Babytummy.

My best friend just had her second baby.

Her firstborn (age 5) affectionately named the baby "Babytummy" in utero. I loved it so much, I decided I'm going to call the baby by this name for his whole life.

It was an emergency C-section. Our other best friend and I spent the majority of the night in the hospital with her after the surgery. We tag-teamed with her mom who had been up with her and by her side all day.

Being a C-section baby, he had a couple mucus plugs. As the nurse explained, babies born vaginally get that final squeeze on the way out. Babytummy, like many C-section babies, would just have to cough it all up.

I ended up being the one to hold him through his first night on this side of the uterus. I stared at him... long and hard, from every angle. Most babies look like rats to me, truth be told, but Babytummy is perfect in every way.

I stared, in complete awe at the thought that he had been smushed up inside my best friend just hours before. I was fascinated by the thought that nine months before -hopefully- he was a mutual orgasm. I reflected on how a couple months before that, a year or so ago, ...he wasn't even a dream.

I was disgusted with myself as I recalled having told my best friend only a few weeks before we found out she was pregnant how I thought a baby was the most horrible thing that could possibly happen to her in her life right then.  And on the surface, my concern made perfect sense.

His dad is now MIA, just another stupid fucking kid running from real manhood, from his life vocation. She's in the middle of a custody battle with her ex-husband over her firstborn. He's with his dad in another state until the next court date. She has no money, while he and his new squeeze are raking it in.

Fun fact: Babytummy was born on the day I was supposed to be getting married.

These and a million more thoughts as I watched his little heart beat under the bundle of blankets helped me to appreciate how amazing God is.

Our lives do not play out in that ideal way we hope. Babytummy's daddy should have been there in my place that first night of his life. I should have been consummating a marriage vow. On the surface, our lives are pretty messed up. God knew, though, that Babytummy was to be born on August 19th, 2011 and that he would be everything we each needed. Everything.

I'm grateful God does things His way.
I'm grateful Babytummy was the male with whom I spent the night of August 19, 2011.

A Shadow in the Clouds.

I avidly wrote poetry and kept a sketchbook for approximately one year before I came to terms with the fact that I sucked at both. I was ok with not being particularly talented in either area, since I recognized that writing and drawing helped to alleviate some of the pent up depression and anger I felt at the time. Times like these, I wish they still worked for me.

I recall one theme of characters I would draw - angel fairies and black shadow people. The angel fairies represented peace, grace, goodness, love, caring. Reflective of my feelings then, they were often trapped, lost, or compromised. The black shadow people when drawn in groups of 4 or more would represent the nameless and lost of society. If only one or two were drawn in a piece, they tended to represent forces of evil.

In one piece, I drew pathways to Salvation. A Thorned Heart with raybeams rested at the center top of the page far from everyone at the bottom. A spiral staircase leading about halfway to the heart grew from the bottom left of the page. To the right of the page, at the same approximate height as the top of the staircase were a grouping of clouds. A pathway up a hill led to a cliff that dropped off into fire on the bottom right of the page. A group of nameless, lost black shadow people stood in the middle at the bottom trying to understand where they were and where they needed to go.

Some got lost on the staircase of Good Deeds - climbing, growing, but always falling off the top step to land where they'd begun. Some looked to and relied on the black shadow people reaching down at them from the "Now too holy to REALLY get our hands dirty but can't keep going up ourselves" clouds, never realizing that they didn't have their eyes on the right prize. They wanted to appear as holy and elevated as the cloud people and couldn't seem to understand the cloud people weren't really any closer than they were to salvation. A good number of the group delighted in the Mountain of Weakness - a seemingly beautiful, wonderful, light adventure ...that dropped them off a cliff into fiery nothing.

Angel fairies attempted to direct the shadow people away from these paths.
A few even sacrificed themselves to the flames to save a person or two.

