I temporarily forgot there's better days to come...

The last time I cleaned my daughter's room because I could not stand to see the filth any longer, I got yelled at. My husband, like me, hates the way she doesn't clean her room and will talk and talk and talk about it until I cannot stand listening to him any longer so I go in there and clean it up. It makes both of us feel better. Having the entire house clean except for her room--which is a total disaster--makes us feel like we're keeping a dirty little secret--like we're fake clean people. But when my daughter comes home from work, he will yell at her about how I had to clean her pigpen of a room and then SHE will yell at me for cleaning it because she doesn't want me in her room blah, blah, blah. So I decided that would I resist cleaning it because it feels wrong to be yelled at and sneered at for doing something nice for someone. It's like no one is happy with it dirty and no one is happy with it clean, so why bother? Anyway, I just went into her room to put something away and it's back to being a disaster area. Her trash is overflowing, there is a glass half-filled with orange juice, there are old receipts laying all over the floor, clothes piled all over. I walked out, closed the door and am now trying to pretend that there isn't a mess behind it.

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My husband has to work out of town on Saturday and asked me to go along with him to keep him company. This wouldn't be a problem, but my youngest daughter usually comes home on the weekend and will see this as me slighting her in some way. My life is filled with overly needy people pulling me in opposite directions. I try to stay above the fray by tuning out most of their noise, their pulling, their needing. There is nothing about my life that is how I imagined it would be at this point and I'm trying to forget how I dreamed things would be to make it easier.

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I've been fighting this feeling of envy lately. I'm not jealous, I'm envious. I think jealousy means I want to take something from someone else that they have that I want, and envy means that I don't mind them having something, but that I want what they have for myself as well. Maybe I'm justifying these feelings so they're not so hateful, I don't know. It's just that I'm envious of lots of things lately. Some people would tell me to get off my ass and make things happen for myself, and I would say that's a valid comment to make except I don't know how to make things happen for myself anymore. I'm just lost. Stuck. Trapped.

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When I'm out running, I don't feel like I'm part of the world anymore. Everything disappears so it feels like I've popped a magic pill that takes me away from all the things that make me want to scream and scream and never stop screaming. When I'm out running, I sometimes wish I could fly like I can in my dreams. I want to soar above it all--take it all in from a different perspective--clear my head. I want to see what it looks like to be me--what I would think of myself if I could take off then look back to where I am living here on earth.

annoying

You know what I hate? When I have a blog in my reader and forever I have been reading that blog in the long feed and suddenly the blogger decides to cut the feed to the short feed so that you HAVE to go to the blog to read it.

I don't mind clicking onto the blogs that are on short feeds from the beginning, but I hate it when bloggers switch midstream. Most times, I delete those blogs from my reader because I have lots of blogs that I read and I don't like being annoyed and the switching to the short feeds is an annoyance to me. I think there was one blog that went from long to short feeds that I have continued to read but she's funny and interesting and a great writer.

Anyway, carry on. Just wanted to get that off my chest!

losing my religion

"Everyone who seeks truth from wisdom will fashion wings in order to fly away and escape from the passion that inflames human spirits. The seeker will fashion wings in order to escape from every spirit that can be seen." - The Book of Thomas from The Secret Teachings of Jesus


Without any regret, I left my religion behind a year ago. It was after lots of searching for the truth and more reading than I have ever done in my life that I decided organized religion was not for me anymore. It hadn't been for a long time, but I did not allow myself to feel comfortable about that choice until I took the time to find out what I needed for me to walk away without feeling anything but peace. It took a lot of time to get here and it was not without lots of sadness for things I felt I had lost along the way--traditions, beliefs, faith in people who were in positions of authority over me for a lot of my life. You wouldn't think that losing a life of lies would be painful, but it was.

After being raised a Catholic from birth and attending Catholic schools all my life, I had never read the Bible. I don't ever remember seeing a Bible in the home I grew up in either, I only remember seeing Bibles in the hotel rooms we would stay in when we went on trips. So I took the time to read it from cover to cover--I did not breeze through it--I studied it. I knew all of the stories from school, but reading them for myself gave me new insight. I came away from reading the Bible having more questions than answers, though, and my experience isn't something that I feel I'm able to articulate properly which is why I haven't written more about it. I felt further away from God, I think, further away from the truth after reading the Bible.

I read everything. I know I said that before but it bears repeating because it means I opened my mind to things I hadn't before. I gave up having to be right about things I was clearly wrong about and it opened up the world to me. When you take a good look at everything, you are able to sift through it all to find what's true. That's what I learned that I will never forget--that you need an excess of information from all sides to get at the truth. I also learned that the truth should be able to withstand all sorts of questions. If someone wants to tell me that I am wrong for questioning things, if they want to shut me up or silence my inquiries, then I immediately know that they are not interested in the truth and I move along.

I read a book a while ago called The Divine Matrix by Gregg Braden. In it, the author talks about how we are all connected to one another--how there are no empty spaces between any of us. There are lines of energy connecting us to other people and other things--we can't see them, but they are there. He talked about how even non-living things experience change when we are in their presence.

The invisible connections that leave behind changes which aren't noticeable to the naked eye help drive home how powerful we are. So much of the time, we are taught to look outside ourselves for answers or for help. The part of the Bible that rang truest for me was Jesus saying that the Kingdom of God is inside us--how we didn't have to look any further than ourselves to find what we're looking for. I believe this is a truth that no one in power really wants to teach us because that would mean we wouldn't need them anymore to tell us what to do, how to live our lives, or what to believe. The funds would dry up if people didn't need organized religion anymore and we can't have that. When big money is at the center of things, I connect the dots and find corruption.

In the end, I come to this: The divine is inside us, outside us, and all around us. The connections we have to everything and everyone brings comfort that we are never alone. We are infinitely more powerful than any of us realize.

what motivates me

The emotion that motivates me to move is anger.

I do a lot of things out of love, but anger motivates me like nothing else.