Maggie's Past Lives

Maggie had an interesting life long before she came to me. She lived in Arizona before arriving in west Texas with her recently relocated mistress around 1946. At the time, my grandparents were newly married and owned a local cafe in town and chain letters were all the rage. With the cafe being centrally located and typewriters being scarce in most households, my 18 year-old grandmother identified a business opportunity. She purchased Maggie for $25, about the same amount they paid in rent for their apartment each month, and began typing copies of chain-letters for customers in the cafe. She charged 25¢ per page and was able to recover the cost of the typewriter in no time.

My mom remembers my grandfather using Maggie often enough and my mom used her for a time as well before Maggie fell into disuse. During the hot west Texas summers, their home was cooled by a swamp-cooler. Over time, the damp air caused Maggie’s case to start smelling musty so at some point my grandmother moved her out to the garage where she waited patiently for me to find her.

At the end of 2018, 91 years after she was manufactured and about 72 years after she came to live with my grandmother, she was given fresh life thanks to my love and wanting of her, Benjamin’s diligent work to restore her, and a new name for her new life: Maggie Underwood - the typewriter I’d long hoped for who was there all along just waiting to meet me.

Meet Maggie

The name search started with a list of the top baby names for girls in 1927. Once I had a shortlist of names that might suit her, I considered the nicknames one could derive from each of them. Naturally, we (my brother and sis-in-law helped) tried the candidates with her surname, Underwood, to make sure it had a nice ring to it. ‘Margaret’ made the short list but wasn’t one of my favorites. ‘Maggie’ seemed nice though. It didn’t take long for me to derive ‘Magpie’ from Maggie and then I knew I had a strong candidacy for a name and nickname pairing!

One of my early reading books featured a magpie. As a result I’ve long enjoyed magpies themselves as well as how the word feels on my tongue. Magpie was a nice fit because she’s black, has some shiny bits (magpies are reportedly attracted to shiny things, a misnomer as it turns out, but still a pervasive stereotype), and (as my brother dryly pointed out) she’s very noisy! The more I thought about Magpies (their intelligence, curiosity, and chatty nature) the more I liked it - but I decided I’d better sleep on it.

The next morning Benjamin and I were talking about her and he mentioned something about slugs. I stopped him. Slugs? He informed me that ‘slugs’ are the metal-bits that strike the page with each keystroke. I stopped him again and whipped out my phone for a quick internet search. Are slugs part of a magpie’s diet? They are. That’s when I knew I had it. She’s black, shiny, chatty, and has a belly full of slugs!

This is my Maggie, my Magpie, my new-old friend. I’m anticipating so many wonderful adventures with her. I can’t wait to keep spending time together generating all sorts of creative and wonderful things to bless others with and make the world a little bit better place, one typed page at a time.

The Right One

Benjamin and I arrived in Texas a couple of days before Thanksgiving. The following week, we found ourselves tackling my grandmother’s garage. A whole wall of shelving was coming loose from the wall and things were leaning uncomfortably close to the car. It was time to pull everything off for sorting and deal with those precarious shelves. As we were removing items from the shelves I lifted a faded, hard-sided, black box and was surprised to discover that it was heavy for its size. I sat it down on the garage floor near the other items and warned Benjamin that I didn’t know what it was but that it was rather heavy. He looked over at it with a glance and told me it was a typewriter.

In my memory, I swear time stood still because that’s how monumental the moment felt. But in actuality, I think I probably got really animated and excited instead; I was ready to open it right away! We opened the case and inside was the most beautiful, old, black typewriter. I couldn’t believe it. We sat it aside to continue our work, but my wheels were already turning. What condition was it in? Could it be made to work again? Where did it come from?! I couldn’t wait to find out more about it.

Admittedly, I was baffled to find it. In my last post I described all of the glorious treasures we had to play with when we visited our grandparents and I assure you that I availed myself of them. I’ve always taken great delight in exploring, rooting through, and uncovering treasures. I like to see the storage rooms, drawers, closets and other such tucked away places where imagination and wonder can hide. Because the items at my grandparents’ house were so novel and exciting, due to their unique interests and work, the payoff was consistently quite high - so I snooped, explored and treasure-hunted around there a lot. This is why my surprise was so great upon finding something I’d never seen before. How had this typewriter never once come across my exploratory path?!

In the days that followed we had plenty of time to learn more about it. Benjamin identified it as a 1927(!) Underwood Portable 4-Bank. He began working on it and painstakingly, scrubbed, cleaned, oiled, polished, and restored every inch of the beautiful machine and its case over the course of the next five weeks. The typewriter itself was dirty with age but generally in good working order. The case, however, looked so rough and faded that I was unsure if much could be done for it. Instead, Benjamin stunned me by restoring the deep black color by moisturizing the dry fabric with some shoe-polish wax. He glued down the edges and seams that were coming up and trimmed loose threads. He polished the metal pieces and y’all, he even crafted a new leather handle to replace the one that was long-since missing.

She is a vision of beauty and a gift of love. I typed my first letters on her on January 4th and I’m itching to type so many more! The first couple of rounds on her were a little rough. It took some time to adjust to her feel, find where the keys are, and intuit how she handles, but I’m learning her. Just one day later I was already so much speedier and more assured. I’ve named her Maggie, which is short for Magpie.

A Love of Typewriters

Many weekends of my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ house. They lived about 20 minutes outside of town in a smaller town in the small house where my mother grew up. Their home and surrounding property were a treasure-trove of things waiting to be discovered.

My grandfather was a tinkerer and collected all manner of parts and pieces of things. He had a small workshop, a detached garage, and a fenced-in area we called the ‘junk pile.’ There were random pieces of lumber for building things with, mechanical parts for tinkering with, and recycling materials for imagining with. With the lumber pieces he built us rubber-band guns, bows with arrows, sling-shots and tree-houses. With wheels and a handle from an old push mower he built a go-kart. An empty 2-liter coke bottle (with the side cut out just right and mounted on some wood) became a bathtub for my Barbie. Once, an empty refrigerator box became our rocket-ship.

Old linens from my grandmother also contributed to our endless imaginative play. Forgotten child-sized rusted bed-springs covered with old pillows were our trampoline out in the yard. Old blankets hung from the clothesline were our fort. An old nylon tablecloth spread out across the grass with the sprinkler running was our homemade slip-n-slide. The pecans that covered the ground underneath poked through at our knees, but we had too much fun to really care.

