Thoughts from 3 Weeks of Being Away

grace, old age, and friends

Been out of pocket/off the grid for the better part of 3 weeks but here's what I've been thinking about:

1. i need more dad jokes in my life. some of you may demur but i'm just owning my truth.

2. every stage of parenting i feel like a new parent. i am getting used to everything being new.

3. walking has become a focal practice for me. getting my body moving in an action that increases awareness and focus and calm. i'm thankful i have a body that is able to walk.

4. i'll be married 25 years in less than a month. that's bonkers cause only old people have been alive enough to be married 25 years it seems.

5. i'm old and i don't care who knows it. gray hairs and wrinkles and more hairs than are socially acceptable in all the socially unacceptable places.

6. i have more grace and acceptance for life's contingencies than i used to. Being alive - staying alive, having a life - is hard work. i think the pathway to joy in the midst of the hard work is acceptance that life is hard.

7. If God is love, than being a person capable, willing, and at home in love is how i commune with God. for me this means: prayer is love, emails are love, dad jokes are love.

8. the two things I feel like i need right now more than anything else is: 1- good sleep and 2- a good cry. Also: many good sleeps and many good cries.

9. i can't make myself do either through self-willfulness. Each comes, for me, as I open to love.

10. The world needs a lot of things I don't have right now: an off button, a reset, a reckoning, a cleanse. What the world needs that I do have something of is love. So as I go through my 49th year one thing I'm committed to is becoming more of what the world needs. That's what I have, that's what I can control.

11. i always think it's fun to have a list of things and not stop at 10 but keep going to 11 even if you don't have something for number 11 it's one way I enjoy my life.

12. i've been to two funerals in the last two weeks (see #6 above). Here's a pic from one of them with some of my good friends from college. Good friends are proof God loves us

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