Dea’

Dea Autumn 2011

Writing, creating yumminess from whole foods, digging in the dirt, and raising my boys and chickens and dreams, are embraced with joy. I am compelled to be outside as often as possible, blown away by my sweet baby boys, and learning to live love with my incredible (and challenging!) husband. Issues of injustice, both globally and locally, move me to tears and, hopefully, action. Conversations and questions surrounding simple living, expressions of faith, organic food, womanhood, and natural parenting,  inspire and intrigue me.

I am often overwhelmed with the vast amount of ideas and actions open for thought and application. My husband Jeremy is both cheerleader and ‘real life’ thinker for me in this regard 🙂 We’re the Dreamer and the Doer; a perfect and frustrating match.

Newly in my thirties, I feel the past few years have aged me decades past. I am hungry for some sleep, healing through faith from bruises and breaks of people and words and experiences, praying for a growing family, and looking with Hope towards growth and understanding and maturity.  So much has happened…yet much more needs to happen in response. Becoming. Discovering. Arriving at the next step…and the next.

I believe we are all created to do and share some very specific thoughts and actions during our earth-stay. I believe writing is this distinct expression in my own life and I continue to find energy, healing, and clarification through it. I welcome you to read and engage; question and encourage; reflect and discover. I desire my life to be a conversation, a shared journey. Through posting these words and thoughts and experiences, I’m inviting you into it.

And all the other details….
The Gang: Jeremy (husband) , Jeremiah Augustine (eldest baby boy (summer 2008), Knightley Tolkien (Autumn 2010), and Balian Justicec (winter 2012)
Education: BA Education, BA Intercultural Studies, MA Education, studies midwifery
Location:  Between British Columbia and Alberta and dreams of lands across the sea, Canada
Pals: Cana (black lab) & Jonah (brown cat)
Favorite tasty treats: GreenValley Coffee (of course!), our own yard eggs, curries, fresh produce, ‘our’ nachoes, dark salted chocolate, quality Shiraz or Pinot, yam fries, sprouted things
Favorite Authors: Richard Rohr, Madeline Engle, C.S. Lewis, Grisham, Rivers…and more and more…..

This is me. In progress 🙂

—

And for more personal glimpse:

I Have. I Am. I Am Not. I Breathe.

I have lived in wealth and debt. Have worked and wandered.  Have studied in desks and at home and online. I have lectured classrooms and received degrees. Have stood for nothing. Have fallen for everything.

I have plowed rice fields in the jungles of East Asia; plow in one hand, water buffalo in the other. I have taken that rice to tribes up that mountain. Too late. Too late I have come and just in time to see a baby dead on the board they called a bed with his mother. I remember her hungry eyes and his brother running naked with the chickens.

I have swum in the South China Sea by moonlight, sailed that same sea by day, and watched the high and mighty sip drinks on its sand while, too close, the lowly bathed babes and laundry.I have run naked through fields of rain and stood bare under waterfalls. I have made love on a beach in Mexico and made war within my home

I have swum with turtles, walked on cold lava, picked coffee, bananas, guava, cashews, mangos, from their vines. I have been awakened by an earthquake and driven through a typhoon. I have been held close during a tornado while it chose the neighbors house and not my own.

I have been kidnapped in Beijing (albeit for only an hour). Bartered on the Silk Road. Eaten yak and monkey and chicken feet.  I have walked where the Steets Have No Names, kissed the Blarney Stone, and wondered at the loss of my Voice.

I have opened in prayer for a stadium of thousands and walked the aisle at the invitation during Graham’s crusade. I have stood in the bedroom of the Dali Lama and sat with those still writing his scrolls.  I have climbed a waterfall to pray defiance against a jungle’s witches from their high place. I have left silenced and without a sign.

I have sat with monks in the temple under a haze of butter tea and incense and singing bowls.
I have felt my fear there…my confusion…my longing…my panic…my peace.

I can no longer be in the same room as incense.
I wish to own a bowl.

I have watched vultures circling the sacred burial grounds while questioning the flagged prayers of the devout in all their tattered desperation and piety. I have gazed upon the blue body of  Krishna and the others and searched their eyes and considered their chipped paint.

I have forced myself to wretch with toothbrushes and salt water and hidden within a smaller (and smaller) dress and sobbed against my mother for so much that I still do not understand.

I have birthed life. I have bled death. I have received life. I have spoken death. I have been a lukewarm tomb of between stale and salty; painting layer upon layer of molding whitewash as I sip red and swallow wafer and convince myself again.

I am not the one to tell you who God is.

I am only discovering, slowly, cautiously, The Mystery.

There is no way to truly describe oneself. We are not only what we do. We are not what we ascribe to be. We are not what we were. We are always in motion; a swirl of respiration and life and death and magic.

This is me.
And some of the fragments which have formed me; shattered and shaking, into death, towards life, with Hope.