I thought I saw a light shine

I've been putting off writing this post for ages, so I'll just get to the point. 

The truth is, I'm not sure what I'm doing here.  I don't know who my audience is, nor do I know whom I want it to be.  I don't know that this is my medium.  I don't feel like uploading snazzy pictures.  I'm not ready to talk yet about the Post-It notes stuck to my mind's eye.  That empty chair on my side of the aisle.   How the skyline looks at night from our front window when I can't sleep.  How sweet marriage is, how natural, how hard to reorient one's life around another's.  Saying vows in the mist.  How nothing that happened after my father died felt like it was for me.  The showmanship of death.  The last message he left on my phone.  The very mixed feelings I have about my best friend's moving out of state.  The relief of collapse, of coming undone in a quiet place and admitting--to God, to myself, to the air--that I am simply managing, and that that in itself can be a form of praise when the grief of a loss is deep enough.

These are things I long to press into paper, but I can't.  It has been very quiet here amidst the rush that summer always brings.  I've been waiting.  Waiting, I think, to know with certainty how I feel about the great swing of loss and gain this year has brought me.  I do want to write that, and I will.  

But not here. 

I care too much that the world see a version of me that is honest. I think, though, that what ends up here is more than a little ad hoc and often -- well, sad.  I've always written more when feeling blue.  (Do people still say that?)  And I hate that, in the randomness of it all, this picture you get of me isn't honest.  So, here goes.  Honest thoughts.  Here's what comes to my mind just now: I'm just a girl who got married and lost her father and whose best friend moved out of state, eating Oreos before cardio, struggling with how her identity has changed, interested in making a difference in the world and figuring out what, exactly, that means.  I live in an attic with a wonderful man in the great city of Boston, and I know some wonderful people, and I've experienced some extraordinary things.  I'm funny when you catch me out of print, and I'm genuinely happy.  I just spent a fantastic weekend on the Harbor Islands, playing volleyball in the dirt till I looked like my native roots.  I find great value in my faith, and I want to write about that, but I'm tired of Christian apologetics and aware that I can err on the side of dogmatic in text.  And I hate -- hate! -- dogma.  I'm currently wondering whether people who find it hard to believe in the presence of God believe still in Sin -- and when I say that, I mean the kind of institutional selfishness that lets over half a world live in poverty and grows corn that can't be eaten, never mind the famines raging.  I tend to preach.  I listen to my own sermons.  I get emotional when I don't understand things or am not naturally good at something.  I'm not always nice, and I've abandoned some of my friends when they needed me most.  The opposite is also true.  Fortunately for all of us, I often think, there's Grace.  We may be moving from our current church because of their stance on women.  Then again, we may stick it out and cause a ruckus.  I am notorious for drinking half a beer and getting bored with it, but I can handle a bottle of tequila.  I'm not reading enough and I'm not writing enough, and I'm overdue on my thank-you notes.  I sing a lot -- out loud, to other people, to myself.  My house is halfway unpacked.  It's six o'clock on Thursday evening, and I'm still in my pajamas.  The Oreos are gone.  I feel a move across the ocean or to another coast is on my horizon.  I'm not sure how I feel about that or what it will look like.  I need a new book to read.  I miss my piano.  And that cardio ain't kicking itself.

So, friends, to sum it all up: I'm rethinking this blog.  I am not sure what its future is, though it has one.  We've been talking about using it differently than as a dumping ground for half of my feelings -- perhaps writing together on life in Boston, on marriage, on going green slowly but surely, on our kitchen mishaps with all our new toys.  (Seriously, one a week!)  But the intensity of the past few months, and how I reacted to them (or failed to) on this blog, illustrate to me that it essentially isn't serving any real purpose for me.  I would love for that to change.  I would love for it to feel all shiny and new.  As we think about that, I have to admit I keep this link open more out of my own curiosity than anybody else's.  It seems to me that the things I have to say belong in other places, either squirreled away in journals only my children see or out in a different kind of open. Unfortunately, I'm kind of all-or-nothing -- and since this little experiment isn't getting my all at the moment, you know which camp it lands in. 

Till then.