SortaCrunchy

the stuff of dreams

At some point when time and I have made amends, I will say something much more elaborate in the way of introducing you to one of my oldest and dearest friends, laura.  She has just in the past few weeks rolled out her darling blog - one that I have long been anticipating. 

In the meantime, you simply must go over and read her account (weddings aren't for wussies) of a recent wedding, um, experience, that is so surreal it feels like a crazy midsummer dream that causes you to mumble that was weird before you shrug and start to shake off the swirling images of bizarre scenarios that are quite certainly are a little too fantastic for reality.   

It adds a whole new dimension to the coverage of the fires at Big Sur, to be sure. 

(oh, go ahead and sneak some peeks are the cards.  they are fabulous.)

Barefoot and Knee-Deep in the Quotidian

It is unusal, isn't it?  To not hear from me, the girl who can stretch one thought into sentence after sentence of unnecessary explication.  Thank you so much, so very much, for the thoughtful comments and emails, checking up on in me in my silence here.

Here's the deal: My husband, bless his heart, is engulfed in studying (a better word would be cramming) for the Series 7 exam which he takes at the end of July.  There is but one computer to be accessed here at my in-laws and it lives in the same office where he is holed up studying for no less than ten hours a day.  It is not at all unusual for him to start his studies as I am getting the girls up, dressed, and fed and to end the day long after I have retired to bed.  He takes short study breaks here and there, but I am unwilling to trade time online for time with him, so my time at the keyboard is basically nonexistent. 

At first, this caused me a great deal of irritation and angst.  As day after day without email, blog reading and blog writing, and message board surfing passed, a disturbing amount of bitterness began to take root.  Thankfully the Lord caught hold of this attitude in my heart and I found it so simple and liberating to let go of expectations unfulfilled.

Indeed, God has already graciously annointed this summer, but I didn't recognize it until we had arrived here and settled into what would become our daily routines.  He had abundantly and in advace filled my book list with all kinds of works I have long been anticipating having time to read.  Among the most challenging, provoking, and powerful are Brennen Manning's Ruthless Trust (which is serving to complete upend and shockingly rework my thoughts on the experience of Christ and the unthinkable accessibility we have through Him to the kabod Yahweh) and Kathleen Norris's The Quotidian Mysteries (which has served to unlock within me an authentic, worshipful appreciation for His presence in the everyday).  (Gratitude is due to Laura and her own Quotidian Mysteries for introducing me to this short but mighty work.)

So.  We've been spending a lot of time outside, building squirrel houses a la' The Creative Family, and investigating bugs (so many bugs) and gnawing on sticks (mostly just AJ does that). 

Truth be told, I am kind of lonely.  I am without community in every sense of the word for the time being, but this involuntary fasting is starving out of me some issues that I am seeing in a new light.  Oh, things like a growing dependence on the applause of man, an unhealthy need to make a name for myself, and a shocking amount of mindlessness and disconnect for the glorious moments of day-to-day life.  Yeah, just some ugly stuff like that.

Just about out of time here, but I just have to share this short passage from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Aurora Leigh," lines I keep going back to as a sort of daily mantra and challenge:

. . . Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries

(Comments closed in hopes that a few extra minutes not spent here will provide a little extra time for taking off your shoes and drawing near to hear what He might be saying to you in the midst of the quotidian today . . .)

this is just to say

We made it . . . we're here.  Have been, in fact, since Monday night, but the magnitude of the chaos has allowed precious little time at the computer.

I forgot how much I love Braums, horses grazing pastures, and the blessed freedom from fire ants.

I forgot how much I hate red dirt, marathon severe weather warnings, and the ferocity with which the wind comes sweeping down the plain.

I am weary of boxes. 

I am ready for a regular routine.

*********************************************************************************

OH!  Before I forget . . . if you have about one minute  (maybe less), and if you are a parent who has shared sleep with your children, would you mind to stop by the co-sleeping survey?  Let's do stand up and be counted and make known that co-sleeping is a safe, nurturing, helpful parenting practice which more and more parents are choosing, even if we aren't all talking about it.

Push Pause

The moving truck is in the driveway, slowly but surely filling with boxes of stuff. 

(We have realized we have so fallen short of our vision of a simpler, less-stuff lifestyle.  Nothing like boxing it all up to get a good grasp on how much stuff you have!  Much reevaluation to do when we land in our permanent place.)

