I usually try to stay pretty positive here. Even when discussing controversial topics, I try to stay away from undo negativity. I want to be a voice of hope and optimism.
But today I feel no hope and no optimism.
As you are probably aware, last night America suffered it's most deadliest mass shooting in US history. I was surprised, actually, that this was the worst mass shooting. After Aurora and Sandy Hook and San Bernardino, you start to lose track of the numbers. Along side other massacres, like the Boston Marathon and Oklahoma City, the death toll just adds up and eventually, you don't know how many people died in the latest mass murder incident.
That is unspeakably depressing.
What is even more depressing is this is just another massacre in a long, seemingly never-ending line of US mass murders. Nothing is ever going to change, is it? If the mass shooting of Christians in a prayer meeting doesn't change anything, do you think the mass shooting of gay people will? If the mass shooting of children in an elementary school doesn't change anything, do you think the mass shooting of gay people will?
I don't even know where to start. There are so many things to say about this latest incident. All kinds of incoherent thoughts are running through my head that don't add up to any real point, just more depression and loss of hope.
I predict the only thing to come of this will be more religious intolerance. There will be right wing rhetoric about combating terrorism and left wing rhetoric about stricter gun laws. It's what we do in the wake of a mass killing, we shout out buzzwords passionately but briefly - RACISM! MENTAL HEALTH! TERRORISM! MUSLIMS! GUN CONTROL! and then move on without changing a single damn thing.
In this instance, the LGBTQ community (my community) was targeted in the middle of National Pride Month. For a few days, there will be brief conversation about LGBTQ intolerance. Not much, though, since the shooter was allegedly an ISIS sympathizer, so the bigger conversation will be about terrorism. If we're lucky, we'll hear some lip service paid to loving the gay community (but in many cases this lip service will be ruined by a call to pray for their lost souls as well). People will shut up momentarily about the transgender bathroom issue. But nothing will change in the long run. People will change their Facebook profile pictures, politicians will argue about the root problem and how to fix it, tragedies around the world will be brought up to show that none of us really care about human rights issues unless they are on our doorstep, and then we will move on and forget about this most deadliest mass shooting in US history until the next one occurs. Then we will rinse and repeat.
This can only happen so many times with no fundamental change in our laws or attitudes before we lose any hope that America will ever come together and agree on a plan to stop these senseless killings. Nothing ever changes, and this time won't be any different.
This coming Sunday, I'll be exhibiting my new book (The Last Petal Falling) for the first time. The Arkansas Literary Festival and the Central Arkansas Library Systems (CALS) are hosting a Self-Published & Small Press Book Fair. Registered authors (like me!) and small presses will attend a few mini sessions on things like Income Streams and Copyrights before opening up our book fair to the public. To decorate my stand, I've got a black tablecloth and a few little flowers and vases, << that poster right there on its way from the printers, and a stack of books to sell. (I also ordered a Square reader for taking card payments, which is taking a ridiculously long time to get here. I hope it's here by this weekend.) If I can find the time, I'm also going to make some giveaway bookmarks. If I can find the time. If.
I'm really excited about promoting my book, but I'm also super nervous. It's a sensitive topic, and this is the Bible Belt. Scott asked me today what I'm going to say when people ask me what my book is about. That got me thinking. I really do need to have something polished to say when I'm asked that. Right now, when people ask, I get a little embarrassed and unsure of how to respond. I kind of just want to hand over the book and have them read the back. It would be so much easier that way.
So what's my book about? It's my loss of faith story. It takes the reader back through the religious experiences of my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood to the broken moment when my faith started to crumble. It tells the story of the three years I spent imploring God to renew my faith as it slowly slipped away, and the pain and despair that accompanied that loss. It's the story of a life built firmly on faith in God razed to the ground. It recounts the aftermath of losing my faith, and how I managed to breathe again as an atheist.
But none of that is really the 15-second attention grabber I need. How do I say briefly what this book is about?
I'll have to spend some time thinking about this. Talking succinctly about it is almost as hard as writing it was. I wish I had someone exhibiting with me to help me out! Someone else's perspective is always more convincing than the author's.
Maybe I can print out my Amazon and Goodreads reviews and have them scattered around the table...
Hmm, that's an idea! In fact, if you've read the book but haven't left a review of it yet, mind doing it this week?! I'll send you a bookmark. (If I make find the time to make them.)
