Swimming reflections

I wanted to introduce you, my most intimate internet community, to my new beau. I met him in my swim class,where he swims when he's not volunteering at the city pool. He's a wild card for sure (part of his charm) and I suspect he'll give my fabulous swim coach a run for her money.  I am mostly with him for his swim stamina and moxie.  He has the fire under him that I want.  Watch out Michael Phelps!

Olympics past and present

Last night I watched Chariots of Fire. Eric Liddell’s story of gold medal and world record-breaking glory, synergized with the current Olympic spirit, has left me feeling particularly inspired today.  The Olympics rouse us on myriad levels: it has us rooting for our country, our commonalities; we are reminded that the beautiful axiom of “practice makes perfect” really does pay off; the strength of the human mind and spirit lays witness to achieving the impossible (thank you Michael Phelps); and it’s satiates our affinity for competition, for winning.  I find myself thinking to my own athletic endeavors.  I don’t know that I can honestly say I feel God’s pleasure when I run but I do feel something akin to the spiritual when I’m running fast, pushing myself beyond my normal regime, beating my own personal bests.  It’s a reminder that when our reach does extend our grasps, it ups the ante on our grasps.  As we continue to reach for and achieve our own “impossibles,” we’re toppled by more possibilities.  It then becomes a dance of humility, as we give ourselves away to the possibility of our lives or potential—to our God-initiated selves.  And I think when we can see one area of our life began to truly take shape it gives us courage to trust this process in another area of our life.  And this, in my mind, IS the spirit of the Olympics: realizing and risking dream after dream, into reality after reality.  

Currently listening to: All These Things That I Have Done, The Killers.  

Current mood: inspired  ;)                                                              

Current community: Watercooler Wednesday!              

Mayer Christianity > The Message?

For some reason I can't get into the guts of my musings vis-a-vis blogging so a little more monkey posts until my blog and my "deep thoughts" reconvene.  A friend recently brought this post from the fabulous blog Stuff Christians Like to my attention, knowing I have a penchant for both God and John Mayer.  It's called "Mayer Christianity," and there is a quiz at the end of the post, quoting Mayer lyrics and The Message Bible. Our job is to decide which words are the Almighty Yahweh's and which words are um, John Mayers. Hysterical. Illuminating.  And tricky I might add.  Test your biblical acumen and then pony it up with the Mayer lyrics that have seeped into your memory, through osmosis.  And then either pray for forgiveness or to John Mayer, whichever feels more appropriate.  

mon cher

A real, bona-fide, thoughtful blog soon, I promise!!!  But until then, here's a little eye candy for the gents out there.  This is a "tres ravissante, mystérieuse et poétique" picture of my lovely cousin, Miss Amy Motta. Bon apetite!

For good measure

Food Court Musical

Anyone out there have a shameless musical indulgence? You can ask my dearest friends and they can tell you: I shamelessly love musicals. I'm the girl that goes down her phone list, trying to find "that person" that will be equally as excited that I scored some free tickets to see Oklahoma at TPAC. In turn, I'm also that girl that knows all the songs from Oklahoma and has to work at not being the annoying chorus line from the audience.

When I saw this friend post this video it was as if I had a deja vu from some former life, when I was some heroine in a distant land, singing my way in and out of life, love and loss. Maybe it's just the dramatics that I'm hopelessly devoted to. Or the whole making the ordinary extraordinary thing. No matter, I barefacedly love musicals and it would literally make my day -no my life- if I was in the food court and a conglomerate of passer-by's broke out into a song about napkins.

Batman and the Joker

I have a few thoughts about The Dark Knight.  I’ve been thinking about the jig between Bateman and the Joker, or personified good and evil, where battle is anticipated but really it’s more of a battle of the bands.  “I don’t want to kill you,” Heath Ledger’s psycho Joker tells Christian Bales stalwart Batman. “You complete me.” Batman, weary of being the white night, moves into a war with his own conscience, pissed at always having to be the heavy in the battle against the Joker, but always acquiescing in the role to which his superpowers have preordained him, leaving the desires of his manhood in the wake.  It was interesting to see the dark side, or rather the humanity, of Batman.  I think of Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mother Teresa or really anybody that makes a significant impression on the structuring of humanity.  Giving yourself away in any major way is sure to take its toll; nothing noteworthy is one-dimensional and none of us live in our idealism all the time.  It’s like being a surgeon on call; sure you want to save lives but wouldn’t it be nice if you could arrange for people to have their ailments M-F, between 8-5?  Oftentimes virtuous, other-centered living doesn’t afford us the luxury of choice.  Or rather, the choice is the virtue, but it doesn’t always feel as sexy as it seems. It rarely does.  I like the honesty of Batman’s struggle.