My grandmother worked at the local bank in their small town and my grandfather did some maintenance work there off and on. Over the years, they’d collected an interesting assortment of bank detritus - so my brother and I grew up playing with old lock-boxes, ledger sheets, deposit slips, coin counters and other odd things. They also had the usual accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of household items, having lived in the same place for just about all of their married lives.

I loved the adventurous nature of the place. There was never a shortage of opportunity for imaginative play both indoors and out. My childhood was richer because of this homestead and the small town it sat in where we could roam freely.

One (of many) of the lasting impacts that these experiences gave to me was a love of typewriters. I grew up playing with a West German Olympia SM9 Portable Typewriter. As a result, typewriters became both familiar and beloved to me. I love the feel of the keys as you strike them, the sound of the slugs hitting the page, the clicking sound as you rotate the paper in through the platen, the bell that dings at the end of each line, and the smooth feel of sliding the carriage back across to start another row.

For about 8 years now I’ve low-key been looking at typewriters. I never could pull the trigger because refurbished typewriters are expensive and I didn’t feel like I had enough knowledge to gamble on a non-refurbished one without knowing if I could get it working. Once, about 6 or 7 years ago I got a cheap typewriter off of Craigslist, but the feel of it was all wrong. We just didn’t click and I didn’t keep it.

Two years ago I came across an Olympia in a salvage store. My face lit up at the joyful reunion with an old, familiar friend. But it was in really rough shape for the price and once again, without knowing anything about typewriter refurbishment, I walked away. It prompted a phone call to my dad though, to ask about the old Olympia. Did my grandmother still have it? He checked in with her and told me that she thought it was long-gone. I was disappointed but not surprised. No one had used it in years. Sporadically, I continued to look at typewriters online every now and then without ever finding the right one.

Low Key Optimism for the New Year

The best way to describe my approach to 2019, and the summation of my feels about it, is “low-key optimism.” When 2018 rolled around, I made all sorts of lofty goals and declarations. They were all well-intended, things I value, and reasonable (I thought). But just one month into the year everything fell apart. It wasn’t just my goals that fell to the wayside, all of my thoughts about the future started turning on their head.

By the beginning of February 2018, I was having chronic arm pain in my writing arm. So my plans for sending letters on a regular basis were put on hold. By the end of February 2018, we started asking ourselves the tough questions: what were we doing and why? We weren’t headed quite in the direction that we wanted to be going, our apartment would be ejecting us in some upcoming month yet to be determined for a remodel (and subsequent rent hike), and for the past two years we’d talked about leaving Seattle but hadn’t made any concrete plans. It became apparent that the time had come to make those plans.

The challenge was that we hadn’t settled on where we wanted to move yet. Despite spending two years traveling to neighboring communities to seek out the place where we might like to make our new home, not a one felt like the right fit. So we kept staying in Seattle. But by the first quarter of 2018, I was asking: “if not now, then when?” We’d been looking for two years without a lead and yet we were ready to move on, so where did that leave us?

We decided the time had come to leave anyway. So we made plans to go on a quest to learn more about what our future path could look like. As ideas began to emerge it was decided that we would hit the open road and put our belongings into storage, taking only what we needed for extended travel. From March through October we worked on executing a plan that often unfolded itself as we went, with plenty of twists we couldn’t have anticipated.

By May, after 2 months of research and discussion, we’d bought a vehicle and secured a storage unit. By June we’d moved into our storage unit and secured temporary housing to bridge the gap between our terminated lease and our scheduled departure. We began demolition on our vehicle’s interior and over the course of the next few months, Benjamin crafted a beautiful buildout using what we already had: a handsaw, a jigsaw, and a drill. He did all of the work himself, curbside, in whatever parallel parking spot he could find in the neighborhood.

On the first weekend in August we took our vehicle out for her first overnight. We back-country camped in the North Cascades. She had a floor installed by then, but no walls, ceiling, or built-in storage. That trip helped us problem-solve not only ideas for the rest of the buildout, but also safety and preparedness.

By the time September rolled around we were entering our final stages of preparing for our long travels. We were tying up all manner of loose ends and finishing up all the details of our buildout and prep. One night we pulled an almost-all-nighter as we sewed all of the curtains we’d need for privacy in our vehicle. The first season of Queer Eye kept us cheerful and awake as we worked into the night.

On October 21, eight months after our initial assessment and decision to leave the city, we turned in the keys to our micro-unit, dropped the last stuff off at the storage unit, put our plants in foster-care with friends and left the city with a general direction in mind but no idea where we’d stop to sleep for the night.

Since then we’ve traveled through six states and seen a long list of beautiful natural wonders. We’ve enjoyed even more time with family than we’d originally planned or hoped for, with more to come. We’ve celebrated holidays with friends and family and have both reconnected with each other’s families for the first time in a few years. We’re indulging in creative problem-solving projects that have presented themselves to us that were inaccessible to us in Seattle (helping out on our families’ properties and a few refurbishing projects Benjamin’s taken on to name a couple). We’re savoring a winter interspersed with warmer days and lots of sunlight and for the first time in years we’re entering the new year without low-key seasonal depression.

But all of these blessings we’ve savored these last couple of months came at a cost. Not only did we carefully plan, work really hard, and save our finances for a full year to make all of this possible, but we also endured terrible bouts of debilitating anxiety, fear, and stress. (I say we, because when those things engage with me and my brain, it most definitely affects both of us). It was a very difficult year for me. All of the change, the unknowns and unanswerable questions, the living on faith, the lack of routine, the unknowns (yes, they’re worth mentioning twice), the necessary and ongoing changing of plans, moving out of two apartments in the span of four months… well, it was a lot. And I didn’t handle it well at all. It got to me so deeply that I spent July-October working with my doctor on restoring balance to my body, which was messed up with stress related illness. I’m still dealing with that fallout now as I enter the new year and currently find myself relapsing with symptoms.

There’s no way I could have predicted any of that. I never dreamed I’d leave Seattle without a concrete plan for my future next-steps. I never dreamed of all the change and uncertainty that would come my way during the year. I couldn’t have predicted all of the stress and stress-related illness that would manifest for me and throw me into the necessary reality of being diligently focused on long-term healing. Through it all I couldn’t find my voice to write about any of it. Everything in my life felt like a tossed salad and I had no perspective whatsoever. It was an all-consuming year of life transition that I never saw coming until I was in it but then found myself actively planning for on an ongoing basis.

It was a messy, painful, empowering, frightening, exciting, exhausting, hopeful year and it was nothing at all like what I expected for 2018 as I entered into the year last January.

