Morning ritual

My partner has been home the last few days completely throwing off my morning ritual. One thing I still maintain is my love affair with Giuseppe (the espresso machine). We have these lovely moments together in the morning that I like. To meditating. Everything g else goes away and it is just me, him, the new Starbucks bean (one of the few I like from Starbucks), my vanilla stevia and hard to see hut very important is my tiny spoon I took as a souvenir from our UK office (in fairness the waiter there gave it to me because I loved that spoon so much). These are some oft favorite moments in the day. The smell if the coffee and the anticipation of what the day might bring.


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Need a theme

I read something today that I really liked and am going to mimic. I read a blog from a jewelry designer that talked about choosing a word or phrase every year instead of a resolution. You put that word/phrase where you see it every day and in the morning you look at it and remind yourself to make decisions that support it. I love this...except now I needy word/phrase. I know what I want to get out if this year but I have no idea how to sum it up simply, small enough to fit on a pendant or even a sticky note. My thoughts so far are:

live out loud

love thyself as you love thy neighbor

Yes that may be a tad sacrilegious but if you know me you know I extend much more kindness to others than I do to myself.

I am enough

Ok. I had a few more but I left my sticky downstairs and my girlfriend is insisting I cuddle because she is an iceberg.


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Coming back to life

Pictured...Baha'i temple in Evanston, IL

I'm slowly starting to recover from last year's madness. The theme of last year was:
1 - I hated my job
2 - I worked too much
3 - There was too much drama at work
4 - I had no personal time and was burning out
5 - I travelled too much
6 - I hated my job (I may have mentioned that

I've stopped and started writing, bloggin and taking pictures off and on for...well forever. So now I feel like I'm coming out of last year and getting back in touch with myself. I'm reading more, I'm listening to jazz, I'm enjoying this diet I'm on (see my other blog), I've taken a few pictures and am enrolled for a class...all the things that mean I'm coming back from the year I had and returning to life. I had no life last year and I felt it aging me...sucking the joy out of me...eating at my soul and my happy inner self.

So now I've started missing what my friends and I call the "woo-woo." It's the things that are a little weird to those who don't share the "goddess in me goddess in the tree" spirit...I have to admit I'm somewhere in both categories...I live in between the woo woo and the analytic...but that's another blog.

So...now I'm contemplating taking my tingy, barely read blog and seeing if I finally have something to say that is perhaps for more mass consumption. But honestly I don't know where to start. How do you make your blog known? How do you get followers outside of your direct circle of friends? I am sure I could google it, Bing it, Facebook it...do all those non-verb-verby things that everyone does but I'd really just like to come up with it organically.

I was on the plane on the way home from my work trip to CA and had a little conversation with God about writing...and I felt like He told me that I have something to say and I should just start writing. But what? A book? A blog? A letter? What do I write? I swear I heard God snicker a little knowing I'd have to figure that one out on my own. I love Him but sometimes he is a shifty little bugger.

So what do I need? A website? Knowledge of how to make a website? A muse? A subject? A clue? Man, I am wearing out the poor question mark key right now!!!

More to come, I'm sure.

Happy Birthday to ME!

Trying to save money for our upcoming move to Colorado (Octoberish) so not buying myself the normal ridiculous birthday gift I usually indulge in. But my lovely, wonderful, thoughtful partner gave me what I wanted most (besides unconditional love and acceptance...yeah yeah besides that)...my photography class! Seven weeks to start. I'm so excited. I'm pinging off the walls! ping! ping! pingpingpingpingping!!!!

Tick Tock Tick Tock

I'm afraid that very soon the subtle, quiet, easily ignored ticking of my biological clock will start sounding less like a small bedside clock to a tower clock and bell worthy of any good Catholic church! I am scared and excited about the day that the alarm bells sound and I have an answer to this question: Do I want Child/ren?

So many questions:

1. Do I want Child/ren?


2. If yes, do I want to be pregnant (at almost 38 years old) or do I want to adopt?


3. If pregnant do I want to have a known or anonymous donor?


4. If adopt do I want to adopt a baby or an older child?


5. Foreign or domestic?


6. Agency or lawyer

OK, i can't keep typing all the questions...let's just stop at 6. My partner isn't insistent on having children but if I say "yes" she would go for this in a heartbeat. I have two things that confuse me about the issue of children:

First, from a very early age I was told I could not have children and if I did ever get pregnant I wouldn't carry to term. Turns out my damaged ovaries and uterus healed themselves...so I'm not sure if I think I don't want kids because I trained myself to think that knowing I couldn't or if I genuinely don't want to raise children.

That leads second: when I was 22 I got pregnant. I was engaged at the time and realized I couldn't marry him, couldn't live in that town, wasn't at all prepared to raise a child the way they deserved to be raised...so I had the baby, got to choose the adoptive parents and we now have an open adoption. He is a great young man and I don't know what me having more children...with a "partner" no less...would do to him. I spent a long time keeping myself a mess so that he never had to wonder why I placed him for adoption but by now I am ready to shed the mess and have a full, rich, well-deserved life.

It's hard to picture my life either way. It is hard to picture my life as I'm older with no grandchildren to spoil and no one to treasure the things inherited from my mother, grandmother, great grandmother, etc. It is hard to picture my life now with children with less flexibility, less sleep, less money, less freedom, more noise...