I also think of the Joker, and how evil preys on it’s own shadows, refusing to be explained by pop psychology.  Forget Freudian hints about a dad who carved a smile into his son's face with a razor. As the Joker says, "What doesn't kill you makes you stranger.”  And I think his lust for chaos is weirdly contemporary.  I do believe that humanity is almost always sacrificed in the hunger pains for power and greed but there is something else at play here.  The Joker isn’t in this primarily for power. He describes himself as a dog chasing a car.  The goal is…well; actually there is no goal.  It’s the process, or the pandemonium that IS the climax. Without going all Dr. Dobson, I think this is a great rendering of where “evil is going” these days.  Look at these recent phenomena of school shootings: madness and bedlam over private, quiet hunt downs.  Our culture is in an interesting time. There is something that feels so compelling about being a rock-star or being noticed—the lines between fame and meaning are ever blurring. Even the psycho-path is buying in, and equally confused. And the strangeness is that the confusion is seductive, it’s the lure.

I’m not trying to take Bateman out of its fantastical genre and dumb it down in some linear way to “dooms day-ing the present times.”  Obviously.  That's not really my style. I just thought it was both brilliant and thought provoking. 

On a less esoteric note I went to see Pineapple Express this weekend as well.  It’s a bottom feeder but hysterical nonetheless.  Shamelessly, or perhaps shamefully, I loved it too. 

Contribution to Watercooler Wednesday. 

Another One Bites the Dust

I know this barely sounds plausible, and if I were reading (not experiencing) it, I would be suspect of dramatics.  But, my friends that have been keeping up: I FREAKING LOST ANOTHER TOENAIL.  No more pictures because pictures of feet are not all that compelling and ones of feet with six toenails land on the fringes of a freak show.  But… ‘tis true.  Vanity has taken its leave. I have a mere three toenails on each foot.  They are shucking themselves like oyster shells, or corn husks, leaving my little piggies naked, vulnerable and unsightly. Furthermore, it’s unwarranted.  I do not run enough to loose so many toenails.  This is an Ironman status toenail dilemma.  I’m not an Ironman. I have cozy little running routines that make true athletes yawn. I don’t understand.  It’s a cruel joke from the gods, to be sure. I must have had model feet in my former life, and then did something really, really bad. Does karma know no mercy? Or is there a giggling Godhead up there, watching me baulk when it’s time to don sandals, an off-color brand of heavenly-humor? Sigh. Has anybody else lost four toenails in a four-month span? If so, please console me.  And for those of you that take your toenails for granted (as I once did,) grant me dibs on the egocentric portion of your prayer requests, at least for today.

Something borrowed

It’s rare that I borrow words from somebody else for my blog. But recently I ran across this blog (friend of friends) and felt really moved by her musings on love.  So I thought I’d share:

When I was pregnant with my second child I remember being excited but also there was this nagging sense of fear.  I worried that I would not have enough room in my heart for another child.

I discovered at the moment my son was born that the heart is a remarkable thing; resilient, forthright, expansive, unending. The love was almost too much to bear I was so filled by it.

I talk about love a great deal. I do not demonstrate it in real life as often as I’d like, honestly, but I’m working on it. The essential thing about humans though, I think, is love. There is so much of it. So much available. So much ready to give. So much ready to be given. We never need to look for an alternative fuel source for the heart because as long as we demonstrate and in turn accept kindness and mercy and peace and joy and sacrifice and service one to another we create this perpetually refilling basin…a vein of gold which never ceases.

Can we have too much love?
Not the marred version of love that we are fed by media or culture but the real thing;


The moment with our selves when we breathe soft and full.


The moment with a child when we greet tears of gratitude.


The moment with a lover when we know we are known.


The moment with a friend when we grieve and heal.


The moment with our Creator when we know we are loved because we are made;
fearfully, wonderfully made.

Can we have too much love?
Can we give too much love?
That is a noble question to pursue. A research project which can only bear fruit.

Normal fare

Sometimes it comes down to the good old-fashioned, homespun hang around the kitchen table, with a few old faces, a few new ones, a pitcher of mojito’s and the few hundred life years racked up in the room, all adding to the fodder, and ultimately the humanity—this IS the What.  Glass is tipped to the quintessential hang. 

And to last nights crew, I have five memorable jags: It went from him to him; Life-force diminished; When life gets hard, you Twitter; I’ve seen a lot of faces and I’ve ROCKED them all; One man’s excrement is another mans ecstasy. (Chortle, giggle.)

