My profound challenge for 2020 is to finally tackle writing about what’s happened in our lives over the past fifteen years. Some would call it writing a memoir, to me it feels more like forcing myself to strip naked and take a flying leap off of a cliff while figuring out where to go from here. All of which is exhilarating and terrifying. I can’t not do it any more.

This is daunting at the outset. Had I known from the beginning how hard the years would be, I don’t think I would have taken this course, but here we are and we’re fine. No regrets.

It is actually a trilogy winding through the past fifteen years: my love and loss of Rick, my ordination and subsequent imprisonment for my grief, and then the loss of my vocation and our season of homelessness while wandering through the wilderness.

I needed some real distance from all three of these watershed seasons in order to keep going for my kids more than for myself, but of course, we can’t distance ourselves from our own path.

So, as a New Year’s Day promise to Chloe and with profound trepidation, I’m going to tackle recalling these tender dark seasons and write it all out. I still want to run away from it. PTSD is always with me, ever ready to fight or flee. It is when I feel paralyzed that I weep.

I weep at the thought of remembering it all in detail, yet Chloe and Max are my muses and my inspiration. Chloe quietly holds the umbrella through most of these stories and Max gives me a toolkit to make it so. They are my kindred companions, now off on their own adventures. Now I have the space and time to breathe it all in and let it go.

So, where to begin again? I won’t post what I’m writing from day to day, but I will write and post one original haiku and photograph each day for a year. This haiku and snapshot will conjure a word or phrase toward which I will focus my scribbles for the day. Some days I trust it will be all that I can do and it will be enough.

We’ll see what flows from here…

There you are, my love
I wondered when we met if
this would be our path.

❤️
mjh

photo by mjh