Star collides with star
thrust from the infinite black hole
blasts explodes
swirls twists tumbles
confused
collects grows collects spins
collects
disperses
Sun gathers chaos
pulls bits into her orbit
swirls of stardust she sets in circles
keeps
heats cools heats cools
nurtures
Life sparks from within
long lost memories of life
spark within
the stardust
life erupts tumbles forms
evolves grows swims
crawls out of water
blinks
Learns to cry
walk sing love.
And the form made from stardust fell
in love with the most beautiful
form and they gave birth to
more
like the debris that formed and bore
them
and together they learned
laughter
fury
compromise
peace
how to smile.
And time ticked throughout the
universe
ticked swirled ticked tumbled
lulled quieted
ticked
and they learned
patience
and urgency
and how to love
infinitely.
Until the stardust flickered
whispered goodbye
quieted lulled stilled tick
tock
and the other
learns
pain
infinite black pain
an infinite black hole of pain
sadness emptiness
swirling twisting spiraling bleeding
in her heart
into
an impossibly
tiny
point
of
time-
skewing
void
lasting
eons
until
Out of the infinite black hole
a future universe bursts
swirls twists collides collects
spins collects
disperses
remembers life in its debris
long lost memories of life
nurtures evolves grows swims
crawls out of the water
blinks.
Dear Paula,
When I cannot be there with you, when I cannot take a single ounce of your broken heart away from you, when I cannot hug you while you cry or wash your growing piles of laundry or listen to you tell stories or talk through the pain, know that even from far away I am here for you, shedding tears for you, loving you, caring about you.
Your friend forever,
Lori
I used to be a "no regrets" type person. We all make mistakes, and focusing on the things we can't change won't make those things go away. Apologizing, making amends and then moving on with a lesson well learned is the best way to deal with our mistakes. I still believe this and still believe in cutting ourselves some slack and accepting our human fallibility, but lately a few things have been creeping up in my mind that I suddenly have started to regret, things that were so long ago that they are now virtually un-make-amends-able. Things I never knew I were mistakes at the time, because back then they seemed the "right" things to do. They were the "right" things to do, because to some extent my religion told me they were the right things to do.
So, since I can never go back to these people now and ask forgiveness for the hurt I may have caused while I was a Christian, I publicly apologize here, with the hopes that maybe one or two of these people will read this and accept my apology.
1. I am so sorry to all the people who I believed were going to hell. I was never one to yell from street corners, "You're all going to burn!" but I have been asked on several occasions (three that I remember very specifically) by special people if I thought they were going to hell, and awkwardly, uncomfortably, I had to say something along the lines of, well, yes. Something along the lines of, "If you don't turn to Jesus before you die, then, well, yes, I believe you will go to hell." Oh how I wish I could go back to all of you (you three in particular) and take it back. Now that I'm on the other side, I know just how horrible a thing that is to say to (or think of) someone.
2. I am sorry that I spent so much time arguing over finer points of theology, while inadvertently ignoring the person I was tearing down. While a good theological debate is always fun (even still), there were many times I took it too far. I took my "knowledge" of the Bible and used it to tear down the "lesser knowledge" of other people. I wish I'd spent more time listening instead. I regret the hurt I may have caused people in my quest to win Most Reformed Calvinist of the Year.
3. I am sorry to the boys whose hearts I broke during my dating years. There were a couple of times I either broke up with or rejected someone I truly cared about simply because according to the Bible we were "unequally yoked", aka, because they weren't Christians or even just not "Christian enough". While I'm glad that in the end I landed where I am, married to my soul mate, I am sorry I let religion tear apart good relationships, going against my own breaking heart. I hope you are all happy now and with your soul mates too.
4. Luckily, I'm able to say this to his face (and believe me, I have, many times), but I am sorry to my husband for the shame I put on him and the fear of losing me I caused him when he stopped believing before me. I'm sorry that I let his non-belief nearly break us up. While I am certain we would NOT have divorced, I am not so certain that my insistence that he be a "spiritual leader" would not have left irreparable damage to our relationship, had that continued. Once I finally accepted him for who he was, not what he believed, our marriage grew stronger than ever before. I'm sorry I spent so many years putting pressure on him to be what some ideology told me he was supposed to be.
