Pick Slow

The end of the school year rolls in like a freight train making an abrupt stop.  The high pitched screech of metal on metal, passengers thrust forward from the sudden shift.

I catch my breath and the silence is shocking.  The train is at a dead stop now, the blurred lines of the moving plains now a still field.

All that work to desperately reach my destination, but now we're here and the silence is deafening.  I look around wondering how to get moving again, what to put in place to fill the silence.

But I hear the invitation.

Sit.  slow.  quiet.

I don't want quiet.  I want significance, meaning, activity.   Fulfillment.  A facebook worthy life.

Get off the damn facebook and live your own life, not someone else's.  And live slow.

Live slow.  Live slow.
But slow sounds lonely.  And lonely is my worst nightmare.

Live slow.  Say no to tennis lessons next week.  It doesn't matter that boy-in-class or kid-on-facebook is signed up for 15 camps and private lessons and things to make him wonder child.  You, pick slow. You pick slow enough to get to the afternoon and to be able to say "does anyone want to go to the library?"  And when everyone says yes, you pick slow and meander to the library.  You live slow enough that after strawberry picking you can make your favorite homemade waffles and slather them with strawberries and eat them in the middle of the afternoon with no worries if the dinner schedule gets pushed back.  You live slow enough that when you hear of the mom in need you can go pick up her laundry and help a friend.  You live laying in the sunshine on a towel in the middle of your yard, cuddling up with your boys at bedtime, and reading through a novel together.  Live slow.  It's what you yearned for and desired the whole speeding train ride here, and now that it's arrived, don't throw it away in hopes of some illusion of what fast brings.  You, pick slow.

Fighting My Way Through

Spring broke through this weekend in an act of triumph, after long weeks of a tug of war with winter. I expected the gray of my insides to be swept away in lockstep with the gray clouds, but the inner clouds still hang, staking their claim.   A year ago January this blog died when my insides clouded gray, brought in by mostly pregnancy hormones, along with a small list of other more minor offenses.  Unlike a year, spring (along with a second trimester in last year's case) does not find me blowing kisses to the wind and goodbyes to the gray.  The gray is staying put.  

"Write your way through it" I've heard in the whispers of the quiet many times over.  I've fallen asleep to the whispers, literally and figuratively.  Tonight I pick up the keyboard and type.  

My "ways through it" have varied from light boxes to exercise groups to caffeine to new vitamins, to name a few.  Sleeves of cookies have been devoured when all else fails.  My lenten devotionals offer words of encouragement, but still, the gray hangs.

Can I hammer out the gray with gratitude?  Will written words of gratitude pile up enough weight to overtake the daunting clouds?  Is the solution too simple?  

What is it I risk to lose?   I herby threaten the gray to a dual of words.  

My sixth month old's dance when she hears a songs, slipping on flip flops for the first time in months, filling perfect temperature bathwater for my delightfully muddy 5 year old.

Take that, take that, take that.

Grace when it's the last thing I deserve, the love of my mom when I'm tired and crabby, the promise of Easter that outlasts the holiday.

Zoom. Bang. Pow.  (spoken while imagining the superhero jump kick my boys and I will make while we fight off the bad guys)

A new corner lamp that pulls soft light into the room, the jumperoo that provides hours of entertainment for the jumper and those watching, the old worn couch that has been a soft spot to land for many long years.  

The words come more slowly than I hoped.  I choose gratitude, fight for gratitude.  And I think I know what He invited me to write my way through it.  Much work awaits me.