To Who I Am Becoming...

The snow and the cold licked her skin trying to make everyone go faster, go inside, get moving in cars. The cold and the snow tried to reach past her skin but she was immune. Her family was leaving. For four days they had shared her life. They had slept in her rooms, watch movies on her TV, met her friends, laughed with her, ate with her, and always there were stories being told and being made. For Four days her whole world was incredible. Her world was still incredible, but now it was a little quieter. She stood in the harsh light, making visible the painful events. She stood in the cold that was trying to take away her warmth and watched her family pile into their car and drive away. There was sadness, yes, but not now. That would come later when the silence of her home deafened her. It would come when she would think of a joke and would realize that no one was there to laugh at it. It would come when she tried to decide what to eat and no one was there to make a wild and spontan...

Every week I sit in church and think about my life. I think about what I want to do differently. How I have fallen short. Those who might help me be better. Those who I could help be better. And the ways that I can see more wonder in the world around me. Every week I make these lists in an attempt to focus me and remind me of things that I have forgotten when life has gotten jammed with other things that are less important. I have spent the last two weeks practically alone, however. I have not "gone" to church as it was General Conference for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which I watched in my home wearing my PJ's. I have not made my usual lists of goals and improvements. Today I decided to do something that I have not done in a very long time. Instead of making lots of lists of things to do I choose one thing. Today I was not going to watch TV and see where my day took me. Instead of getting lost in some show I Cleaned my kitchen Tided up my bath...

In the past I have written stories that were about me but where the main character was "She". Writing about She allowed me some distance so that I could talk about it. I have written this new piece about me without "She". The dry air prickles my skin with tickling fingers. My hands caress the desert grass feeling the hidden life that flows up through the earth with all of the stories, histories, and people that have been there before me, that I am now a part of. My eyes are closed but I don’t need them to see the blue sky with sparse clouds that are white but also carry the color of the land. The air carries the voices of those who found this land and became part of it. My blood flows like the red rock with the rhythms of the people and animals that have passed. This is where I am from. These are my people. Many may say that I have no right to say this, as they have. Calling me outsider, pretender, and unbelonging. They have scoffed at me. T...

The human life is made up of experiences. Some we choose to have and some are chosen for us. We all have one choice no matter the experience we live, what to do when it is over. When it becomes part of our past instead of our present. When it fades into memory instead of reality. When it becomes a story told at parties instead of something to be dealt with in the moment. We choose what we become. We choose what we will remember, what we will tell. We choose. She stood in that moment of choice. The event had passed and the next one, the one where she would have to actively deal with it, had not started yet. This was it, when she would have to choose what would happen next. She barely understood it herself and could not imagine how she would be able to explain it to someone else. It was over, and she wasn’t sure she knew why. She knew the raw facts of how she had ended up here. She knew the chain of events that had led to this. She knew the reasoning that was given to explain w...

There is a joke that having to speak on Mother's Day in the LDS church is the worst talk to give. No one wants to do it and almost no one wants to listen to it. Perhaps this post will be the same but each year I cannot help but have a few thoughts on the many mothers in my life. When most think about the mothers that are important to them they think about the mother that took care of them as children, gave birth to them, and sent them off into the world. Usually this is one woman. For me this is many many women. I have a birth mom (which I will talk about on a different blog) and I have an adopted mother. The list, however, does not end with these two women. I have mothers who I see at church, mothers in my academic life, mothers in different countries, mothers who are also sisters to me, and mothers who have helped me have a good relationship with my primary mother. It is on Mother's Day that I think about all of these women. Each played a vital role in my upbringing and a...

She stood at the brink. She had heard this been used as a metaphor many times. “They are on the brink of destruction”, bringing this person to the brink, and so forth. She looked into the fathomless ravine. As She looked She saw faces emerge, She saw her mother, her father, her brother, the children who had become hers, the loved ones who needed her in their lives and all those who knew her through and through. She didn’t just see the faces but heard the voices; the laughter, the cries and the songs of these loved ones. With each face, each sound, and each memory the pain grew. She remembered the food that She and her mother shared on car trips, the conversations had. She remembered the feeling of the land felt through tires on road trips, songs sung with no care of tone, pitch, melody, or lyrics with her dad. She remembered the feel of shotguns and the sound of clay pigeons shattering shooting with her brother. She remembered the feeling of grass rolled in and the smell of rain ...

Three years ago I wrote about the end of a story. I have to admit that when it did not end, but added characters, and continued on I was upset. I thought about the connection I had with the show and the people that shared that time with me and wondered how I could continue watching it without feeling let down. At times I did feel let down but held on like any crazed fan would. Three years ago I lived through this show. I was Haley when she fell in love for the first time. I was Nathan when he screwed up. I was Brook when she didn't trust the good things that happened to her. And I was Mouth feeling like I would always be just the friend. I say "was" but I think I still am. I have watched as these characters have traveled through some of the worst and best moments anyone could live through and I have become stronger for it. I will keep this short as words can no longer express the gratitude I feel towards this show, for the laughs it brought me with friends during stres...

She realized why she liked this space. She sat in her office at the university; filled with the memories of triumphs past, small achievements, stacks of work to be done that told her that she was important to someone, and trinkets of loved ones who remembered her as a better person than perhaps she was. It was in this space that she liked to work and play pretend as if she were what and who all of these people and objects thought she was. Here she could imagine herself in a life that was more than the harsh reality she lived. Here she could be amazing. She noticed that the lights were off. She never turned on the lights because she didn't want to have the light reveal the lies that kept her going from moment to moment. It was always the light that reminded her that she was not who she thought she was, it reminded her of her failures and the things she had forgotten or neglected to do, and it forced her to see that the magic that she believed in was just delusion. These things cou...

Power. Connection. Rules. Identity. For me, being a redhead meant that I was given something extra. I was different from others and therefore I had to live differently. My father was a redhead but it was my mother (a dark haired) that taught me about being a redhead. I vaguely remember the books that we had in our house. The important ones had redheads as the main characters. They were the fun ones, the changers, the people in silent power, and even the secret or not so secret destroyers of lives. They were those with divinity or tantamount to daemons. Lots of times they were both. This was often the same in the real world as well. An Asian woman once asked my parents if they wouldn’t like to have my hair be a different color. “Like what?” was their question back, “Like black.” was her response. In her culture red hair meant something bad. Another time my mom and I were in downtown Tucson, at dusk, waiting for the bus. A man waiting with us looked at the sunset and ...