So this year, I’m entering 2019 exhausted, relieved, and grateful. I don’t have the gall to make even one plan for this year because there is too much uncertainty afoot. We’ll be on the road through March? Or June? We don’t really know. We’re figuring things out as we go. We’ll settle in a new home that’s yet to be determined by this summer perhaps? Maybe? We’ll live as frugally as we can on the savings we have and find work to earn more as we need to and trust that we’ll have what we need when we need it. 2019 is all about flexibility and faith.

So that’s why I have low-key optimism. We’re birthing something really exciting. There’s no way we’ll remain unchanged after all of the work we put into shifting things in 2018. We are in the process of being transformed and we’re still waiting to find out what that might look like on the other side. I’m hopeful and optimistic about what’s to come, but I don’t really have an idea of what it might be. So I’m staying low-key, not over-thinking or over-planning anything and learning how to lean in and let it be. It’s a valuable life-lesson for this gal who likes to over-control everything, have a plan, and have all the answers. Perhaps it’s precisely because I’ve always been wound up tight in those areas that these life lessons found me and are teaching me to live with more uncertainty and ease.

This year, in all honesty, my hope is for peace, joy, and health. Because after a year like 2018 where I was full of unrest, fear, and subsequently waning health… my priorities have majorly shifted away from task-oriented goals or resolutions. In that vein, my focuses for the year will be on gentle exercise, art, baking, and writing. Through exercise I will treat my body tenderly and compassionately with movement. With my art I will prioritize my creative self to live my greatest dream which is to grow as an artist. Baking, especially at holidays, is a self-care ritual for me that soothes my mental-health. Writing helps me make sense of the world and has lately also been integral to practicing gratitude.

Even as I’m grateful for all that 2018 taught me, I’m so grateful to have it fully behind me. i’m ready to watch 2019 unfold with a tempered hope. May each of you reading this also find peace, joy, health and hope in the new year, in whatever ways those things manifest for you.

We celebrated Samhain with shrimp soup and a lovely fire.

Reflections at Age 36

Yesterday, on the day of my birthday, I asked my parents and grandmother what they remembered about 36.

When my dad was 36 I was one and still an only child. We lived in east Texas and money was tight enough that he kept careful track of the finances. When my mom was 36 I started Kindergarten and my brother was two. She described how the whole family had to adjust to the new routine of a kid starting school. By then we were in west Texas in the home where I would spend most of my childhood. It hadn’t been painted yet, so the interior walls were all still goldenrod yellow from the previous owners. I remember how goldenly garish that house was all too well! At 36, my grandmother had a 12 year-old daughter (my mom) and a 10 year-old son. She was commuting into town to work at Kresge’s department store at the old (now long-abandoned) mall and my grandfather was working in the oil field.

It was a gift to hear from my elders about where they were at my age, what they were doing, and what they were worried about or adjusting to in that phase of life. Hearing that my dad was still watching his paychecks carefully at that age gives me hope that maybe my finances aren’t so out of wack after all and that I can still build a better financial future for myself. Learning that my mom was still settling into the home I would grow up in gives me hope that it’s okay that I haven’t settled into my long-term home yet. That even if I still don’t for sometime that it’s okay. It takes time to build a home and a community. Knowing that my grandmother was a commuting working mother raising two kids reminds me that however stressed I might feel sometimes that my life is always manageable because she juggled work and kids, which I won’t ever have to do.

I’ve loved growing older each year. With each passing year I feel more at home in myself. However, I still manage to put quite a lot of pressure on myself to be more and do more. I worry that I am not as far ahead as I think I should be with all the goals I set for myself. By interviewing my elders, I gained the gift of perspective. It was a potent reminder that I’m right on track and right where I need to be. While my journey is my own and won’t look like any of theirs, I can still savor the glimpse into their younger selves and also know how wonderfully life’s turned out for them since then. Because I can see myself in them, I gain hope that my life is turning out wonderfully too.

Things to Remember About my BiRthDaY!

Yesterday was my birthday! I woke up late after a late night of game playing. Mysteriously, Benjamin knew when I awoke, because shortly thereafter he came into the room with a big poster he made from recycled wrapping paper that said “HAPPY BIRTHDAY HILARY!” on it. I loved it so much. Upon seeing it I said to him, “Yes! I will marry you again!”

As I got dressed, I braced myself for an unlit tree. I’ve never lived with anyone who remembers to turn on the tree  each day and my biggest Christmas peeve is an unlit tree. I always give them a hard time and fuss that people who don’t turn on the tree obviously hate Christmas. I wondered if anyone would have made an effort since it is my birthday, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

I walked into the living room and Benjamin, my brother, and dad were already there. My brother jumped up from the couch and ran across the room. Was he coming for me? It seemed uncharacteristic. No, he was headed past me towards the Christmas tree to turn the lights on! He saw my usual trajectory to head over to light the tree, intercepted me, and plugged the lights in for me for my birthday! He declared with relief “whew! I barely made it!” We all got a good laugh out of it. And I felt really loved!

With the world icy and slippery outside, we all enjoyed a quiet day indoors. Unfortunately I’ve not been feeling too great for the last few days, so the quiet day was appreciated (although I wish I’d felt well enough to enjoy my birthday with more flair!).

The next highlight of my day occurred when my mom brought the phone to me for my grandmother to give her birthday salutations. She told me of her memory of driving across the state through thick fog when I was born. They arrived a day later than planned because of the fog, having to stopover for the night instead of driving on through. They stayed about a week and she got to help take care of me during that time. I’d never heard that story before (that I could remember) so it was very special to hear.

After lunch I walked down to see her and to take her a birthday cupcake. I sat with her for a good long while and she shared stories about my great grandparents and answered questions about them. I relish these stories because she’s my last grandparent and I know these stories will end when she goes from us. Sometimes I think I’ll write notes down about them, but they’re so not the same as hearing her tell them herself. So instead of worrying about what will be lost in the someday future, I focus on savoring our precious time in the present. My visit with her was one of the two best things about my birthday.

The other best thing about my birthday was the thoughtful presents that Benjamin surprised me with. He got me a 4D Model Snail and I spent the rest of the afternoon examining the different body parts, assembling the snail, and reading and researching about snail organs and how they work. It was the perfect low-key activity for this introvert who wasn’t feeling too well to still get to feel celebratory while also getting to relax. I loved it so much. I’ve learned a lot from my time with the snail yesterday and I’ve been savoring it’s company on my bedside table ever since.

