Not So Grounded

"What is God?" this early in the morning ...?

My Dad, an Episcopal priest, is performing our upcoming wedding ceremony.  It's all kind of a big deal 'cause I declared myself agnostic at age 14 and haven't had much to do with church ever since.  And 'cause my first marriage took place at the York County, SC courthouse, no relatives in sight.  Now understand, the whole wedding is making my family laugh to begin with:  tons of people, country club reception with an honest-to-goodness wedding band (the Fabulous Kays) and uniformed waiters, dresses ordered months in advance ... but one cousin said if the communion wafers came out she'd just know the real me had been abducted by aliens and she would just have to leave. 

But I'm having way more fun designing the ceremony than I ever thought possible.  The consummate project manager, I, of course, delegated task coordination to two dear friends perfectly suited for the task.  And they diligently compiled sample welcomes, vows, homilies, and poetry for our perusal.  (Our family's 16 year old friend subsequently found the first poem I'm definately using, e.e.cummings.)

The most fun is the exchange of ideas I'm sharing with my Dad ... about marriage, religion, spirituality, the nature of God ... Are we god-like or are we God?  Is marriage a divine gift offered by God in our effort to get closer to God's presence?  Or is it a human inspiration celebrating a human union with spiritual components?  What's the purpose of ritual in our human existence?  What's the purpose of religious ritual?

I haven't had these conversations with my Dad in ages & ages, maybe since I was 14.  He's a brilliant theologian, with a strong command of Christian history and the history of Christian thought.  And it's all a fun surprise side-effect of the whole getting-married thing.

Hiking With Elvis

Mother's Day, 5/11/07:  I snuck out of the house while my lovely family slept and hiked my favorite trail.  Locals call is Nowhere Mountain, although I think it's properly named Rich Mountain, part of the 3,516 acres donated to the National Park Service by Moses & Bertha Cone, surrounding the Blue Ridge Parkway near mileposts 292-295.  Darling Daughter and her friends hate the trail -- it's a 2-3 hour circumambulation, like a unidirectional labyrinth.  In other words, ya wind up for 3+ miles and then ya wind on back down along the same wide carriage trail.  No rock scrambling, no spooky caves, no creek beds or swimming holes.  Just steady moving.  With a beautiful view at the top. 

Elvis loved it, too. 

Sometimes inside ain't loud enough ...

I've been taking yoga with Joanne Williams for 7-8 years and every once in awhile she stops our movements and describes her type of practice and her teaching philosophy.  She's practices Kripalu yoga, her shorthand description is that it emphasizes compasion for oneself and humor.  Which she exhibits & models in bucketfuls.  She talked quite a bit yesterday, as the handful of us regulars in her morning class sat peacefully on her living room floor.  Her main intention, she stressed, was that we listen to our internal voice in our yoga practice, rather than her's and move in whatever ways we were internally guided.  (She's notorious for laughingly telling us we can ignore her instructions whenever we choose.)  Listen to ourselves, follow what our bodies and our internal voices were saying. 

A nice message, a nice reminder that I'm supposed to pay attention to myself.  And then I came home to find that John, my Lovely Man (who said he prefers his real name, although several other friends have requested they be described with all sorts of bizarre psyeudonyms ...) has pneumonia.  He'd been sick for over a week, willing himself better but not actually feeling better, getting up and going to work each day.  Evidently with pneumonia.  And I thought of Joanne's suggestion that we pay attention to what our bodies tell us.  Poor guy.  His body kept telling him to stop, louder & louder, until it banged him flat-out over the head.   It could've been me just as easily, but I lucked through my cold a little better.  We're all driven by our to-do lists to the point of exhaustion and disease.  I know this isn't a new story -- it happens to everyone, all the time.  But I got such a strong, clear message yesterday -- Joanne suggestion we stop and listen and poor John demonstrating what happens when we don't.   

Elizabeth Gilbert, Part 3

Iva, Liz, and me, in front of the Chocolate Fetish.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Part 2

Ever have one of those really cool, pretty much perfect days ...? Yesterday my Lovely Man & I made it to Asheville and Malaprops to hear Elizabeth Gilbert.  The Q&A was very cool -- she's bright & funny & engaging & down-to-earth.  She talked for a good while and signed a slew of books.

Then the day started to feel kinda magical.  I was initially tugged to Asheville from a quick, spontaneous email from my friend Iva.  Iva & Elizabeth Gilbert are close friends; she's even on page 31 in Eat Pray Love.  And Iva is magical in & of herself - just sitting in a bookstore cafe, Iva illuminates the whole place in a way that makes the air smile.  So we found Iva & sat down to yak.  (At which point in walks a dear friend neither Iva nor I have seen since last December, when he took off for New Zealand.  Just back from travelling, just in Asheville visiting his two kids, just happened to walk into the same bookstore  ... but that's kind of a different story.)