In this illustration, I think I've become the character I like least. I'm a Cloud Person. The Good Deeds climbers at least have the satisfaction of trying, of being humble, of experiencing an illusion of progress. The Mountain people are just lost. They deserve love and pity as most of them simply don't know any better, don't know that they're supposed to be looking up.

Then there are the Cloud People - the fucking ridiculous bastards.

See, the Cloud People started out alright.  Many spent their fair share in the fire. They climbed the Mountain, fell, and were rescued enough to start looking for other paths. They did the Good Deeds thing for a while, but eventually realized they were powerless in their Salvation. They fell a few times, but perservered. Then, they recognized all they really needed to do was look upwards and wait. They realized they needed to have the faith that they were going to reach the Thorned Heart without any obvious way to get there. Eventually, angel fairies (grace) descended upon them and they were being carried to the Heart. Something about seeing the Good Deeds people still going at it and seeing the Mountain people perpetually falling, they stopped receiving the gift of grace. Although grace would never drop them, they had the power to stop receiving it. They stopped ascending.

They got stuck in limbo. They realized how much further up they still needed to go and got scared. They wanted to help everyone else look up to see Truth. But they developed pride. They were enlightened, seemingly successful having tapped into the right path. They were brought too far to choose to fall again, yet they could no longer relate to any other shadow people without looking down on them. Looking down at others, they couldn't look Up anymore.

I'm looking down at others - those who are trying to figure it out, those who are lost, and those in flame. I'm looking over at the Good Deeds people who are really trying. I'm watching people pass me on their way Up.

I'm not looking Up, but I refuse to go back.
I don't know how to fly from here.

I'm afraid of falling, since this cloud hangs above fire. If I fall, I might hit someone being carried to a better state of existence and bring them down as well. If I fall, I risk crushing more than just me. If I fall back to the middle, I'm stuck knowing I can't climb back up via Good Deeds and that the Mountain of Weakness will never really make me happy.

In a lot of ways, this sucks a bajillion times more than being completely clueless. I now know that my biggest obstacle is me. I keep getting in my own fucking way. This is depressing.

Help me fly. Please.

Au revoir.

She's always good with awkward situations. I'm happy she came with me to this one. She extended her right hand towards him, "Well, [NAME], ...have a great life." He chuckled, shook her hand, and wished her the same.

That was basically it. Minus monthly checks in the mail for money he still owes me, his life path and mine have now veered off into completely opposite directions. I might see him in passing when I visit friends in his hometown, but we are no longer a meaningful part of each other's lives. We're no longer going to share the great life we used to playfully plan out.

She summed it for me. I do wish you a great life. Whenever I catch myself missing our would-be great life, I remind myself that that life would be short-changing both of us. We both have so much more to live for.

I pray you peace and blessings. Fulfillment. Strength.

I'm gettin' mine.

Goodbye.

Neighbors.

I've always wanted that storyline you see in movies. The boy and the girl grow up as neighbors, become best friends, support each other through awkwardness, heartache, and other pursuits, then grow to one day realize they're romantically destined for each other. Maybe it's because I never stayed in one place long enough to build that kind of history. Maybe it's because I've come to realize how much of a headache it is to date; it'd be nice to just already be sure.

That being said, it's occurred to me that I might be in love with you.

Fuck.

I Do... hope.

Already one of the most beautiful women I've ever met, she could have been straight out of an old painting as her father escorted her down the aisle to stand with her groom. She wore white. She's one of few women who deserve to wear white on her wedding day, if you know what I mean. It truly represented her being, her soul, her honor.

I wore brown and black to her wedding. And funny enough, this combination probably best represents the state of "me".

Don't get me wrong; I'm a firm believer in love, marriage, and commitment! I'm just still incredibly jaded and incapable of believing that men really have it in them to commit to one woman, for better or for worse, for the rest of their lives.

I don't think I can, in good conscience, wear white on my wedding day.

