the busy heart

I'm beginning to think none of us are spared worrying over our bodies, thinking they're not good enough, destroying ourselves over this and that about them when there are other things we can and would like to think about. (Do you know anyone who is spared? Do such creatures exist?) Thank you for reading and responding to my post about it . Just before I hit publish, I worried it wasn't as universal as I thought, that this time I was really exposing myself. And as I read your comments, part of me was glad I wasn't the only one, and the other part of me was thinking, "You, too? You worry about your body?" It reminds me of a moment in the women's meeting at church ( Relief Society ) a few years ago, when this gorgeous woman stood up to talk about how plagued she was by self-deprecating thoughts, how she never felt good enough or clever enough or pretty enough, and what she was doing to work on it. And I remember sitting there thinking, "You? If you don...

I've been posting on this blog for five years. Sporadically, mostly. Sometimes very sporadically. But somehow I always come back to it. And at several points since I've had this blog, I've felt inclined (or prompted?) to take it more seriously, to post more, to try to do something with it. But let me tell you, there are a lot of ways to talk myself out of doing that. I'd try, but then I'd get too busy, or I'd post something and get zero comments, or I'd post something and actually get comments (which was almost more terrifying, somehow?), or I'd think I had nothing to say, or I'd worry that what I had to say was something I was not supposed to say, on and on, you get the point. Recently, I had that feeling again, and I was talking to my sister about it, and she said I ought to just do it. I'd been turning the idea over and over in my head for weeks, thinking really hard about it while I did other things, asking myself the hard blogger questio...

Thank you, really, to all of you who commented and wrote me emails.  They really mean a lot to me.  And mostly I'm just checking in to say I'm feeling better.  The way I came to feel better seems important, so I thought I'd record it: *I prayed, and it wasn't pretty.  This was flat on my face, weeping aching praying, saying, over and over again, "You have to fix me.  You have to heal my heart."  (Yes, precisely in those words.  I can get a bit sassy and demanding in my praying.)  I felt broken and I felt like I spent all day trying to fix it and everyone else was trying to help me fix it, and no one could do it.  I wasn't asking to stop grieving, just to be functional and believe in good things again.  I felt deeply then, more than perhaps ever in my life, that there was this gaping hole in me that I needed God to fill. And, after many days of praying like that, and a turning point conversation with Sam (up next!), something lifted, sh...

(title comes from Hopkins' poem "God's Grandeur" ) Morning walk, things I loved: *elegant New England houses *remembering what a "pediment" was on said houses *passing through the smell of fabric softener coming from silver vents *mossy tree trunks and mossy stone walls (a minor but lovely side effect of the flooding rains) *few (but gorgeous) blossoms on the trees; millions of tiny green buds that promise blossoms *sitting on a bench to pray, feeling the world reduce down to my prayer, birdsong, and a breeze that seemed to split at my nose and travel deliberately over both my ears, like a whisper