5. I'm sorry to all the people that I simply prayed for but did not actually do anything to help in their time of need. When friends and loved ones went through hard times, I prayed, and I really was a good pray-er. But I was not a good friend. I'm sorry I didn't show up at your doorstep to babysit your kids during your hard times or bring casseroles over to save you making dinner or sit on your couch with you, letting you talk or not talk over glasses of wine, while you processed your grief. I wish I'd been there for you, instead of just praying for you from afar and leaving you alone in your suffering.
6. I'm sorry to my past self for living all those years telling myself how wicked I was, how unworthy, how sinful, how nothing I did on my own was worth anything unless it was done for God. I'm sorry for convincing myself I was inherently evil and no good. I'm sorry for never acknowledging the good in myself. I'm sorry I lived over thirty years in a state of self-flagellation. It will take years to undo the damage that kind of thinking has done to me. It will take years to not start crying whenever I start thinking about this. I was and am a good person, I'm just sorry I never told me that.
I've been putting off posting about this, because I don't know what I can say to do it justice. But it's so heavily on my mind, I can't just not say something about it at all.
Found in the wreckage.
A week ago yesterday, a terrible storm crossed Arkansas culminating in tornadoes that touched down in several surrounding areas and leveled a neighboring town (as well as a few others). The same storm system also created tornadoes in a couple of the surrounding states.
It's been a long time since I've lived through a tornado warning. In high school, I remember a tornado warning being issued during a rehearsal for our school's spring musical. We all had to line up along a wall within the auditorium with textbooks over our heads. Our parents weren't allowed to come pick us up until after the tornado passed because the school was on lockdown. For the parents, it must've been terrifying. For us teenagers, it was just a thrill. Nothing bad happened nearby that I remember.
In college, I saw a tornado for the first and only time. I was staying at my then boyfriend's house in Searcy, AR, and the whole family plus me was crouching in the hallway. His dad kept going outside to look. I worked up the courage to go look too and in the far distance I saw the funnel cloud reaching from the distant black sky to the horizon. It was terrifying and breath-taking.
But last week was the first time I ever experienced the actual reality of a tornado.
I woke up early that morning to a thunderstorm. The night before, we'd left our canopy out in the back yard, so I quickly woke Scott and said we needed to get it down before it filled with rain. In our pajamas, we ran outside and clumsily fumbled with metal poles while lightning forked through the sky and thunder roared. It was a little frightening.
The forecast predicted tornadoes. I'm not a panicker in these kinds of situations, so I wasn't really all that unhinged. A bit freaked out, yes, but that was it. We spent the day inside, as thunderstorms came and went. It wasn't until late afternoon that I began to sense the seriousness of the coming storm.
An enormous black cloud was approaching outside. I tried to film it with my camera, but my camera's settings kept trying to compensate for the blackness by increasing its light balance. (Apologies for the lack of correct photography lingo.) It was mostly silent outside, and a little greenish, two indicators that this was tornado weather. Never had I seen a cloud like it. It covered the whole sky from my view outside my back door. On one edge, Scott noticed clouds swirling down and back up into the greater cloud. He called me to come look. Little wispy clouds were being sucked up into the black cloud in circular motion. I'd never seen anything like it.
This cloud looks dreary and grey in this picture;
in reality, it was almost completely black.
I started watching the storm chasers online. We don't have access to TV stations, so I couldn't watch the news. Facebook too was popping up with lots of weather updates from friends, including some 'how to stay safe in a tornado' posts. I'd never considered half the things people were suggesting - food for 72 hours, bike helmets, shoes in case you had to walk through rubble. I felt a little paranoid doing it, but I went ahead and cleared out Jaguar's closet, which is the innermost room in our home, with no outside-adjoining walls. I gathered together our personal documents, some water, our shoes and the kids' bike helmets. We put the kids to bed, thinking we'd scoop them up and bring them into the closet lined with pillows should the sirens go off.
I watched the coverage by professional storm chasers until midnight, when the storms had officially passed out of our area. I knew the storms had severely hit Vilonia, a town 18 miles north of us, and Mayflower and Maumelle, about 20 miles west. But I didn't know the full extent of it until the next morning.
Vilonia (and Mayflower) had been destroyed. Over a hundred people had been injured and at that point at least 5 dead. The total rose to 12 (then 15) as the day progressed. Around 40 people were still unaccounted for. Emergency staff were the only ones allowed in the disaster areas and no lay volunteers were being allowed to help at that time.
Someone's home.
Someone's truck.