The Sacred Blur, an exerpt

I am finding myself drawn more and more to poetry in recent months. A favorite poet of mine is William Stafford.  A friend left this verse on my Facebook wall earlier today. (Facebook and Stafford—a postmodern paradox that would make Bono proud, I’m sure.) 

Charles Simic in an essay about Stafford said: "At the end of his great poems we are always alone, their fateful acts and consequences now our own to consider."

Alone but for the poem. There is a sense of respect and confidence in his leaving us to our own devices, to ponder questions we are somehow freer to ask ourselves. Give, exit: this is the respectful way Stafford engages his reader. When we are passive, or flaccid, we miss it; Like most Sacred encounters.

An Archival Print

God snaps your picture -don't look away-

this room right now, your face tilted

exactly as it is before you can think

or control it.  Go ahead, let it betray

all the secret emergencies and still hold

that partial disguise you call your character

Even your lip, they say, the way it curves

or doesn't, or can't decide, will deliver

bales of evidence.  The camera, wide open,

stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years

or so --after that you have become

whatever the veneer is, all the way through.

Now you want to explain.  Your mother 

was a certain --how to express it?--influence.

Yes.  And your father, whatever he was,

you couldn't change that.  No. And your town

of course had its limits.  Go on, keep talking --

Hold it.  Don't move.  That's you forever.

-William Stafford

For more deep, light and creative jags click here. It's Watercooler Wednesday!

Birthday badaboom!

Huh hum:  

My acceptance speech into the grand old age of 36:

Alayna, Krista and Rb – you are my loves.  Thanks for such a fabulous party.  Thank you for knowing me so well, and for the (seemingly) effortless way you mingle meaning and fun.  The thing is, I know it’s actually effort-full and I forever appreciate the ways you go the extra mile, every time. I love growing old(er) with you girls. And I dig your style. 

Jory – thanks for adding some spank to Fact or Crap.  (For the uninitiated, Fact or Crap is a game my circle of friends often plays at people’s birthdays. ie: Angela rode elephants in Sri Lanka; F or C?—It’s a fact, btw.)  Jory, aka “Party in a Box,” decided to up the ante on our fun little rated-PG get-to-know-you game renaming it, “Who’s Your Daddy,” and asking questions like, “Who are the last two guys Angela’s kissed?” Uh… because there is nothing like 30 of your dearest friends contemplating your sordid—and private!!—love life.  Awesome.  Although I blushed and defended myself for a greater part of this game, it was great fun and luckily I don’t hang with people that are shaming (or that completely believe Jory.)  

In the end, Buckley and Erin, the two Menza’s, ended up duking it out with a tie-breaker standby: How much does she weigh?  Buckley, skating on thin ice, guessed too high and was immediately disqualified! Erin, guessing two pounds under my actual weight, is not only Menza, she's also a girl. (I love you dearly Ahme -and I like that you "think" and "laugh" in equal measure too! This IS our connection!!)

Everyone else: thank you for the NICE bottles of wine, gift certificates, books, poetry, the massage (which I will LOVE Rb and Shanks), the cookbook – (I love it Sharon, and your very thoughtful blog!!), Milk duds…what else? Ivy, thank you for your very excellent cupcakes and for plugging yourself into our little world with sass and über confidence. John, thanks for the bike ride, the birthday draft, and hanging with 29 people you’ve never met.  David, Stephen, Chance–thanks for the rock star entrances at the end of the night. You made it better, of course.  

Mom and Dad: thank you for the inflatable 2-person kayak that I am VERY excited to utilize.  (Anyone want to go kayaking?)

Here's the picture recap of the night:

August 2 - my first whassup to the world

Today is my birthday.  It’s been a lovely day, one of those days that come in equal parts of fun, active, lazy and familiar.  And it really hasn’t even begun yet.  I’m in a few stand still moments to myself—my best friend just left and I have two solid hours of quiet to hang with the dogs (Churchill, my friend's black lab, is staying with us; yes, I have quite the motley canine crew right now—Churchill and Mother Teresa) before the festivities get underway.  I started the day at 7:30 am going on a fifty-mile bike ride with friends through the muggy, picturesque countryside of Nashville and Franklin, TN.  It was enjoyable, as biking on sunny days in sleepy neighborhoods usually is.  My ever-thoughtful friend John was committed to get me to draft properly.  I kind-of did for a long stretch of rode.  We both celebrated.  (It’s nice to have somebody celebrate your accomplishment with you, as if it’s his or her own, don’t you think?) I came home to my BFF hanging with the dogs, ready and always willing to do whatever.  We putzed around for a bit. My phone has been buzzing throughout the day with text messages, phone calls and Facebook shout-outs, chirping birthday tunes and wishes.  I feel happy and blessed by all the thoughtful, gorgeous souls that make up my life.  Tonight friends are throwing a soiree, complete with scrumptious food and spirits, games and dancing –some of my favorite things. I’ve been instructed to nap, as I’m often a pumpkin when the clock strikes 10.  So that’s my agreement: I promised to nap so I can stay up late.  Not bad, eh?  Did I mention that my A-team are total rock stars?