He also got me some modeling clay and wrote up some project ideas for me to do with the clay. Last year I realized for the first time how limited my exposure to art education had been during my upbringing. It helped me understand why I gave up on certain aspects of my creativity at a young age, believing some things to be impossibly out of reach for me. Having gained an understanding around that, I’ve felt bolder about tackling art skills that I want to learn.

Benjamin’s upbringing was very much the opposite. There was never a time when art education wasn’t emphasized in some way, which culminated in him going to an art school for his college education. He was stunned to realize how unique his opportunities were and became eager to share exercises with me that he had the privilege of doing throughout his early art education. The clay is part of that desire of his. He’s given me a chance to get my fingers messy and play around with no expectations about being ‘good enough’ but instead to just enjoy creating while trying a new medium. He took the guesswork out of me having to know what to do with the clay by giving me assignments he know I would enjoy. It was a very thoughtful gift and an investment in my dreams as a growing artist.

As is the usual way of things in my family, my birthday was accompanied by the retelling of the story of the day I was born. These are other stories I treasure. How my mom didn’t eat all day because she knew the baby was coming and they told her not to have a full tummy when in labor. How by dinner she was starving and said she wouldn’t make it through the delivery without some energy so my dad made meatloaf, potatoes, and green beans. How she delayed calling the hospital because she was worried that she’d have the doctor she didn’t like. Once she called she was relieved to learn that her preferred doctor was on call that night instead. She waited at home until the contractions were the right amount apart to head for the hospital and I was born that night, two hours later. The nurse asked my dad if he’d like to carry me down to the nursery. He did and when he got there they offered him a rocker to sit in with me for a while. He sat and rocked me and sang to me my first lullabies before handing me over into the nurses’ care.

Usually this story gets told at night, at the stroke of my birth time (and since I’ve left home, I always call home at the right moment so as to keep the tradition intact). This year we did it after presents instead. So we were all sitting quietly together, each working on our own projects or playing handheld games when my birth time came to pass. I’d been watching the clock and announced to everyone when the time had come. My family all wished me a happy birthday and then I stated that my first act as a thirty-six year old would be to go to bed and I happily excused myself, said goodnight, and enjoyed a great night’s sleep! :)

Things to Remember About the New Year

On the 30th, we spent the whole afternoon (and into the night) with my oldest dear friend, Shanna. She took us around the town to show us some really wonderful ways my hometown (and hers) has evolved over the years since we’ve been gone. She low-key sold us on all the town has to offer and I have to admit, one could make a lovely (and affordable) life here. After seeing the children’s storybook gardens we sat in a great local coffee shop and visited. Then we went to a local spot for dinner and visited even more. It’s the first time in years that the three of us have gotten to hang out together (since I always travel home alone, she and I catch up annually without Benjamin). I was so glad to have us all three in the same place at the same time!

On New Years Eve, we went into town with my brother and sis-in-law (SIL) to run some errands together. In addition to running actual errands we also lingered on the LEGO aisle at Target for a while and looked at various games and puzzles we could play with. After dinner together, we met up with Shanna and a couple of her friends for a screening of the movie “Big” at the local historic Paramount Theatre. Thirty years ago she and I were ballerinas together at that old theatre and it was so good to be back in that grand space, especially with someone who shares similar cherished memories. We enjoyed reminiscing together.

During intermission a pianist came out and filled the theater with live music. My brother and I were absolutely floored that it was the same piano player that always played at the town’s best pizza joint back when we were kids! In a world that feels like it’s always changing so quickly (rampant development in Seattle with skyrocketing rents along with plenty of development in the country town my mom grew up in) it was deeply comforting to see that some things stay the same. 💛

We savored coffee and visiting after the movie then came home to watch the New Years Eve broadcasts on TV, which has become a tradition for me and my SIL to do together.

My brother 110% won this round and also made me laugh. Playing possum has always been one of my favorite things to do. And still is!

New Years Day is also SIL’s birthday! She and I baked lemon cupcakes together that we topped with chocolate icing and a cherry. The four of us kids (me, Benjamin, brother and SIL) played Forbidden Island (it’s my favorite game. It was the first time we played with more than two players and it was much more of a challenge! It was so fun.) Then we played Telestrations (this time with the parents) followed by three hours of Apples to Apples! We all laughed so much and enjoyed the many hours of games together. It was a great way to celebrate her birthday.

Tomorrow is my birthday and I am ready for it. I’m not feeling very well, which I’m rather discouraged about. But still, I’m looking forward to the day. I hope I’m not too tired from staying up so late playing games this evening. :)

Wrapping Up Christmas 2018

Yesterday we wrapped up our fourth and last Christmas of 2018.

For seven Christmases it’s been just us 3 up in Seattle, and it’s been great. We always share Christmas Day together at home and make a lot of our traditional favorite foods. The day after, I often fly to Texas to spend the week between Christmas and my birthday with my family.

But this year, for the first time since we moved, we came home for the holidays. We planned extended travel time so that we could drive down and be here for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Birthdays, and beyond. It’s the first time we’ve been home for the holidays together since we moved, and the first time Benjamin and I have been home together at the same time in over five years.

After Thanksgiving (plus a couple of weeks) with my family, we traveled to spend Christmas with Benjamin’s family. We savored 3 Christmases with them, each with different (but overlapping) family groupings. Each gathering was all food and fellowship without the exchange of presents (except for the little ones) so it was super stress-free. We played games, ate delicious food, and enjoyed lengthy visits. It was *such a treat* to be with everyone.

Yesterday, as per my annual holiday routine, we came back to my parents for post-Christmas, New Year, and Birthdays (my sis-in-law (SIL) and I share birthdays one day apart!).We exchange small presents with my family, which range from handmade to practical to fun. This year more than one of us had the idea to give little LEGO sets, and I got us all a Nintendo Classic to share.

So we spent our day playing with Legos and watching each other play nostalgic Nintendo games. It was a Christmas straight out of Christmases past! When we were kids, a perfect Christmas consisted of Legos and Nintendo. Turns out that’s still what constitutes the perfect Christmas for these kids!

Things I want to be sure to remember:

• Us four kids, ages 32-37, all in the floor playing with Legos before lunch and again through the afternoon. My brother and I also dug out some of our old Legos of yore and using those random pieces he master-crafted custom stuff straight out of his imagination until about 1am.