Anyway, thanks so much for your amazing feedback, thoughts, and prayers.  I hate not being able to respond individually to each of you; thank you for bearing with me.

We roll out Monday morning, and I look forward to seeing everyone around sometime later in June!

Blessings to you all!

Gratitude for this Room of Grace

The part of me that is vibrating with excitement about our move and this new chapter of life is most certainly eclipsed these days by the part of me that is heavy with mourning.  I really do miss this hill country town already.  I look harder and longer at the streets and faces and houses every day, trying to cement in my mind the images of this place I was, at first, hesitant to embrace and that I now know can never be replaced.

More than the gentle slopes of the landscape, more than the river and the queso and the music and the history . . . more than any of that, I will miss my community of friends the most.

And so what follows is a love letter to the hot mamas who have come along side me to inspire, nurture, encourage, and love me in the too-short time we were planted here:

Dear friends of the Community Prayer Coffee,

How could I ever begin to put words to what you mean to me?  There is no doubt in my mind that when we weren't able to buy that little house with the white picket fence in that town down the road, it was because God had already laid the foundation for a house of love and laughter for me right here.

That first Girls' Night Out when two of you stepped forward with an invitation to join you, I was cautious.  I had already invested so much energy into guarding myself.  We never really intended to be here for more than a season or two, and many years of uprooting and relocating had built up gnarled scar tissue in my heart.  Careful though I was, your warmth was irresistible.

The four of us gathered around the table at Melissa's house, and I discovered an openness, a distinctive authenticity among you three that I had never experienced before.  I wasn't ready to let my guard down yet, but I did begin to think that maybe someday, I could. 

Not too terribly long after that, Dacey was born and ya'll showed up to minister to me with abounding love and support.  Delivered meals and deliberate phone calls and taking time to look me in the eye and ask how I was really doing.  My heart is so full when I think back on those days.

When the new baby/new mama fog finally lifted two months later and I returned to our prayer coffee group, I was delighted and amazed by the growth.  No longer would we fit around one table at anyone's house, and God provided a pool table and an unshakable hostess who never flinched in the face of opening up her home to the masses (and grubby fingers and contagious grins of all of our children). 

It was there, in our own little upper room, that God unfolded for me a beauty that is unequal to any I've ever beheld.  It was there I learned what it is to be TrueFaced for it was there, in that room of grace, I knew I could finally take off my mask.  I learned from you what it is to be bold, to be risky, to not settle for the surface, to engage in the deep.  In the gatherings in that room, the hardest of secrets could be spoken out loud and whispers of dreams were finally given a voice.

In the spring and summer of two years ago, when the end of my parents' marriage brought me to my knees in despair, when I walked through the darkest valley of grief and loss, your tearful prayers over me were a balm to my seared and broken soul.  And when you showered our family before AJ's arrival, my spirit soared in the glow of such generosity.

You've taught me about showing up and following through, about taking it in and working it out, about boundless grace and unyielding mercy and immeasurable love.  Even now, in the midst of boxes that signal another uprooting, I wonder over the unstoppable munificence of this community who would step up to serve me even as I am in the process of being pried away.

But because of you, my sweetest friends, that old scar tissue has long since been cut away.  In its place there is a tenderness, a vulnerability, a willingness that I surely never would have known were it not for your work in my life.  This leaving is wretchedly painful, but I know you send me forth with prayers of healing and renewal.

Thank you for being the gift that you are to me, to this community, and to the Body. 

Tidying Up

From nine in the morning to nine at night, yesterday was a wonderful day of fellowship and fun with friends.  Fun!  So I didn't have a chance to mention that Part One of Two in the Karen's Nip Cancer in the Bud series is now up!  Go by and check out these helpful and informative insights in cancer prevention.

One of the few things I enjoy about packing for a move is the opportunity to sort through stuff and simplify.  I'm on a mission to "Simplify or Die" (as the bumper stickers I have seen around town so gently suggest (which are, by the way, especially effective when slapped on the back of a monstrous SUV)), and I am using the guidelines set forth by Amanda Blake Soule (also known as SouleMama) in The Creative Family (more on this later).

(I like parentheses.  What of it?)

I would also like to do some simplifying and tidying up around here, and I would like to start with the blogroll.  If you have minute, can you help me with this?

If you are on the blogroll and would like to stay, please email or leave me a comment on this post.

