Off to the Snow!

Just writing to say that I'll be out of town and out of blogging touch for a week. I'm off to the northwest to visit family...to snowy mountains. It will be wonderful. And crazy house of children. But fun. I hope to be a better blogger upon my return! I miss it and it's somehow been squeezed out of my routine. Happy New Year!

Merry Christmas

Hello, dear blog friends. Merry Christmas to you all. I am grateful for you...you offer to me the gifts of your stories, your wisdom, your poetry and your words. Thank you. May you be filled with joy and peace in the next few days.

with love,
Grace-thing

The Ghost of Christmas Present

Sigh of relief. Last night's disc. meeting went so great. The group is really feeling comfortable together and conversation flowed. The reason it went well, the main reason, is that I wrote a spiritual autobiograhy to share. I read it aloud. It was just what we needed because it forced me to put into words things they had to know. I had to take control and choose to share with them a lot. Then they had so much more to go off of...so many good questions. The practice itself of writing a spiritual autobiography was so good for me, but so so difficult! So hard to organize into coherent thoughts. So hard to really tell the truth. But I did it and now I feel like we're really in discernment together, instead of tip-toeing around the edges.

Regarding the play, I'm making myself push through and do it. My impulse was to keep up my brave face and not let the others in, but I ended up confessing how terrified I was to the director. So that's good.

Christmas is upon us and I yearn to be PRESENT in the next weeks...to my family, to the advent, to others, to the food :)

presence to you all,
me

The Ghost of Future Yet To Come

Wow. I've been a pathetic blogger. I had a blogging loss of innocence a few weeks ago and what with all the other stuff going on in life, I've just been a little blog shy. I was tagged to do a 10 random things meme and I offered quite a few details about myself. I was blogging under the false notion that even though I was offering details, no one I knew would read it! Well, a friend of my father made a comment on my post and it completely freaked me out. His post was very nice and short but I felt exposed and invaded. So silly, really. This blog is out there and anyone could find it. But it was a good lesson. I still have no idea how he found my blog. I suppose key words appear on search engines??

SO...in saying that, here's more info and oh well if I end up not being completely anonymous. I had the weirdest experience last night. A friend of mine invited me to be in her theatrical production of A Christmas Carol. It's her own adaptation and her theatre company is very physical and fun and different. Definitely not your run of the mill production. She offered me the role of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come. And the show opens in one week. She told me I'd be completely disguised and that my face would be veiled. Given the fact that I've had major issues with fear on stage, despite my advanced degree in theatre, this was the perfect role to offer me and she knew it... I could be part of the play, be on stage, but be hidden at the same time. So I said yes. Because I am a firm believer in walking through the doors that open in front of you. So I showed up last night and it was completely and utterly directly out of a nightmare. And I mean that in the literal sense. When I used to act more, I'd have anxiety performance dreams of being thrown into the middle of a performance and not knowing where i was supposed to be or what to say. For those of you who have never been in a play, this may seem silly. But it is a terrifying out of control dream. So that's what happened last night. Because everyone else had been rehearsing for weeks, it was so uncomfortable trying to dive in. I was paralyzed and didn't offer much at all. I basically just tried to survive the rehearsal. I survived, then came home and fell apart to my husband. It had taken so much energy to just keep it together at the rehearsal, that I just had to let it out at home. And of course, because life has a sense of humor (or maybe I should call it wisdom), I have my third discernment meeting tonight. How do I explain? I was always an actor. I had talent. But I never felt comfortable in that skin. Sometimes I did. But only once in a while. The creative process was riddled with anxiety and struggle. So as I've been pondering choosing a different path, it has felt very good not acting. Last night represented something I let go about 6 years ago and haven't done since. It represented something deep down that I didn't recognize until I came home. It was so painful to be in that room and to be so paralyzed. And maybe it was a final face to face confrontation with a death of this side of me. And let us not fail to notice that it was the Ghost of Future Yet to Come...the very ghost I've been wrestling with myself. And this was the role I was embodying. This spectre of the future, the unknown. I think it just shook me up on my insides to be crossing worlds in such a major way. This probably doesn't make much sense to those of your reading this. I'm surprised I'm not thrilled that I had this experience. In one sense, it is an affirmation that this is NOT me anymore and is more reason to go this other direction. But I have a deep fear that once I go to seminary and then become ordained and then have a job...that I'll experience the same anxious paralysis of fear. It's something I must push through. But it is present. Still not sure why it has such a grip on me. I'm quite emotional today and shaky. Thank God I wrote a spiritual authobiography to share with the committee tonight. Otherwise, I wouldn't know what to say. But I try to trust Timing. and God. But icky painful feelings...