• During the afternoon, we watched my brother own Megaman like he still plays it all the time when in reality it’s been more like 20 years since he’s played. My mom made popcorn and we sat and watched the impressive show as he steadily marched towards the final boss. Between me and my brother’s shared memories of the game, we remembered all the tricks to it, and he executed them impressively!

• My mom played Super Mario Brothers for the first time ever and was so animated about all her missteps. It was so fun and funny to watch!

Amidst watching each other play Nintendo (and each of us playing it ourselves in turns) and as my brother continued to play with Legos well into the night, we all visited, Benjamin and my SIL worked on a jigsaw puzzle, and I read vintage cookbooks and took notes on recipes I want to try while my mom read a vintage 5th grade songbook I found a couple of weeks ago. We also pulled out my and Benjamin’s wedding album and then my parents’ album, and showed them to my SIL to give her ideas for what she wants for hers.

It was the perfect Christmas Day. My favorite people to share gifts with. Gifts that kept on giving all day long and late into the night such that we didn’t even realize how late it had gotten. Gifts that created the background noise for visits and stories and photo-reminiscences. Legos and [grown] kids spread across the living room floor like old times all under the glow of the Christmas tree.

Christmas this year was richly abundant in fellowship, food, and memory-making. I’ll remember the 2018 Christmas season for many years to come.

Christmas 3 of 4

Benjamin and I exchanged tiny stockings this year. We used Christmas kid’s socks for stockings since smaller stockings mean there’s much less to fill. Our tree is made of discarded branch clippings from my parents’ tree with ribbon I braided and stars my mom crocheted for me. Brass bells too heavy for the tiny tree are hung on the milk bottle instead. We exchanged our stockings after we woke up this morning and then helped Pepper open his.

We spent Christmas Day with my in-laws’ in-laws. They’re a generous and hospitable bunch and it’s been years since we’ve celebrated with them. It was such a treat to be in their company. Besides delicious food and good company, there are a few things I will savor above the general joy of the day.

After lunch my little six-year-old niece came up to me, addressed me by my name, and asked me for a favor in the sweetest voice. It’s the first time I’ve heard her call me by name and I positively melted. She and I have a pen-pal relationship, but I haven’t seen her in person since she was about 6-months old. She’s a remarkable child and I’ve so enjoyed getting to know her during this trip.

I love Benjamin’s brother like he’s my own, and watching him parent our niece is truly wonderful. He’s so attentive, kind, proud, patient, firm, fun, and gentle. He’s all the wonderful things a parent should be. I’m so proud to see him be such a great dad.

We got hours of uninterrupted visiting time with Benjamin’s brother and sis-in-law both, which was a really special gift. I feel like I know both of them better now. I have a helluva lot of respect for them and the ways they’re raising our niece (she is such a lucky, lucky girl to have such thoughtful, compassionate, empowering parents). And we got to compare notes and understand how much we have in common and build bridges over shared concerns. All of that was a real gift.

On a lighter note, there was a Christmas popper at each place-setting which was just plain fun. I’ve never popped one before. Mine contained a plastic blue harmonica and I wore my orange paper crown all day long until it fell off and I accidentally stepped on it!

Not Quite Christmas Memories

A recent acquisition for my vintage Christmas photo collection.

Yesterday wasn’t one of our many Christmas gatherings, but it was filled with lovely memories that I want to record and cherish, so it gets an entry all the same!

Yesterday Benjamin and I shot our little sister’s senior photos. She’s the only child I’ve yet had the privilege of watching grow up from infancy to adulthood and it’s been a true gift to watch her grow. She’s a bright, funny, wonderful human and we had so many laughs yesterday during the shoot.

Later that day Benjamin cut his finger and when he asked his dad for a bandaid, his dad came back with one and told him to stick his finger out. He proceeded to put it on Benjamin’s cut finger. It was the cutest.

Our second home as newlyweds was the pool house in his dad’s backyard. We fixed it up and it was such a darling space. It remains one of my top 2 favorite places we’ve ever lived. After we moved out, a couple of tenants didn’t take such good care of it and it fell into disrepair. Recently it’s been refreshed and renovated and we saw the remodel yesterday.

The tree at Christmas 2 of 4. While the day itself didn’t get its own blog post, the lovely tree still needed to be featured!

I stood in the bedroom looking into its little backyard and cried big fat tears for all the good memories there. I thought of our rabbit Millie, who lived just outside that window. I thought of our sister when she was still a kid and would come over. Pepper was young and Benjamin and I were newlyweds. The light shone through the trees outside the bedroom window in just the same way that I carry with me in my memories. It was good to see new life in it, but the part of me that cherished my time there so much will never stop missing and savoring the sweet moments we shared there.

After the tour, we had lunch with Benjamin’s dad, step-mom and sister and we laughed and laughed together. Then we joined his dad to go visit his Grandma. Gosh she looked great. It was so good to see her! I had the great pleasure of watching Benjamin walk into the community room where she and other residents had gathered to listen to a Christmas string quartet. I watched as he surprised her and her face lit up. It was beautiful.

After the quartet and visiting, she invited us to dinner. We sat with her at her assigned table and enjoyed the company of her lovely tablemates, Sally and Dolly. Benjamin’s dad shared stories with her friends about Grandma. It was such a pleasant meal with truly lovely company.

These are the reasons we’re here and I’m so grateful for all of these opportunities to reconnect.

Christmas 1 of 4

We’re in Texas for the holiday season, so for the first time in seven years, we’re joining our families for all the festivities. Today was our first Christmas gathering and there are so many things I don’t want to forget about Christmas 1 of 4.

After everyone finished eating lunch, Pepper’s uncle asked if he could go get Pepper out of his room and hold him at the dinner table while we all visited. He held Pepper for a long time and gave him a good and proper massage. It made my heart happy to see Pepper so loved. They share the same middle name, which the internet once told me is the name meaning “happy friend.”

For 30-45 minutes I danced nonstop to the nutcracker soundtrack on cassette with my 6 year-old niece (whom I’d never met before) in the back bedroom. I also had the privilege of explaining to her who Benjamin and I were (she thought Benjamin was “daddy’s friend”). Then she told me: “Benjamin is a weird name. Cute but weird.” (That assessment just keeps making me laugh!) We looked at a map together and I showed her where we live compared to where she lives and all the states we drove through to come visit her. I also got to teach her how to work a cassette player, which was a privilege indeed.