If you have been hanging around here a while and are not on the blogroll but would like to be, please email or leave me a comment on this post (and please don't be shy or feel awkward about it!  I sometimes just lose track of updating and I would hate to leave you out!)

If you are on the blogroll and would like to be removed (for whatever reason, you need not explain) please email or leave me a comment on this post.

I'll make the changes on or around Thursday, May 29th. 

And some of you are staying on the blogroll whether you want to be on there or not!  (muhahaha)

Wow.  I think I have just exceeded the number of times any blogger should use the word blogroll in an entire year.  But it's got me thinking - what do you think about blogrolls?  Do you actually look at the links a blogger lists?  Are they becoming trite, passe', a thing of the past?

Shift

Today I want to share with you The Really Big Thing.  Let's just get it out of the way that, no, I am not pregnant.  I realize in reading back that maybe the way I've talked about this thing, it would be easy to read that into this.

The Really Big Thing is that our family is on the cusp of a paradigm shift that is at once entirely surprising and yet completely expected: we've decided that the time has come for us to leave coaching.

This conclusion began processing last January, and we've spent so much time since then walking back and forth with our thoughts.  Projecting trajectories.  Envisioning outcomes.  Skipping ahead to the last page.

I love this perspective on paradigm shift from taketheleap.org that states

It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis.  It just does not happen, but rather it is driven by agents of change.

Our agents of change?  Observe exhibits A and D:

(gosh, they have changed so much since the end of last December!) 

We are hoping someday God will invite us to once again co-create with Him, and that we'll get to add a little exhibit B ("B" is for blue, right?) and maybe even an exhibit C to the mix.  And the thing about the coaching business (and, oh, it is a business to be sure) is that it is just relentless in its demands for time. 

But we've had fun - so much fun! - in our years in coaching.  From 0-10 seasons (yes, more than one) to weeks soaring through the Division I Top 25, we've experienced it all.  Conference cellar-dwellers and conference champs.  I hold close to my heart my memories of a bowl game in Memphis that allowed me to experience Graceland and Beale Street and the waddling ducks of the Peabody Hotel.  If it weren't for traveling with The Coach and the team, I am sure I would have never seen the Chicago skyline gleaming in mid-September sun, nor would I have gotten to saunter through the French Quarter, nibbling a beignet and breathing in New Orleans in all its pre-Katrina glory.

But my husband, The Coach, sees the mind-boggling rate at which our girls are growing and changing, and he just can't sign on for missing anymore of these precious and brief years we get to have them here at home.  We are leaving coaching so that he can begin a career as a financial analyst with a well-known and much-respected nationwide investment firm, and he embarks into this new career in just under three weeks.

In the explanation of paradigm shift above, it mentions metamorphosis.  That's what this feels like to us.  It reminds me of a favorite selection of mine from Trina Paulus's Hope for the Flowers: 

"How does one become a butterfly?" she asked pensively.
"You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar."

In my mind's eye, I see our little family starting out ten years ago when we got married.  Everything about us was little bitty, just like the caterpillar who springs forth on the leaf.  As we partook of all that life offered to us, we swelled with growth.  Three years ago, we expanded from two to three, and we grew again when this sweet baby arrived last September.

And now feels like a good time to wrap ourselves in a cocoon of transformation.  Gone will be the notoriety and notability, the fame and infamy, that has marked so much of our identity for the past decade as we look towards a path that is both more stable and yet infinitely more scary than the path from which we thought we would never stray.

In addition to this change in career, we are also leaving behind this community in this state that we have grown to love so much.  We are being shepherded home, back to Oklahoma, the state where neither of us were born but both of us were raised.  Back to parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins and high school friends and college friends and peaches and lakes and Indian tacos and grassy plains that stretch on for miles.

The cocoon that invites us to this change will be, in the beginning, a quite literal one as we will be living with Kyle's parents for the rest of the summer while my husband studies and trains.  The same home where he knelt and proposed to me is the same home that will house us until we are ready to launch forth, unfurl our wings, and live life in an altogether different incarnation than we ever thought we'd be.

Bittersweet?  Absolutely.  My heart aches for the life we are leaving behind.  I miss it already. 

In the meantime, just know that life in this house is chaotic beyond words.  Piles and stacks and lists and boxes abound.  My time online in the coming days, weeks, and months will be sketchy, at best.  I do so love engaging in conversation through emailed replies to comments, but that is probably not going to be happening for a little while.  A measure of grace is my small request.

