intensely into the change and moments when, because I was just trying to survive, I was doing it unconsciously . But continue I did.

It doesn't matter what culture or society we live in, we need to keep the internal journey progressing. We need to open ourselves up to that process. Distracted as we may be by the logistics and execution of daily life, we need to keep evolving spiritually and emotionally.
That's all for today, I guess. Make more of the day than presents itself to be made.
Love,
Deborah

Under the Tree

It's only been an hour since she invited me in. "Come under the tree Deborah!"

We have not played with each other since August and she went off to kindergarten. Before that we were almost daily friends from the time she was a baby.

My unspoken hesitations were numerous and well reasoned. I knew they all needed to remain unspoken. This was an invitation born of whimsy, and whimsy was/is the strongest bond between us.

Pulling up the ottoman as close as I could I sat, and then lowered my aging body to the edges of branches that smelled of fresh forest.

The ever favoured monkey pillows were carefully laid underneath. She lay waiting for me. "Come on Deborah, you can do it!"

I lay on my side putting my face fully underneath.

It was , as she had promised, magical. Lights and decorations look more beautiful and iridescent from the underside of the boughs.

"Oh there's the magenta one you told me about , "I exclaimed in genuine awe. It was like looking through the mist of Christmas promise. And there was amber, although she would call it yellow, and blue, and green, and then duplicates of each near her side.

You will be busy the next few weeks. Remember to lay down under the Christmas tree. It will show the reason for the season, the other dimension to which Jesus referred. The bigger picture for which Jesus was born.
Love,
Deborah

Winter Views

If you live in the Southern Hemisphere, this is not well timed. But if you are in the Northern half then the trees are finishing their defoliation and everywhere is.... the winter view....

I don't notice how the view disappears in summer until suddenly the water, the neighbor's yard, vast expanses are viewable in more panoramic ways than the lush green of Spring and Summer prevents.

Since winter is historically a great time for reflection and drawing in and thinking quiet warm thoughts = well, after the holidays= it's good to draw the parallel further and wonder what is underneath our industry, our busyness, our 'foliage'.

And how can I write such a profound thought that requires some seated and surrendered contemplation on a day when I am dashing faster than the hours and minutes can pass?

Irony....yet still great Truth...
Love,
Deborah