Sometimes you don’t want to forget things because they’re so wonderful. Other times you don’t want to forget them so that you can make better choices in the future! Despite some efforts to practice smidges of dietary self-care today, everything was so tasty that I ate way too much and gave myself quite a stomach ache! Yesterday I baked lovely gluten-free sugar cookies and I ate way too many of those delicious bad boys today. All day long they were pure melt-in-your-mouth buttery goodness. Now they’re only regret!

Benjamin overdid it in his own way, so tonight I was on my phone searching for any kind of internet relief I could find. Even a placebo was acceptable. I just needed anything to help me feel like I was doing something to improve our situation! This led me to “yoga poses that undo overeating” on Cosmo.com, so I invited Benjamin to join me.

The poses did help some, but then we sat around afterwards and talked about Marvel Avengers stuff and speculated and laughed. Honestly I think that did more to improve my situation than anything simply because it took my mind off my misery.

So here’s to uncles who show love to their furry nephews, nieces to meet and dance endlessly with, and lovers to commiserate, cope and be miserable with. Christmas 1 of 4 was a wild success!

Apologies

I’m confessing that despite all of my resolve to stay out of trouble during the holidays that I’ve already stepped in it with my big mouth.

I want to be a person of love who asks questions instead of making assumptions. Who seeks to be open instead of quick to judge. Who listens more than speaks (sometimes that’s an especially hard one for me, especially when I have big feels, whether excited to upset).

Mostly it’s all gone well the last couple of days. A few moments felt sticky, but we got through them just fine. And then this evening I popped off a single, sassy, sarcastic remark. It was just a few words long and we moved past it without much further talk and everyone really enjoyed the evening. There was a lot of laughter and fun.

I didn’t think a at all about what I’d said until I fell into bed just now, exhausted from consecutive late nights of visiting. I began to feel the unease rising in me. I thought of all the times I felt uncomfortable today when we inched too close to some topic where there were opposing viewpoints and beliefs. Today I mostly listened and inwardly rejoiced when someone made a good point that helped restore some balance without wavering in conviction and I waited for each wave to pass. But then I replayed how I so ungraciously popped off and felt sick in my stomach.

So I rolled over and pulled out my phone to draft a sincere letter of apology on my notes app in the dark. Writing the letter allowed me to start thinking through what I’d like to say to this person tomorrow, so that I can do it genuinely and graciously without stumbling over my words. It gave me a chance to consider whether I need to apologize to the others who were present (ie: everyone) and why or why not. And it helped me understand why I popped off in the first place.

The truth is that I’ve spent my life feeling tender about my gender within my family and I’ve mostly felt completely unseen in these moments of frustration/anger/resentment/inner-struggle and also sometimes ganged up on. My experiences, and therefore my self, feel unseen because any protests from childhood (and beyond) seem to fall on deaf ears. I hate being treated differently because I’m a girl and I am *so* frustrated by those in my life who can’t see it and continue to perpetuate gender stereotypes.

So something was said that stirred all this up (I have no idea what it was by now, and it’s not important anyway) and I popped off with a truly unhelpful (and worse, divisive and attacking) comment. I’m super not proud of it, and was rather ill over it when it resurfaced in my mind. I may not always feel understood by this group of folks, but I love them dearly. And the thought of being party to inflicting harm on them because my mouth popped off while fueled by my feels... well, I hate that.

So my resolutions for tomorrow include the following:

• Apologize privately and individually at an early opportunity. - I decided that private, individual apologies were the way to go because then I can tailor each apology to the individual and seek to create more connection that way.

• Go for a long walk at some time during the day to get out, clear my head, diffuse my fuse, stretch my body, and create space for mental and physical self-care.

And that’s about it. It’s a short list and neither thing is difficult. Although apologies can sometimes feel uncomfortable, I need not overthink it. I need only 60-90 seconds of uninterrupted time with each person to say that I see them and that I also see how my words were harsh and how sorry I am for that. It’s a simple list, but it will make all the difference in both the energy within this space that we share and in my ability to keep myself appropriately on track with my own well-being and subsequent behavior.

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This squirrel is smiling and enjoying his Thanksgiving dinner because he doesn’t have to navigate controversial topics when they accidentally come up or deal with the ramifications of running his mouth. - Photo by Benjamin.

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A Traveling Sick Day

Photo courtesy of Benjamin.

In March through October, as we were planning for our travels, I knew that the time would come when one of us would be sick while traveling. At the very least, autumn and winter usually bring at least one seasonal cold to our home. I’m glad I knew to expect it so that I could file it in my mind as part of the natural rhythms of living life instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, disappointment, or interruption to our travels.

On the tail-end of Day 12 I felt the foreboding feeling of the pre-symptoms of a cold. Sure enough, Day 13 rolled in with a sore, scratchy, swollen throat and drainage.

Of course I’d prefer if it hadn’t happened during the one week I’d been anticipating more than any other week during Phase 1 of our travels. But, in truth, as I write this I’m still in bed where I’m warm and cozy, it’s rainy and windy outside (so I’d be indoors today anyway), and if I sit up I can see the ocean from my bed, which is heaven.

The ocean. It was my first request as we started planning our itinerary: one week on the Washington coast. It’s been too long since I’ve been here, and even then those visits have only been stop-offs as we drove through. This is my first time to sit and soak it up over a period of days.

I love the ocean. We arrived just before nightfall last night and I headed straight out onto the beach with Pepper. I stood and watched the water and cried. It felt like such a relief to finally be back with it. Pepper chased billowy balls of golden foam as it blew across the wet sand and he sniffed at piles of bullwhip kelp. The fog hung low over the foothills lining the shore and the sea stacks in the water. Everything felt gray except for the luminous foam pushed ashore by the rolling waves. Pepper and I ran along the beach and for one brief glorious moment, I released him from the confines of his leash and he flew across the landscape with the youthful exuberance of a pup.

The Pacific Ocean is my favorite. It’s raw and wild and powerful and it frightens me in a way that fuels my love and respect for it all the more. It stretches from Hawaii and my treasured memories there to the Pacific Northwest that I call home, tying the two together.

So here I lay, hot tea beside me, blankets piled high. I’m taking a resting day to give my cold the best chance I can to move through without too much fuss. I’m grateful for the cooperation of the weather so that I don’t feel like I should be up and out and ‘doing something.’ A rainy, cloudy, wet and windy day is the perfect day to curl up with a book or take a nap, so I’ll take advantage of the serendipitous alignment of my body’s request for rest and the hibernation-conducive weather we’re having.