I don't know what it was about this particular storm that hit me so hard. Was it the proximity? Was it seeing the start of myself, knowing that very cloud and those swirling cycles were the beginning of the tornado that devastated a town so close to us, that could have hit us if we'd just been a little less fortunate?
I still don't know what made it touch me so deeply, but it did. My neighbor and friend is friends with a few of the families who lost everything, and one who lost the family's father/husband. Another friend of mine lost a co-worker. Another friend of a friend lost her two young sons. The stories kept coming in, and they all were far too close to me in some way or another to ignore.
What does one do when they hear these things? What can one do?
All over Facebook people were saying to pray for Arkansas. In the face of such tangible devastation and need, not even to mention grief, the concept of just praying infuriated me. We were already being told of the many, many things that would be needed - supplies, clothes, first aid kits, money. I understood that people believed praying would do something (comfort the victims, I guess), but there were so many things we could actually DO besides pray.
This perhaps is what hit me the hardest.
For all my life, with a few exceptions, when horrible things happened, my response had always been 'pray'. And after praying, I felt I'd left it all in God's hands and he could go on to deal with it for me. After all, what was I able to do? But now, there I was, realizing that prayer is just a practice that helps the person praying feel better, makes them feel like they've done something useful, in times when they are otherwise helpless. I understood the urge to pray - I felt helpless too - but I also realized that praying was the lazy way out. I needed to DO something that actually might make a difference, however small.
It almost felt like I had a life time of doing nothing to make up for.
There wasn't a lot I could actually do; I knew that. I donated what I could and volunteered one day in the tornado-ruined neighborhood when I had childcare. It wasn't much at all, and I still felt the huge weight of how much there was needing done and how little I could do. I still feel that weight, and I still feel that helplessness. We might be able to get on with our lives a week later, but those whose homes were leveled to the ground and those who lost loved ones will never be able to go on exactly as they had before. For the rest of their lives, those who lost their homes and belongings will remember irreplaceable things they lost, and those who lost members of their families will never forget the agony and pain that will remain with them in waves of rawness their entire lives. I wish there were more I could do to reach those needs. Instead, all I can do is just meet practical needs where I possibly can and hope it means something to someone.
I understand through all of this the desire to pray. And having been a Christian for my whole life, I understand the theology behind praying. But as a non-believer now, I just see the irrationality of it and how futile it is. It makes us feel better to pray, it really does, but that's all it does. I've spent plenty of time in prayer - not enough time in action. I just can't sit back and do nothing anymore.
I know that one day, probably soon, I'll realize there is nothing more I can do. I know that I'll live with 'survivor guilt' for being able to move on with my life while knowing many of them haven't even begun to imagine what moving on would even look like. I know that I'll be better prepared for the next storm, with fully equipped 72 hour bags, and I won't wait to get the kids in our designated shelter, now that I recognize how quickly tornadoes can hit - too fast to scoop kids up out of bed and get their shoes on them and get them into a closet. I've learned a lot from this storm about the realities of tornadoes. But I've also learned a lot about the reality of myself. I've spent a lot of time doing nothing when I could have been searching for ways to do at least a little tiny something.
Even though it's been warm all week (Fifi was outside climbing trees in shorts yesterday), it's going to get really cold and supposedly very icy tonight and tomorrow. While this kind of messes with my Pampered Chef parties this weekend, I can't say I'm not excited about Fifi being off school and Scott being off work! A surprise three-day weekend!
I do think there has been a little bit of hysteria over this weather going on around here. I mean, ice is bad, yeah, and no one wants to drive in it (especially with all the people on the road who don't know how to drive in it), but it seems a bit pre-emptive to cancel the universe before it's even happened, before the temperatures even hit below freezing.
Anyway, I'm not complaining. Day off tomorrow means lazing about, not having to wake up early, having an easy day and making up for the Advent Activity we did NOT do today.
I'd forgotten until last night that Fifi had a Girl Scouts thing tonight, so I had to do a little swapping around. We were supposed to watch a Christmas movie and eat popcorn together, but I changed it to have a picnic on the floor in our pajamas. Still a stupid thing to change it to because I wasn't going to get Fi in her pj's before Girl Scouts! At any rate, none of that happened at all.
Partially because of this...