I'll likely marry eventually. I hope and pray that what I feel for the person I commit my life to is half as intense as what I saw in her eyes when she promised herself to him.

Foliage of the soul.

So we started this garden.

Living with three other chicks, it simply wasn't an option to kill the nest of baby rabbits we found in the thicket we were clearing to plant our garden. Yes, even though we knew that rabbits are the antichrist of vegetable gardens. We bought cutesy gloves and weeding tools. We spent far more money than I'd like to admit on stones and wires and stakes for "bunny-proofing". We then threw 14 kinds of seeds into the soil which was previously home to a weed jungle. We huffed and we puffed and then we stood back to see what would  happen.

It's about two weeks since planting day. Thinking we're probably not watering enough. Noticing that the most successful foliage resembles the type of weed we spent a week uprooting. Reflecting on how excellent a metaphor for life gardening is.

I'm not a tree-hugging hippie, but for all intents and purposes, from here on out, the "garden bed" is going to be used to illustrate the concept of the "human soul".

It's amazing how ridiculously overgrown with useless, ugly gunk we let it get before do anything about it! How often do we completely underestimate how much work it's going to take to cleanse it of the bad and make room for the beautiful. How often does dealing with one thing lead to a bajillion other, deeper, more difficult issues we could never have expected when we started trying to fix things. How often do we really need the help of someone else that we're too proud or shy or ashamed to request. We realize that it's hard to get rid of the cute and furry little things that we know aren't good for it but still let them stay because they don't SEEM like an aggressive or vicious problem. There should be balance and variety. It should be full. We know what it is that we want to grow and nurture in it, but really have no friggin' clue how to make it happen.

A big thing I'm realizing is that there's only so much we can do. Yeah, we have to put our blood, sweat, and tears into clearing, planting, safe-guarding, and watering. But then you have to give the rest to God, to the mysterious unknown, to the risk of both failure and success. We have to do our part in the tending, but ultimately, it's not us that makes the miracle happen.

It takes a long time. No, you can't have your bell peppers and chives tomorrow. I know - "Damn it!" Yeah, the weeds still creep up and get in the way of the veggies you're trying to yield, but taking it day-by-day will prohibit losing it again to the undesired gunk. It can be beautiful with care. You'll have something worth sharing in the end.

It's worth it - every painstaking moment.

There is nothing more glorious than growth.

My room.

I sit in my room. My room. I've only been calling it mine for about three weeks now. When I was a kid, I saw this TV show that featured some new-age self-improvement hippie shrink who claimed that one's room can be considered a reflection of that person's current emotional state. I took that to heart. I used that to justify the never quite put together state of the space I called my own.

I organize it much like I "organize" me. ...I really don't.

Three weeks into this space and I've made little progress. I have piles of potential. I have pictures I want to hang up, but haven't gotten around to it because I need to remove some from frames and replace them with people I can stand to hang on my walls. I have piles of things I used to take pride in - books that inspired me, movies that moved me, technology I used to enjoy. There they are - my beliefs, my ideals, my goals. Disjointed. Collecting dust. Needing attention I haven't given them.

I look at my room and realize that we both need to change. We need to settle into this next stage of life. We need to get organized. We need to shelf the past, get rid of the ugly, and design the future. We need to make us beautiful again, inviting, warm, coherent.

This isn't easy for either for us.

My room and I never meant to end up in the city where we are. We never thought it'd be just us again. I shared my former room with someone else and that someone else was supposed to always share a room with me. That was the plan. I thought his piles were there to stay. I thought our piles complemented each other's. I thought that made me happy.

Looking at my dusty and unread ideals, my un-hung relationships, my un-laundered self-image, I realize I'd let someone else's piles define my space, ...my life.

So, my room and I are starting over. Just us. It's time to spruce things up. It's time for both of us to fall back in love with the fact that neither of us will ever be 100% tidy or presentable. We're going to learn how to be okay with just each other.

I'm making my room ...and my life ...mine again.