three purple hearts

It seems like a lot longer ago than it has been since I was sitting in a quiet boat floating down the canals in Amsterdam. The return to real life certainly did not come gently. And yet, my mind keeps going back to the gentle sharing of facts and history that the skipper of that boat kept up throughout the tour.  I learned things I hadn't known before about the city built on a swamp that shouldn't be able to exist, and how it has maintained a seemingly precarious balance beautifully for 750 years. I saw beauty in the quirks and slightly off-kilter places, and the reality that people are free to be themselves there was palpable. It is a place whose welcome and encouragement connected and still connects the world. I felt more at peace there than I have in very many places I've ever been.  I felt like me there. Returning to the country of my birth was a more foreign experience than I knew it could be, but I have gotten reaclimated and life has marched on. Finding common ground...

I laughed. I cried. I learned. I rolled my eyes. This one article has all the makings of a decent made for tv movie… but it’s real life and oh, so timely. At a time in history when what is reported by those grasping at control like it’s the only straw left in the dispenser is so boldly different than what’s real, these kinds of discrepancies seem to stand out more than ever. What the church of the Nazarene and its “leaders” say in this article… just isn’t true. The writer even calls it out, at one point. And it feels like a breath of fresh air. Here’s the thing, folks, you can point and blame all you want… but the curtain is falling. The ivory tower is crumbling. The glass house has more empty frames than in tact panes. I’m so deeply saddened for all of you who thought you did something by reaching the pinnacle… All it really seems to have done is put you at the head of the church of the Nazarene at a point in history when it is very much on the wrong side. And the silence from the ...

A long time ago in a life that seems very far from now, I heard a story about raising a special needs child. It told of planning a trip and learning a language, and getting all prepared to go to Italy… and then arriving and finding yourself in Holland. The writer wrote beautifully about how it was sad to not have made it where you were aiming to be… but also about the beauty of the place where you are.   I learned that story as we were finding out diagnoses and realizing the realities of the life we would live as far as we could tell them to be at that time. And ever since then I have dreamed of going to Holland. Tulips have long been my favorite flower, and I have very much grown into a vibrant and colorful life as I have done the work to love myself and the world around me in healthier ways.  On Wednesday night, I left home to make a last minute effort to get to my younger brother’s wedding. I kept wanting to just buy a ticket and go but I wasn’t sure until the very last min...

I think it’s funny how often we perceive someone else to be ahead of us on the journey... This caught my attention in a conversation with a friend I used to have years ago and came back to mind when I was reflecting on how that relationship has changed me in its slow ending… It’s a trick of the mind, I think. Like when you’re falling asleep and all the sudden you startle as if you are somehow really falling. Or how you can close your physical eyes and pull something to your mind’s eye to examine closely even though it’s nowhere near you. For most of my years knowing this person, it felt like they were out there ahead of me somewhere… and I just wished that someday I could be up there and helping people, too. As I did my healing work, reality seemed to shift a bit… and for a while I looked around and wasn’t sure where they were. If I closed my eyes, I could pull them to mind, but I wasn’t sure where they were or if we were even in the same space anymore. As I finished up some work t...

It was the beginning of December when I first “met” my friend. No one could have prepared me for the life changing reality that would come with knowing them.   The first conversation we had was hours long. So many things came together as the history I had long lived but not been allowed to give voice to became reality. My story, our story, the story of so many, was not new to them.  As we talked, we came to understand the depth of our connections. Not just because of our shared spiritual family of origin… Not just because of similar educational pursuits or the efforts to advocate for healthier ways of handling abuse within the structured religiosity… but somehow there were a million tiny threads of my past and future that connected in that conversation.  We messaged periodically after that until they couldn’t anymore. A multitude of health problems and a terminal diagnosis was slowly becoming real. After a couple more times on the phone… suddenly the loss was looming....