Reason Breeds Insanity

Because of the season of year, you know, Advent and all of that, I am thinking forward to the new year and what it might hold. As always, I have some goals that may or may not be accomplished, but I am going to set them nonetheless. Here they are in no particular order of importance:

1. Return to veganism. I decided in October that I would stop being vegan for a couple of months and just eat whatever I fancied until December 31, and while I have enjoyed eating some things I’d missed, I also feel an intense amount of guilt because I am behaving out of accordance with my beliefs. While I haven’t had any weird dreams about cows chasing me or having full-on verbal discussions with pigs in a stockyard semi trailer, I have been feeling a bit sad about killing other sentient beings, harming the environment, participating in a violent food chain, and just basically not living in line with my beliefs that all beings are sacred.
2. Remain sober from alcohol and any other vices. I have enjoyed being alcohol free in 2022, so 2023 will remain the same. I make it sound like this is an easy choice, but if you know me, you know I have struggled some this year, and I will probably struggle some next year too. But, what I know is that I like my life without, more than I liked my life with, so I will make a mission to remain free for another 365 days. I may even work on caffeine and sugar, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
3. Observe Sabbath. I’ve planned to do this before, but I want to make it a reality in 2023. My computer will remain in my backpack, my school email will be removed from my phone, and I will spend Sunday going to church, sewing, hanging out with friends and family, and reading books I choose. As another form of Sabbath, or maybe it’s a form of religious devotion but not really Sabbath, I plan to finish reading through the Bible. By reading three chapters a day, I’ve made it to Deuteronomy. I know it’s strange, since I’ve been a Christian from the age of 5 and been to seminary, but I have never read straight through the Bible. I am pretty sure I have read nearly all of the words in the Bible, but never read through it, like the storybook that it is.
4. Move my body and love her. In the past, I have set some sort of parameters on this, but this next year, I just want to move her in any way I can. I want to dance, run, bike ride, swim, walk, hike, jump rope, lift weights, and basically just enjoy the skin I am in. Again, if you know me, you know my body and I have a tenuous relationship, and I have recently been a bit annoyed with her, because as I start into peri menopause, my body just wants to hold onto so many pounds. In fact, I think she may be manufacturing some each day. I guess, what I am trying to say is that we’ve recently been in a fight, but that I am ready to reconcile with her, if she’ll take me back.
5. A book a month. If I am more diligent in grading and less diligent at TV watching, this goal should be an easy one, and I think I may even try to make it a fiction book a month, since I spend most of my free time reading books that most people only read by force. But I really like to know things, so I read a lot of nonfiction. Maybe this year, I will just set myself up for fun sometimes.

“Don’t be concerned about being disloyal to your pain by being joyous.” — Hazrat Inayat Khan

My last goal is to simply be joyful, not necessarily to be happy all the time, because that is disingenuous, but to have an underlying current of joy. In the past year, I have moved from a place of almost constant sorrow and despair, into a place where I can name my emotions, acknowledge them, and then act appropriately on them. I am not a prisoner to my own sadness. So, my biggest goal for this year is to simply live joyfully, to move through life with a love for myself and for others.

Here’s to all of it. Cheers.

Today’s journal prompt is a weird one, but I am going to go with it anyway: “What was an improvement?”

As I was watching the sunset tonight, I was thinking about how I’ve had three very good days in a row, three days of joy, three days of being affirmed, three days of love and fellowship. Beginning with Indy Pride parade on Saturday right up through the most beautiful sunset this evening, I’ve experienced so much joy the past few days, that I have nearly had to pinch myself to make sure I am still living this life.

On Sunday, as I sat in church with my brother and one of my best friends, I heard a sermon that I needed to hear 27 years ago when I first came out of the closet. If you know me, you know I have a lot of things that I need to work on my life, and one of the biggest things I’ve been working on is self-love in regards to my queerness. So, on Sunday when the priest spoke about his experience at the Pride parade on Saturday, I couldn’t help but tear up a little when I heard these words:

“Within the parade, in the gauntlet between the barricades, I saw a constant movement of people, back and forth, to and fro. People darting out from the crowd to hug people they knew. We were walking in joy. But not walking for us. Walking for them. For all those people whose faces were bright with smiles or shiny with tears…and all because they heard someone say, ‘God loves you. No exceptions.’”

We all need to hear these words: “God loves you. No exceptions.” Because God does love you, no exceptions.

I have to think that three days of joy in a row is a vast improvement over the past few months where I’ve found myself not being able to see the good in this world, and the past few months have been a vast improvement over the past few years where I found myself not wanting to live to see the sunset each night. In fact, for so many days each week, just trying to find the energy to live, to leave the house, to make it through the day was a struggle.

In this past week, I have learned some pretty gut wrenching news, and I was able to work through intense anger, sadness, betrayal, disgust, and other emotions. After wrangling with God for a few hours while I meditated and prayed next to a lake, I was able to reach deep inside and extend compassion to the person who I perceived had wronged me. I was able to put myself in her shoes and think about how I would have handled the situation in a different scenario, and I was able to have my heartbroken and repaired and broken and repaired, until I was able to give grace.

The great improvement for me, right now, is being able to live in joy, recognizing all of the other emotions as they show up, feeling them, then moving through, and not dwelling in them. In short, I don’t feel like I am drowning every day, and I will take that as improvement every day of the week.

In the interest of catching back up with the prompts, I am offering you a three-in-one exercise. Because I tend to be rather wordy in my responses to these prompts, I am going to answer three of them to catch back up to today’s prompt, but I am allowing myself only one concise paragraph for each prompt. Let’s see what happens!

“What Good Are You Doing for Yourself or Others?”

I try to live every day better than the last one, which is really difficult sometimes. I try to listen well to those around me, and I try to help when I can, and simply listen when I can’t help. Currently, I am working on trying to allow others to help me and to listen to me. So, I think the good I am doing is putting kindness and love and grace out into the world for others, and I am trying to accept kindness, love, and grace back in return. The first comes pretty naturally for me, because at the end of the day, I perceive my calling as a Christian to be to love others and to give them the grace that I have been given. The second does not come naturally for me, because I have a hard time accepting others into my world more than superficially. By working on the second part, letting people into me, I am finding that the first part, helping others, is becoming easier.

“A Thing Your Life Has in Excess”

Right now my life has an excess of absurdity and an abundance of women (and my brother) who love me. Like I feel like I am inside a simulation, particularly this week. My week went from having a colleague be a passive-aggressive monster at a meeting, to having an old friend completely shun me, to having someone I barely know tell me his whole life with every sordid detail in the matter of 15 minutes, to having my whole world turned inside out by one piece on information, to my dog being bitten in the face by an off-leash neighborhood dog, to being able to share all of the most painful and strange parts of my life with the women (and my brother) who are closest to me.

“What Is A Top Priority This Month?”

My top priority this summer is to work through all of the things of my life, or at least to get a good start on it, before school starts again in the fall. My top priority is to go vacation with my love and our children and our grandchildren and to have the best time I’ve had in a long time, to go with an open heart, and an open agenda, and an open mind and to just shower them with love and grace and kindness. My top priority is to be free.