Shouldn't a person know for certain? Is the fact that I'm not sure a bad sign or is it just that this is how I am - never sure of what I want to be when I grow up and so I float along until I bump in to something and say, "well look at this - I think I'll do this for a while." But I'm probably not going to bump in to a baby...so I should make a decision.

I also need to go and visit the fruit of my womb soon. I do miss him and want to have a closer relationship with him. I was talking about some of this with his Mom and told them my mother's concern about what happens to our treasures after I did since I don't have children to which he replies, "you have me." How that touched my heart to know that he thinks of himself as mine. It's true though; I'm not his Mom, I won't ever try to take her wonderful place but he is still a part of me...really he is "ours." How lucky is he to have two loving parents and two others, involved in his life, that he knows he "belongs" to us all. That's amazingly special. Below is a picture of my now 15 year old birthson. :)

Betty Kay

My friend's Mom passed away on New Year's Eve. Her mass is tomorrow and I'm having trouble sleeping. My partner lost her mother two years ago and it has been such a hard road to the little bits of healing she's experienced. It will be hard for my friend as well and my heart breaks thinking how much her heart hurts right now...how close she and her Mom were and how my friend's life is forever changed. She's one of the kindest people I know - she has such a good and pure heart and I can't imagine how it is breaking now. I'm sure there is a part that is glad her Mom isn't suffering and in pain but just a few short months ago she was fine and now she is gone and it is just so sad to think of this world without her. She was a force of life and the only good thing that can come out of this is that heaven has one heck of a party planning, firey red-headed, loving, laughing, open-hearted lady up there making everyone as happy up there as she did down here. Pray for my friend if you pray...or send good thoughts...or whatever it is that you do with good intentions...OH!...and if you haven't lately - call your Mother and tell her how very much you love her...even if she drives you insane...do it...while you can.

Where is home?

I'm back in my blog which can only mean one thing: I'm restless. I'm thinking too much. I'm feeling too much. I'm overwhelmed with something and I don't yet know what it is. I so want to identify it - name it - put it in a box and control it - but I can't. It kept me up last night until 2:30AM - it kept me pacing around the house talking to myself - talking to the floor and the walls and the couch and the blanket - asking these things why they contain me - why they hold me here - if here is where I should be - if this is where I belong - and most importantly do I belong anywhere?

I remember sitting at the lunch table in middle school thinking that I didn't belong and no one liked me - here I am 25 years later and I still feel like that kid at the lunch table looking around at all the other kids wondering if I'm the only one that feels this way. I can't put my finger on it. I don't know what it is that causes this feeling but I want it to go back in to its murky darkness.

I'd like to run away for a few months and see if in running I can't find some answers - but where would I go? Wherever I go I take myself and that's really what I need a break from last night. I was in all the places I've lived for any significant amount of time in one week and it has me reeling. I grew up in California and I love it there - I love the mountains and the trees and the golden poppies - but it isn't home anymore. I was in Dallas for a friend's birthday and I don't like it there yet I sat across from three very dear friends and had a real conversation with them about real things and as much as I don't love it in Texas I felt me and real and seen and heard and loved - but it isn't home either. Then I came back to my current residence in Chicago and I love it here too. I love the lake and the changing seasons and the politics and the acceptance - but it's a lonely place - people here are busy and hurried and I am busy and hurried and I work and worry too much and my partner and I have very few moments these days where we sit across the table and don't just look at each other - we SEE each other. Yet I am seen in this place. I am in a relationship for the first time in my entire life where someone has seen me for exactly who I am - the good, the bad, the really bad and the divine - where they have seen all of that and they like and love me for it all - not in spite of it but for it.

So where is home? Is home where my partner is? Is home where my friends are? Is home where my parents are? Will I ever have a home if I don't learn to be my own safe haven? Will I ever have a home if I don't first befriend myself? Will I ever have a home if I don't take care of my health and my happiness? I know the answer. Right now I have no home because I don't fully dwell in myself.

I can't take a page out of Eat, Pray, Love and go find myself in beautiful exotic places and in the end fall in love and have an exciting romance. I have a job and responsibilities and a relationship that I cherish and so I need to find a way to have that experience here, in my office or in my living room or while taking a picture. I do need an Eat, Pray, Love moment but the food that I eat needs to be nourishment of my soul and esteem for myself and not more pasta...the prayer that I pray needs to be for shedding the things I don't need rather than finding more and the love that I find has to be for myself and my value and not for another (I have that already).

Writing it is the easy part. Now I have to figure out how to do it. I have to figure out how not to have this same type of post the next time I sit down at the computer to spill my overflowing thoughts...I don't want to bore myself and anyone reading with the same questions year after year after year...

This is something I can say from the bottom of my heart - and it seems appropriate since it just became Thanksgiving day a few minutes ago - I am grateful. I am so very grateful. I have this heaviness I carry around inside me and I'm not my own best cheerleader but I am blessed and I am aware of how blessed I am every day. I am gainfully employed and loved by a wonderful human and have a few good friends in this world that love me very much. I am blessed. I am loved and I do deserve that love. Now I need a home.