Belizean Citizenship

So we've been here a week and dad tells me I should consider dual citizenship, I laugh as I think about my trip on the motorcycle last night that left me stranded asking the grocery guy to help me start it...i am not so clever when it comes to Belizean transportation: golf carts, boats, and motorcycles! It has been good to be here - the sea has welcomed me with her silence that heals my heart a little more. God seems to be giving me kisses through sea turtles as I have chased two in the last two snorkeling trips (and they are pretty rare!)

Autumn and I have been spending 5-6 hours a day on the book, and I must say I have never felt more vulnerable than to actually live out this dream to write and publish. I don't want to admit how much I love to write, that if people really would read it, I might write for the rest of my life!

If this wasn't exciting enough, I broke through another fear tonight as I sang karaoke with Bonnie and Autumn - picture a Latino bar with the smallest dance floor and a french woman who dances with such fierce abandonment I find myself next to her smiling and dancing the same! I have never seen so many latino men sing slow spanish love songs with more passion than I have ever seen in the movies!

If all these things were not enough yet I will try to win you over with this, dad thinks we need to practice if the world were to end...so we leave tomorrow for a weekend camping trip on the island! We are taking 10 of us and we are fishing and living on the land....dad says that reality t.v. is not his thing, and he wants to play Survivor in real life, so off to the island!

There is my update....heels and a machete will always be my preference!

disorderly beautiful

“God hasn't invited us into a disorderly, unkempt life but into something holy and beautiful—as beautiful on the inside as the outside. If you disregard this advice, you're not offending your neighbors; you're rejecting God, who is making you a gift of his Holy Spirit.” -1 Thessalonians, The Message


I am baffled by this verse, for what is inside of me is definitely a ‘disorderly, unkempt life’ – I mean, I only show you so little of loneliness, so little of my face – so what does it mean if God has only invited me into something holy and beautiful? It means that either I am in sin or I am redefining beauty. Is it beautiful to cry and curse till there are no longer words but silence the only thing that holds your heart, because pain can not be heard? Then that is what I will call beauty, in its elegance and grace, because all I have of holiness is by invitation He’s laced.

We read these verses blindly or we watch t.v.
and beauty and holy are no longer me.
They are chipped out and painted on canvas across my drive home,
of women and men yet I know their alone.
See the hurting and suffering our hearts try to lock
up, are bursting of pain - if only someone would knock.
Yet I falter to know if that is beautiful at all
when she’s left there naked and there is no you?
Stories upon stories I hear everyday and if hurting and pain are not holy, what do I say,
to all those who linger without limbs from the fight…. I pray that God redefines beauty alike.

A tribute to friendship

What can I say about people who stand beside you in your struggle: hope for you, cry with you, laugh with you, pray for you, and commit to seeing you reach all that is within you. I want to love the way these women have loved me - i want to love all people with such freedom. There have been women in my life who have stood next to me (in this picture and don't forget Bonnie, Toni, Angie and Beth!) If life would bless us with only one gift, it should be love - at the end of it all we will be asked if we loved well. I want to love well....for all is lost if there is not love. It is worth more than anything I have, thus everything I will give to learn what it means to love. May we all experience it.

Mom's rocking chair

I tiptoe to the glass room with the phone in my hands
and crawl into the rocker set near the window.
Its dark and I listen to words from a distance
and wonder if relationship is worth such precision.
I trace the wood on the arms of my momma’s old rocker
the scratches left by my fingernails long ago.
As I sway in the rocker it takes me back to her songs
that she’d sing; back to the rhythm of the methodical creak.
Now a woman I sit but as a baby I lay in this rocker that held me,
that lessened my pain. Same fabric holds tears that it held long ago
and if mommas where wooden then here is where I’d go.
If I found her I’d ask her to sing to me please
because life and its brokenness has not offered her ease.