A Summer Soul

"Kismet  was borrowed into English in the early 1800s from Turkish, where it was used as a synonym of fate. This was an expansion on the meaning of the original Arabic word that led to  kismet : that word,  qisma , means “portion” or “lot,” and one early 18th-century bilingual dictionary says it’s a synonym of “fragment.”"  —  "It's Kismet", Merriam-Webster.com

  "Now if you're looking for a savior, well, that's not me."   -Lorde, The Path So Lorde is back.     The significance of this -- of all the little things that had to fall into place to be in a similar headspace as this literal pop icon after whom I've patterned myself since 2013 -- is astronomical (hehe).      First things first, however...     I sleep through the night now;  I no longer look with yearning at certain tools of destruction; I wake up and want to live; I can tell my story without dissolving into sobs; I drink hot tea every morning before work; I serve my small town as a bastion against illiteracy and misinformation, spending paid time amongst the quiet and the sacred rows of books. I've found kindred spirits (read huge nerds ) in my fellow laborers. I've read 11 and 1/2 books this year (but that's a post for another time  😉). I spend a little less time on my phone placing the weight of the world on my shoulders and ...

 When I was a kid, I didn’t understand why Michael Jackson bought so many toys and super soakers. I didn’t get the childishness and the yearning for younger days; I wanted to grow up and do the traditional Motherhood thing I was always pretending with my baby dolls. I get it now. Now that I know the scope of my tragedy, I totally get it. Lately, I find myself unable to sleep at night. My mind just won’t turn off, tumbling over and over the same fragment of a song, or searching to find the tactile part of a memory of my little sister playing with my hair as we tried to fall asleep during a long, dark night in North Carolina. I’ll toss and turn until finally I grab my phone and start looking up old toys from my childhood: a dollhouse here, a set of pretend play plastic there; recently, I purchased a book, a Beanie Baby, and an old movie I remember watching in 2013. This new part of me, this yawning ache for the untainted familiar, wants to buy every piece I see — every pre-owned bit ...

 Fascinating. "If you're holding on to frustration [at what happened to you], then that's you saying, 'Well, I blame God. He let this happen to me. Where was He in all that?' Then you might want to talk to Him about that." "There's no such word as 'can't' in the Bible. We don't find that concept in Scripture." "Jesus came to heal and restore all things." "Take every [remembrance of abuse, every trigger] thought captive in Christ." It's so much easier said than done. May He help me to not lose sight of how very heavy a young person's cross can be. Look: Someday others will have words for what happened to them, and they will use them. Don't assume you know how quickly that healing or restoration is supposed to happen. Don't assume they blame anyone but themselves or their abuser; assume they have discussed it at length with their God, trying to unlearn Him as consistently wrathful, dispassionate a...

In the last few weeks, I watched four films dealing with loss, and the ways humanity deals with theft, whether of bright futures, loved ones, healthy relationships, or freedoms. Didn't realize the connections between them all until literally just now, when I started to write in my down time (of which I suddenly have much).