I love birthdays.  I love remembering other people’s day of reckoning, the day they unwittingly announced themselves to the world. It’s like a big “I’m glad you are here!!” fest and, because life has its share of challenges, I think we ALL need to be celebrated now and again.  I hope your birthday is meaningful this year, a cause for you to celebrate the many lovely things in your life, including yourself.  And if it doesn’t feel like there are many lovely things in your life, the lovely thing must be you.   And I’m glad you’re here!! Okay, I’m turning on the blog-sap.  Cut me some slack –it’s my BIRHTDAY!!

I’ve got to hop in the shower.  The sweat and bike grease glued to my body—not so lovely.

Happy day!  

LOVE is all you need

Well, hello there my lovely little internet family!!!  I’m back to blogging as a sport and am happy to be here with you—my global network of friends, sleuths (hi Ben) and passer-bys.  And I’m happy in general right now.  I have this Thursday morning off and have decided to clean my house, which isn’t really blog-worthy I know, but what I’m listening to IS.  Last spring I got into The Beatles album, LOVE, the collection of songs from the Cirque de Soleil production, LOVE: A Tribute to the Beatles.  I gushed and gushed over this show, probably blogged about it, and wore out the album.  I just pulled it back out this morning and am listening to it in surround sound: this Beatles collection ROCKS!  Truly, honestly, lovingly, faithfully and genuinely –you can trust me. I would not lead you, my most intimate global network, down a lame music path.  But this is the real deal.  And not on iTunes, unfortunately.  But you can get it here.  I'm talking about a revolution.

Bizarro-dream vacations

Today a client told me about a TV program on FX entitled “30 Days.”  Do you know about it?  Morgan Spurlock, brainchild behind the 2004 documentary Supersize Me, is the conceptual mastermind behind this reality TV show.  It’s not a far stretch from his 30-day fast from food not McDonalds. (Gross.) Basically, it takes people in two different stratospheres of life and settles them in together, for a month.  Examples: An ardent hunter went to work with the president of PETA, for a month.  A pro-gun guy goes to hang in a pacifist Amish community.  Morgan himself went and lived on an Indian reservation for 30 days, to chill Native American style for a month. 

As my client and I were talking about her experience of sadness this past week, she said that strangely, she felt a bit sad watching this TV show.  She saw an episode of Morgan living with the Native Americans, in scraps of leftover land, with little purpose and too much beer.  My purpose here is not to write a diatribe about Native American culture.  Rather, I love the concept of this TV show and the ways it evoked some soul-level response from my client.  It made me think about what culture I would put myself in, in an effort to expand my own prejudice, or lack of understanding.   What would mature me? Swell my own sense of empathy? Be hard and funny, soul-stirring, maybe life changing and of course, prime-time fodder to swap at dinner parties?  I’m thinking that working on the PTL Network would be a good stretch for me.  Or living in a retirement center.  Maybe wearing a fat suit for a month would better help me understand weight issues; or living on a polygamist commune and wearing those God-awful gunny sacks for dresses.   I am attracted to anything that is hard but has the ability to enlarge my capacity to empathize and “get it,” from a perspective other than my own.  Or maybe I just think I’m attracted to such challenges.  I’ve never actually had to live too far outside of my own comfort zone.  Not for a month anyway.  I know that even thinking about eating McDonalds for 30 days makes me and my arteries want to spew.  What would your 30 days be? Has anybody seen the show?  It’s on FX Network at 10:00 PM EST, Tuesdays.  I guess we can call this bizarro-dreaming: what would you NOT dream up doing for a month?  And then, would you do it? (And if you say swimming with dolphins or hiking the grand canyon, I call bullshit.)

This is part of Watercooler Wednesday.  Check it out!

The journal entry

“By indirections we find directions out”

                 -Hamlet, II. i

Two questions that were once presented to me and now I often present to my clients are these: Who are you? What do you care about?—Thoughtful questions to touch base with throughout our lives.  Today I’m revisiting these questions for myself.  I’ve been battling a blank muse for hours—okay days—now.  So I’m back to the drawing board: Who am I? What do I care about? Ugh. 