More yakking, our travelling friend leaves, Elizabeth Gilbert finishes signing books and then suddenly my Lovely Man, Iva, Elizabeth Gilbert (who's now just Liz), & I are sharing danish & Perrier, and talking about weddings and immigration law and new houses and how we ended up in various places. 

It's very weird to meet a best selling author I admire so much, especially since just last week I told a friend I wanted to meet her.  It's very weird to meet someone new about whom I've read so many intimate details.  To hear her life's next installments as if catching up with a dear friend, only to remember that I only know the prelude in the same way that every reader who has made the book a NY Times bestseller knows the prelude.  It's a bit surreal. 

But a good surreal.  A good weird.  The same surreal weirdness I sometimes feel when I steal a secret glimpse of my Lovely Man and remember less than six months ago we hadn't met.  The same odd feeling I have with my closest friends -- all of whom I felt connected to from the moment of our first introduction.   

I'm crazy enough, of course, to believe those sudden connections are significant, divine appointments that are best kept.  But I also believe the web, the internet, the Gutenberg press create relationships in ways that are, in fact, rich and meaningful, even if different from the relationships that enjoy physical proximity and many years.  Sure I loved reading Eat Pray Love because I learned so much from the author's experiences and insights.  But I also loved Eat Pray Love because I just really liked Elizabeth Gilbert, pretty much from the opening paragraph.  I kept thinking, damn, I bet she'd be a ton of fun to hang out with, as much fun as my Lovely Man and my friends. 

And she was.  And that we all hung out -- my Lovely Man, my dear friend Iva, and Liz the author whom I know mostly from reading her bestseller but now a friend, and me -- just felt like magic.

Elizabeth Gilbert

I just learned Elizabeth Gilbert will be at Asheville's Malaprops Bookstore today at 3:00, reading from her new book, NY Times bestseller, Eat Pray Love which I loved.  So I'm going, no lead time, no pre-arranged plans, with huge thanks to Debbie and Andy for picking up my Darling Daughter after she finishes the SAT.  My Lovely Man is coming along, who didn't need even so much as a second's worth of asking.

She's a wonderful, inspiring, honest, insightful, and funny author, who somehow can describe transcendance, conversations with God, masturbation, pizza, and a gut-wrenching divorce all in the same book, all with effortless flow, and all making perfect sense.

Lighten Up

I'm getting married.  August 5.  And I'm blaming my lack of consistent dedication to just about everything, including my new blog, on the wedding.  I used to actually think about stuff, learn, ponder, listen, do stuff that seemed externally important.  I was organized about it. 

Not so much at the moment.  I love my soon-to-be husband deeply, love his 9-year old son, who's sweet & funny & smart.  But last couple of weeks I've felt bogged down in brand new day-to-day logistics & home/family maintenance -- getting two children to school on time, homework, carpools, mounds of unfolded laundry, piles of Star Wars legos, Darling Daughter and her new driving permit, the typical flurry of Obligations that get dumped on a breathless May as if the world ends June 1.  The downside of family blending.  Not sure why I thought just the fun would feel exponentially bigger when the two of us grew to four ...

The Sweet Boy was home sick last 2 days, genuinely sick Wednesday, but so not sick by 10 Thursday (except maybe sick of 3rd grade) ... so we went hiking and he spent the rest of the day playing with his official Star Wars light sabers, then outside barking like the dogs (who were actually quiet for once, but god forbid the neighbors suffer even a moment's peace & quiet) and then drug them -- the dogs, not the neighbors -- through a muddy creek, which subsequently required a bath -- the dogs, not the boy -- and when Darling Daughter got home from school she found he'd pulled off her window screen and thrown her shoe out the window, which was now stuck in the gutter, in the rain ... (In all fairness, day before I'd instigated the whole screen-off-throw-things-out-the-window so we could see how they roll across the roof & fall to the patio and poor Sweet Boy tried to replicate it, but the shoe didn't roll and he threw the other items in frantic attempts to dislodge the shoe, before he ran from the room in a panic.)  Darling Daughter was spit-fire furious momentarily -- okay, a very long & loud moment.  But I started laughing and instantly the hard shell of the growing weight of Increased Adult Responsibilities all cracked away, revealing the soft, mushy, universe beneath.  It had always been there, wiggling & laughing like jello.  But worrying about dirty dishes & retaining my former illusion of external order had frozen the top.

Betty Friedan once said if you want a cleaner house install dimmer light bulbs ... and then get on with the fun of living.