As I lay here I can hear the roar of the ocean not far behind me, and the rain on the roof above. If I’m going to be sick, it’s not a bad way to wait it out.

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Postscript:

As I finished writing this, I received notice that it was time for my morning constitutional. This meant digging out pants, coat, and damp sand-covered shoes and walking a short distance in the cold rain and wind (20-30mph) to a porta-potty where I proceeded to have an experience that had the germaphobe in me low-key-asking, “Am I going to die?” Then walking back in the aforementioned weather to declothe, hand-sanitize and get back in bed.

So, in an effort to keep it real... yes, being in a warm bed just a stones throw from the ocean is a dream come true. But being sick is never fun no matter how you slice it and especially on a sick-day it sure would be nice to stay pantsless and in my houseshoes and savor the comfort of a clean, private bathroom instead of dressing to brave the elements and the germs. So I’m counting my blessings and savoring the heck out of them. But I’m not only going to paint a rosy-picture for y’all, because that would be so inauthentic to our lived experience. :)

A Missive From the Road

This past week we shared our salt-watered, forested neighborhood with a pair of nesting bald eagles, a barred owl, an American mink, a gray squirrel, a Douglas squirrel, large red slugs, garden slugs, a chatty frog and a wide array of birds (for the sake of my own personal record-keeping they were: pacific wren, brown creeper, dark-eyed junco, gulls, Brandt’s and double-breasted cormorants, and possibly a great blue heron which was scared off by an incoming dog).

We’ve heard the squirrels chatter, the eagles chirp, the frog croak, and the owl hoot and we watched the birds flit about, the squirrels fuss and the slugs munch. We’ve enjoyed the company of our neighbors.

We’ve stayed warmer this week than last since we’re close to the water and away from the mountains. But it’s been cloudy and rainy much of the time. Although it’s been no trouble and is just what we expected, we are longing to head south and savor the sunshine we know is coming!

In addition to all this loveliness, just to keep it real and paint a full picture, here’s the other side.

Based on some inquiries we’ve received, I think some expect that this whole ‘getting back to nature thing’ is one big vacation. But the truth is that it was a tremendous amount of work to prepare for (both practically and emotionally) and it takes work to maintain daily (where will we sleep each night? Where will we buy our next round of groceries or find a bathroom?) because basic activities of daily living are always changing with the weather and as we move from one place to the next.

On top of that, there’s the baggage. My beloved pieces of furniture, books and mementos? I put those in storage for some hoped-for future time. But my brain? I can’t put that in storage. It comes with me and it brings all its baggage.

I’ve been losing sleep due to worry and stress about a matter yet to be resolved back in the city that keeps me preoccupied. I’ve also had vivid and strange dreams every single night since we left. Nothing in my life is actually calamitous, these are just things my brain does when something is worrying it.

So rather than a vacation, it’s better described as a lifestyle change. We’ve traded human neighbors for animal ones, and just like our old neighbors, our new ones are sometimes funny, sometimes stressed, and sometimes shocking (I’m looking at you, slugs!). We’ve traded one kind of survival for another. In the city we earned money to have food and shelter. Now we conserve money and find shelter (or rather a new place to set up camp) and cook as the weather permits.

We still don’t find as much time as we’d like for creative pursuits (although we do find more than we did before) and we still putter around doing chores as a means of procrastinating and avoiding the difficulty of sitting down and beginning creative work. We still struggle with motivation and mental blocks and mental stress.

So, we’re working hard to maintain our routines from before and adapt them to our new life. We’re establishing new routines and holding each other accountable to taking care of ourselves and each other. There’s still plenty of additional self-care routines that I could be doing that I haven’t made space for yet. So it’s all a work in progress.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that a move is a move, whether you move to a new apartment or move into your vehicle. Sure, there’s less stuff that needs to be sorted or arranged, but it still must all be stored and organized and it takes a while to figure out what systems work and which ones don’t, just like in any new home.

So there it is in a nutshell. Overall, I can say that I am less stressed. Just being closer to trees and water has helped with that. It’s also helped to be distracted with the daily survival routine. Things that I might let slide at home (hello dishes!) are essential now. Dishes must be washed after each meal. Food must be made before it spoils in the cooler. I’m eating more regularly and healthfully and snacking less and doing chores regularly because there’s no other option. This infusion of discipline is so good for me because it keeps my mental chatter at bay. But the chatter is still there and I’m working on it. You can put your stuff in storage, but you can’t leave your brain behind. All of that stuff comes with you. 💛

The Third F

I spent most of the day in bed yesterday, and I didn’t really understand why. I just knew I had a billion things to do and I felt weighted down and glued to my bed. I sensed that if I stayed still and warm and cozy enough that I would be okay.

This week I’ve been operating with a Master List that I made on my phone and shared with Benjamin. It has all of the many tasks that must be done before we leave and they are broken down and prioritized by day. It’s honestly the only reason anything has gotten done this week. My brain would be utter jelly without it!

But despite having a Master List to guide me through every single step of each day and help me maintain some sense of direction, I couldn’t get out of bed yesterday.

I admit I’ve been lingering in bed longer and longer each day these last couple of weeks. In part, I’m exhausted. We’ve been working non-stop to wrap up our lives here and I’m worn thin. Dinners and tea dates have been sprinkled throughout the last few weeks as we savor dear friendships and say our goodbyes (for now) and they have been life rafts of normalcy and respite for me. These scheduled, carved out moments with friends gave me a chance to sit and eat a real meal and really connect with people. Even though it’s the kind of simple ritual that my days with Benjamin are usually made of, he and I haven’t had those luxuries together for too long. We eat on the go, work evenings and weekends, and we each go to our separate corners to divide and conquer the tasks at hand. I miss him. I miss our casual, normal, average time together. And I miss real, nourishing meals.

So I’ve been lingering in bed a little longer each day the last couple of weeks. It’s felt like reasonable self-care to let myself rest. But yesterday was different. I felt weighted to my bed; glued down and in need of it. Once afternoon rolled around and Benjamin suggested I get out of bed, I felt myself get heavier. It felt physically impossible to move. Furthermore, I didn’t want to. It wasn’t exhaustion or avoidance or procrastination. It wasn’t depression or overwhelm. (All the reasons I’m used to lingering in bed). Instead I felt fine. Content even.

Finally, around 2, I took to the internet to try to understand what was going on and I realized it was anxiety all along! Throughout my life my anxiety has manifested in a myriad of physical ways. Although these ways have changed and shifted throughout the years, there’s always been physical symptoms. I wasn’t tracking this ‘non-symptom’ of seemingly ‘feeling fine’ as any kind of anxiety.