Why does a little Monday afternoon soul searching have me craving milk duds, Coldplay and a crawl space?

And why are these basic self-analysis 101 questions so daunting and intimidating? What are we afraid will come out? Or are we afraid of the things that might remain concealed? Perhaps a point-blank look on our truest selves calls us to something raw, something real and gritty, and something true.  We get squirrelly with truth.  Truth is transforming and transformation takes courage.  We are often a timid people who feign courage; most people are quite convinced by our pretenses.  We hide how bad we are; we hide how good we are.  Then we spend a bulk of our lives hoodwinked by our facades. Bless our poor little phony hearts. Blech.

This is what I often believe about myself: I am too much.  Too much mood, too much emotion, too much desire, too many words and ideas, too many existential fears and complaints, too much, too much!  Do all women feel burdened by an interior world that has outgrown its visceral walls?  Do we seep out of ourselves, trying to plug the leaks; afraid that what’s evolving inside is too messy, too unpredictable to be seen by reputable bachelors, or conventional husbands and friends?  I wonder if our best selves are often stuck in a self-contemptuous purgatory; we know too much to fall back, we’re too afraid to move forward.  We hate what we know because it only illuminates our longings for something real.  The more we know and feel, the more at odds we are with ourselves—we stop fitting in.  We’re in vertigo with Alice, dropping down the rabbit’s hole full of wonder, mystery and fret.  

Freedom and Anxiety -the two heavy's, always duking it out.

I am currently reading a little devotional by Henri Nowen entitled, The Inner Voice of Love.  In one vignette he writes, “Be patient.  When you feel lonely, stay with your loneliness.  Avoid the temptation to let your fearful self run off.”  What about when, at baseline, our fearful selves overbear the calm, collected and emotionally savvy self?  This is what scares me.  Fear is a hungry shark in a home aquarium.  I am a minnow.

I believe this is the ogre we (I) must wrestle with.  We must look deep into our little David selves and confront our Goliaths.  We must stop getting busy and indignant when life doesn’t submit to our requests.  Rather, we must pause, evaluate and find meaning in our little shard of world.  We must allow truth to penetrate us, to make us courageous, to set us free.

I’m realizing in my own life that the goal isn’t to pine for what’s ahead but rather to find meaning and life in what is.  Can I live in the parameters of my own gifts and insecurities: bowing up to my anxieties, taking refuge in laughter and smack talk with friends, steady on in the small ways I can affect change and be changed?  

Who am I? What do I care about? —These are the questions that continually define and refine who I am.  These are the questions I’ve given my life to.  I think, at various points in our lives, we all should.  

Odd Pride

I was perusing a few blogs yesterday during some illegitimate down time (I was really procrastinating on a writing assignment) and saw one entitled “odd pride” where this girl talks about things that have given her an “odd” sense of pride in herself over the years.  I loved this thought.  It got me to thinking about the atypical things I do or intuit that give me that cozy sense of well-being.  Of course we all, or we all should, have the obvious successes in our lives, but what about our oddities? Our peculiar ways that, given a dose of reflection, make us think, “Damn glad I’m me.”  I’ve listed a few of mine.  Indulge me friends –what are yours? 

I can remember the detailed plot of someone else’s life, often times better than I can remember what I did yesterday.  ie: I will remember your boyfriend from 8^th grade, his name, and the restaurant you told me he took you to before the Sweetheart Ball.  I might remember the particulars of your life better than you do, and I mean the nit and gritty– like what you were wearing when you saw Grease 2  in the theatre and  if you ordered a Diet Coke or just Coke. (But if you asked me what movie I saw last weekend, you’d have to help me break it down.)

I can really pack a car.  If you think all the suitcases can’t fit in the trunk, with the bike rack and the bulky bags of recycling, I, my friends, can make it happen. 

Sometimes I’m a little clairvoyant.  If the phone rings, and I see who the caller is before I answer, I have this weird intuition about why they’re calling.  And I’m often right.

I make really good oatmeal.  It’s not hard, but I have a knack and secretly, I like the way I make steel cut oatmeal better than any I’ve tasted, even my MOM’s!

I’m almost always nice to airline people, even when I’m cranky or THEY are cranky.  Even when I have to be body searched for razor blades at 6:20 am and my flight leaves at 6:30 am.  And I can make the impossible madcap dash from one end of the airport to the other, stringing along my carry-on’s, with the determination of an Olympic hopeful, to catch a connecting flight. 

I know how to mix mo