Archive
My first ever blog award!!
Yes, Gentle Readers, I will confess that I am very excited (and not a little flattered) that Purple Dreamer has recognized me with my very first ever blog award, the Wonderful Team Member Readership Award. First, I would like to say thank you to Purple Dreamer for being so gracious as to bestow upon me this honor as I feel like her contribution here has far outweighed mine on her blog, so now I am doubly in her debt. Secondly, there are requirements for the award, which I fulfill below.
The Rules
1. The Nominee of the Wonderful Team Member Readership Award will display the logo on his/her post/page and/or sidebar. – Look just above. 😀 Continue Reading
A Blog I Think You’d Like
A dear friend of mine, who is also healing from childhood trauma, has recently opened her blog for public viewing. She works through her feelings and processes her healing by painting. She is an incredible artist and her paintings are both very beautiful and very powerful. They reach inside me to those places where words fail; where we must reach for art to express the inexpressible. I’m thrilled she’s sharing them. I also love that she shares brief thoughts on the meaning of the paintings, what inspired them or what she is struggling to learn. Go take a look, you’ll be inspired. (The blog is also in my blogroll.)
I could learn a lot about brevity from her. 🙂
Keeping Our Hearts Safe
This is a favorite quote of mine from CS Lewis, one of my favorite authors. Most people know him as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, but he was a leading Christian intellectual of the 20th century with a number of excellent books on and in defense of the Christian faith. I am a very big fan of The Four Loves and the Great Divorce, although anything he has written is worth your time. He also has a wonderful adult novel based on the myth of Psyche called ‘Til We Have Faces, that I return to again and again.
The reason I love this quote is that it is a reminder that life and living will sometimes involve pain, but the price of not experiencing that pain is too high to pay. Besides, I tried it for a number of years and it really didn’t work out. This quote provides me with the necessary courage to risk that hurt in order to live more fully. I hope it can help you as well.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket–safe, dark, motionless, airless–it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to risk of tragedy, is damnation.
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
Forgot How Good This Was
I had my Ipod on “shuffle all” which I do occasionally when I can’t decide what I’m in the mood for. I have wildly eclectic taste in music (some people have implied it gives them whiplash :D) so when I do this I have no idea what will turn up. One of the reasons I like to do it. The other reason is that once in a while, something you REALLY love, but haven’t heard in a long time, pops up. That happened this morning. And it’s so good I wanted to share it. I hope you enjoy it as much I do. 🙂
Baz Luhrman’s Everyone’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)
Favorite lines: “You’re not as fat as you imagine” and “you’ll miss them when they’re gone.” 🙂
Shackles
Greetings gentle readers. I have returned safely from a wonderful, refreshing vacation, but re-entry was a bit bumpy. 🙂 We brought back a stomach virus, to which I added some asthma and sinus problems, so I’m sloooooowwwwly getting back into a normal rhythm. It was really nice to be away, but it’s also really nice to be back. 🙂
I wanted to share with you an analogy about healing that I thought many people might find helpful (h/t to Blackbird as it was during a discussion with her on psychcafe that I first came up with this one :)). When I first started seeing BN, the prism through which I saw myself was one of pathology. That I had been injured and damaged by the abuse and I needed to be “fixed.” One of the greatest gifts that BN has given me (which is saying a lot as the list is quite long) was instead seeing my struggles as development gone awry. That there was nothing fundamentally “broken” or “wrong” about me. I just had not gotten what I needed or been taught what I needed to know. That anyone who had endured what I did would have similar struggles with similar issues; my reactions were reasonable, it was the circumstances that produced them that were unreasonable. Continue Reading
Come Closer by Anis Mojani
Another amazing poem by Anis Mojani. I love his metaphors; they just resonate so powerfully with me. This was the opening to TWOLHA‘s HEAVY and LIGHT event this year in Orlando. I hope you find it as powerful as I did.
Anis Mojani performs “Come Closer” at HEAVY and LIGHT
I especially loved “what beautiful battlefields you are” since it has been such a fight to be able to live my life fully. I loved even more the idea that we need to dance our way back to God.
And he said something I want to say to all of you: “I am like you, I am like you, I too, at times, am filled with so much fear” followed by “walk through this with me, walk through this with me.” We do not travel alone and therein lies our hope and strength.
Tales of a Boundary Ninja 
Recent Comments