Everything came into focus when I found this article and was reminded of the third F. I’m well acquainted with Fight and Flight, but I always forget about Freeze. Recognizing myself in the words on the screen, I realized how deeply I’d disconnected from my body as I suddenly began to reconnect and felt the physical sensations of anxiety start strongly prickling through my body. This led to a quick rise of panic in my throat and tears started to spill over. It all came on so suddenly that at first I felt it might overtake me. It felt scary. But as the initial rush began to subside, I settled back into the anxious physical feelings I’m so familiar with and leaned into deeper understanding.

The reconnection to myself helped me realize frankly that I’m scared of the next few days. I realized that the reason I feel lonely isn’t because Benjamin hasn’t been a full partner in this whole endeavor (he has) but because I’m scared. I’m anxious because I’m scared. The list isn’t helping because overwhelm isn’t the problem. It’s just plain old fear about leaving everything behind and taking leaps of faith in ways we never have before.

Understanding the root of why I felt frozen and why I felt alone gave me the breakthrough I needed to mobilize again. Because although fear and anxiety are unpleasant, they are also familiar. I’ve spent years working to develop tools and resources to make peace with this anxiety-companion of mine, honor its requests for support, and nurture myself.

Because I associate being stuck in bed with feeling bad, sad, or stressed, I didn’t know that I could both feel fine and also stuck at the same time. Once I understood what was going on and got past the initial scary feeling of all of the anxiety rushing over me all at once, I was able to get out of bed and take out the trash and make some food and feel confident that I had the tools to take care of myself. Simply gaining self-awareness about what was really going on freed me to get unstuck.

The third F is the one I most often turn to but also the one I most often forget about.

So Long, Seattle

Last night at a local drawing meet-up, I knew I wanted to contemplate our upcoming trip by drawing the vehicle that will be our home for the next many months. After nearly 8 years, we’re leaving Seattle, not because there’s somewhere else we want to be more (if so, it would be easy because we’d just go there to that place and continue our daily lives), but because it just hasn’t been working out with Seattle for the last couple of years or so. As I begin the descent into the backside of my mid-thirties I can no longer ignore that the life that I dream of (although modest) is completely beyond my reach here in the city. And after some discouraging turns, we just don’t want to keep building a life here.

When we arrived in January of 2011, we were filled with optimism and excitement. We drove in from the south on I-5 with ‘Hello Seattle’ (by Owl City) playing on the radio. Seattle was the place of my dreams and I was so in love. Since then, Seattle has been everything we hoped for and more. But the challenge of rising rents has also been pressing in and we’ve watched the culture of one of our favorite neighborhoods change, and even turn violent. Over the last few years we’ve felt ourselves letting go and have watched doors close as city ‘progress’ displaced us once, then twice from our homes.

As I drew, I thought through many common break-up phrases and considered which ones might be appropriate for my parting with this city that I once loved deeply, but which also increasingly disappoints me again and again:

Seattle, we need to talk.

Where is this going?

I can’t do this anymore.

It’s not you, it’s me? or It’s not me, it’s you! - In truth, Seattle, it’s both of us. Rampant growth and development at the expense of harming and/or displacing local communities? That’s you. Wanting different things out of life now that I’m moving into the backside of my thirties? That’s me. I could go back and forth with the ‘it’s you, it’s me’ stuff, but what it comes down to is that we just aren’t compatible anymore. You aren’t who I fell in love with. And to be honest, I feel like I’ve put in the bulk of the work at trying to make things work out in this relationship. Living here has been one big compromise (studio apartments, no yard for a garden or our dog), and until now it’s been worth it. But it’s never enough, you keep asking for more, and I’ve reached my limit (I really can’t go any smaller than the space I’m living in now, Seattle. I’ve downsized all I can).

So this isn’t working and I’m not willing to do what it takes to make it work anymore.

I just need some time to think about things. I need some space. So I’m hitting the open road to clear my head and re-evaluate. I’ll be back in the Spring for my stuff, and with any luck to move into a hoped-for co-housing situation with some friends. Seattle, if it works out between us it will be because of the generosity, friendship, and community that we’ve found here, not because you’ve changed your ways. Actually, it’s always been because of the generosity of community that we’ve found a home here as long as we have.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s so much that’s still lovely about you and I wouldn’t mind spending more time together. But when we return next Spring, it won’t be because of you. It will be because of the supportive community that we’ve carved out here that we love. Despite the challenges you pose to my family, my friends, and my neighbors, community continues to flourish and thrive here. Seattle, if it works out between us, it will be because of them. Until then, so long.

Imagination

When I was a kid laying in bed at night, waiting to fall asleep, I would often become aware of my heartbeat. This reminder of mortality always frightened me and so I’d often go find my mom and ask her to feel my heartbeat and reassure me that I was safe and healthy. She would, but then I’d want to feel hers and was always alarmed that hers was slower than mine. Each time she’d explain that it’s normal for kids and grownups to have different heart rates, but I was certain that either she or I wouldn’t make it through the night because either mine was too fast or hers was too slow.

I guess I stopped noticing my heartbeat at some point. But last night as I lay awake unable to fall asleep and trying to quiet my mind, I noticed it again. I thought back to my fearful feelings as a kid and I thought again of mortality. This time I didn’t worry about my own death, I thought of Benjamin: the worst loss of all.

Last week I was contemplating imagination. I read an interesting snippet about why humans have imagination and how it contributes to our survival. The writer suggested that imagination is what allowed early humans to, for example, pass a cave and imagine it filled with the warm glow of a campfire and kin. Now, that memory is tucked away for when shelter is needed come winter. Next, the passerby might imagine discovering a bear deep inside the cave. Now the person is better prepared to take preventative measures when seeking shelter or evasive maneuvers if in danger.

Last night, for the first time, I followed my heartbeat thoughts without letting them turn to fear. I imagined how I would survive if I found myself suddenly alone in our currently tumultuous season of life. I considered where I would find support and help and how I would move through everything that’s coming up these next few months. With each turn of thought I checked in to see if I was getting anxious and needed to abandon my thought process. But consistently, I kept finding comfort in envisioning survival, resiliency, and my supportive community, and so I followed the thoughts until I could fully envision a path forward and then I fell asleep.

My imagination often takes me to dark and scary places. But I’m learning how to turn those thoughts around and use my imagination to nurture resilience instead of fear.