Thanks for letting me pour out my heart.  There's more, but for now, I feel better having said this.

That's The Really Big Thing.

Forward with Gratitude

Ever-inspired by the gratitude for all gifts - great and small - that flows freely at Holy Experience, I must add more to my list:

8. late morning picnic in the shade of our front porch, pink and white striped beach towel spread across the cool concrete, juice and pretzels and raisins for the feasting while butterflies pursue one another amidst the late spring blooms

9. stepping out the front door, garbage bag in hand, stopped in my tracks on the way to the dumpster by a deer stopped in her tracks in the front yard.  simple, quiet, sleek elegance, and in a flash she is gone

10.  Patty Griffin's "Mary"

11.  the emergence of Daddy's Girl.  All day long, it's I can't wait to tell Daddy about . . . and the moment he walks through the door, she all but forgets the one who grew her to fruition.  After three years of intense attachment, I could not be more grateful, or more delighted.

12. opening a package that bursts with music, hand-picked and thoughtfully selected just for me by a dear friend who has known me long enough to know me, and loves me anyway.  also in the package - a book which speaks to my heart and affirms this gratitude journey.  thank you again, sweet friend.

13. Ma-ma.

14.  Camera and lens repair shops. 

15. this promise:  If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him.  (James 1:5, NIV)  Oh thank You, thank You, thank You, Lord God, for your abundant, generous, vast, perfect wisdom.

More to come.

Week in Review, mid-May

So many things to share . . . where to start?

You know how if you live in a smallish town or a smallish community within a big town, you find yourself running into the same person over and over again in various scenarios?  Like, you saw her and her kids one morning during Open Gym at the gymnastics gym, and then you noticed her at the library the next week?  And then you see her and her kiddos at the toddler park and then you see them the next day at the grocery store?  And then it gets kind of awkward because you kind of smile and are cordial but you've never introduced yourselves?

That's how I've felt about Kelly at Love Well for a while now.  She and I run around in the same bloggy circles, as I know I've seen her at Missy's place, and for sure at Elle's, and other places, too (Coulda' Been Worse, perhaps?).  Anyway, finally, I went on over to her place and sorta introduced myself, and I am so glad I did. Kelly is just so neat!  And she is way cooler than I am in that she let her husband hijack her blog last week to write this timely and important post on The Art and Heart of Giving.  Make sure you take a minute or two to read this insightful guidance from someone who is definitely in the know.

You may have noticed the new button on my sidebar directing you to Karen's Simply . . . Amusing Blog.  Karen is doing a special and important series titled "Nip Cancer in the Bud with Early Detection."  If you have questions about cancer and cancer screenings, please go by and find out how you can get those questions answered by some Texas oncologists who have committed some time and energy to further spreading the word on the importance of early detection!

Completely switching gears, my friend Laura has set me up for a world of hurt by introducing me to Velvet Lava.  My entryway into this devilishly delightful homage to all things baked (complete with just lovely photography) was this utterly ridiculous Red Velvet Cake post.  Truly, there should be law against such things as this.  I was going to try it out this weekend, but tragically, I have run out of time.  I'll get you, my pretty, someday . . .

Let's see, what else?

Oh yes!  I was delighted to see that Simple Mom has chosen Rachel's Small Notebook as the first ever recipient of her Shoe of Simplicity spotlight.  I've been convinced Small Notebook is the Best Blog You're Not Reading, and I am just thrilled to see her get this attention! 

Speaking of Simple Mom - oy!  I just love her.  She posts the BEST stuff.  I emailed her last week to ask how she went about finding all those fabuloso Flickr images for her posts, and she kindly and promptly emailed me with the link to this article: A Complete Guide To Finding and Using Incredible Flickr Images.  Yahtzee!  Had to pass that along.

There's more, but now I've run out of time and D is about to go out of her mind begging me and Daddy to play a little game of freeze tag, so off I go.

Stay tuned this week as I share something really big happening in the lives of our little family.

Warm Biscuit Bedding Winner!

Thanks to all who entered the Warm Biscuit Bedding Company gift certificate giveaway.  The lucky winner is Farrah of Baby Love Slings!  Congrats, mama! 

And a HUGE thank you to Warm Biscuit Bedding for sponsoring such a generous giveaway for my amazing friends and readers.  I hope you all found some really cute things there that you just can't live without!