You probably recall Gracie, our miniature dachshund. Our miniature un-house-trained dachshund. We love Gracie. She is the sweetest, gentlest dog ever... but she poos and pees EVERYWHERE. We just couldn't keep her inside for longer than 20 minutes for fear she'd mess our carpets again. With the weather getting colder, I just hated having her outside. We'd bring her in, but then she needed to stay in her crate, which just made me feel cruel.
I'd have loved to take the time to train her but with two other kids at home all day? It just wasn't feasible. So we started looking for a new home for our sweet Gracie.
My mom called me today to let me know a woman at her work had a daughter who loves the breed and was willing to take on the challenge of house training her. And she wanted her today.
Lolly was distraught. I was pretty broken up about it too, though I knew it was the best thing for our doggie. I decided I couldn't take Gracie away without Fifi getting to say goodbye, so I picked her up early from school on the way to taking Gracie to her new home and broke the news to Fifi. Fifi was distraught.
The whole thirty-minute drive was agony. The two girls wailed the whole way. Lolly kept crying, 'This life stinks!' and 'Why did you take us to this rubbish, rubbish, rubbish, rubbish America?!' and 'I want to go back to Scotland!' The cries not only made my head pound, they made my eyes water. I feel your pain, girls. In so many ways.
I took some pictures of the girls with their dog before saying goodbye, but they are too sad to share. So here's a less sad one for Lolly to remember her 'precious, precious puppy', as she kept calling her all day. This was earlier in the day before the reality of it hit her.
Afterwards, I took the kids by McDonald's for an ice cream. This helped soothe their pain tremendously. Then I stopped into Walmart to get some milk before this supposed 'snowpocalypse' rolls in. The people of central Arkansas have gone crazy. The state of their shopping carts made me think they were stacking the shelves of their nuclear bomb shelters before crawling in for the next ten years.
By the time we got home, and I got dinner ready, it was time for Girl Scouts, so no picnic in pj's. Fifi and Lolly did have a lot of fun cutting up thousands of sheets of white paper into snowflakes... which totally screws day number 9's plans. But tomorrow's snow day means we can have a picnic on the floor in our pj's all day long if we want.
And now, for a Banoffee Pie Update:
This morning the girls found BP having a leisurely tea party with his two favourite redheads, Ariel and Merida.
Even though he's friends with both, he obviously couldn't help perving on Ariel a little bit in her little teeny-tiny purple bikini. She wasn't helping things with the slutty way she was sitting either. But maybe it's not entirely her fault; I've never tried to sit on a picnic blanket in a fin, so I don't know what's comfortable.
Banoffee made some delicious Chocolate Oatmeal No-Bake Cookies too. Little ones for he and his friends to share with their cup of tea (real tea, despite Fifi tasting it and saying it was just water - it was real tea!) and jello (Lolly's gift to Banoffee yesterday). He also made plenty for us too, though I may or may not have eaten 95% of all by myself.
I attended a funeral yesterday, of a man I never knew. He was someone very special to someone very special to me. It was one of the saddest I've ever been to, not that any I've ever been to have been less than sad.
How does anyone go on after the death of someone they love? As this man's father spoke, I wondered how he will go on. What happens to your heart when you lose a child? Whether your child is a baby or a grown man, how do you get out of bed in the morning? How do you breathe?
His siblings lost their brother. How do you get through the next forever number of years without your brother less than a phone call away?
My friend lost her boyfriend. How do you move on from that? The what-ifs, the maybes, the probablies, they live on interminably. The memories, the love, the excitement, the laughing spells and the deep eyes-into-eyes looks - what happens to those? Where do you store these things in your heart without it breaking over and over and over again? Never ever wanting to forget, while the remembering crushes you continually.
I am deeply grieved by the loss of this man I never met. I am grieved for the grieving. I cannot put myself in their shoes; to do so is more painful than I am willing to feel. To imagine losing my son, or my brother, or my lover is too exhausting, too agonizing. I have the choice not to experience it.
But they don't. The choice was not theirs. Life and death play by an unfair set of arbitrary rules. I wish I knew what could be done to help ease some of this heartache for my friend, although I think the clear answer is nothing. Nothing but cruel, unforgiving, undesired time helps, and right now, time is the enemy. It is the only balm, yet it is unkind, taking with it all the beautiful and painful you want to hold on to tightly forever.
Sleep, dream, all you loved ones, retell the old stories, hold each other close, take deep breaths, eat something, and may you have moments of rest and comfort and peace amidst the black and blue sorrow of these long endless days.
