:Naiahdot

In a month it will have been a year since I wrote why I hadn’t written in half a year. I’m thinking it’s really time to lay this site to rest. Over the years I’ve grown and changed, and my readership has shifted again and again. I’ve alienated and offended people. I’ve baffled and bemused. I’ve also scared, confused, touched, and, undoubtedly bored.

Though I have not chronicled it here, I have gone on growing and changing in the ensuing textual silence. A whole new chapter has begun in my life–more like a whole new volume after many new chapters have come and gone–one so new and so different as to be utterly incongruous with any old thread that I might pick up from here. It is a happy new chapter, the happiest of my adult life–well, really, of my life, period. So, you needn’t worry about my signing off. I am on to sweet new horizons.

My sincere thanks for all that I received from having done this-my own increase in personal clarity as well as the support and feedback that so many people have given me over the years through this medium. I’m grateful for all the doors that were opened to me through my efforts here, even if I never did quite step through many of them.

I have no desire to be any kind of a public figure, a writer or a blogger or anything else, as I fade into my life of delicious ordinariness–filled with love and art and beauty and growth.

Wish me luck, and please know that I sincerely wish you well.

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For months now, I have wrestled with varying degrees of resistance to writing here, ranging from my own reticence for fear of pride to outright stupor of thought those times when I’d made up my little mortal mind to just roll my sleeves up and have at it. I’ve called up screens and stared at them until the words “Write Post” were burned into my retinas. A few times I’ve managed to tap out a bit, but never anything inspired, in any way worth sharing, or, occasionally, even coherent.

As the subtitle of this site states, I write here to make sense of it all, to process all the various theses, antitheses, and yes, even my own varying syntheses as they flow through my life and mind. Sometimes I write to process. Sometimes I write to proselytize. Sometimes I write to persuade. Even then, though, when I think I have scrap of understanding that I wish to share, in the process of writing, that God-given ephemeral abstract pursuit of condensing the myriad sensations of existence into linear text, even then I am further cementing the order of my thoughts as I experience their verbalization.

I could not begin to make sense of the last several months of my life if I had two research assistants, a team of experts, and the Oracle of Delphi to help me.

I live in a small town. I like living in my small town. I don’t like leaving my small town. In fact, as a rule, I just don’t unless I have to. Well, last summer, I packed up and left town for quite a while and had what was safely one of the richest life experiences of my 30-odd years. I was blessed, together with my children, to get to spend a month of our summer living with some of the displaced FLDS mothers and children down in Texas. Yes, I went all the way to Texas. Yes, I went to stay with the FLDS in Texas. What a priceless cross-cultural experience!

You see, I had been very moved by both what I had seen of their plight in regard to the YFZ Raid of 2008, as well as what I had managed to learn of their lifestyle previous to it. I wished publicly that I could live among them and learn from them, and that wish was granted. I learned more there than I could even begin to quantify.

That one month is still being processed some six months later. (Has it really been that long?!?! I hadn’t counted until now.) Sure, I said above that sometimes I write to process, but there’s a fair level of pre-writing processing that has to take place before I can even begin to piece together a sentence, and, being a busy mother, I really don’t have anything close to the time to relax and peacefully ponder a body of experience of such depth and breadth and height. I have, at times, impatiently begged for understanding, but I was met with nothing but a quiet admonition to patience. And so, I wait. If He meant for me to have it, I would have it by now, but I don’t, and I’m ok with that.

I, myself, wait rather patiently on the Lord these days. He has kept me plenty busy with volumes more life experience in arenas much closer to home, and so, like a lovingly distracted and redirected toddler, I find myself not even thinking much about the lack of recent posts on my blog. All my concerns about yesterday, and all my fears about tomorrow are remedied by living today as best I can (a spectacular truth that I picked up from my FLDS friends), and so I find myself staying in the moment. So much so that, apparently, six months have gone by before I could even stop to reckon them up on my fingers. All through this time, though, I have been receiving such kind and sweet encouragement to begin writing again, from such different quarters of my life, that I felt I needed to offer some explanation for my silence.

So, there you have it. I’ve been blessed with one of the most priceless experiences of my mortal sojourn, but without the corresponding capstone of understanding. If anything, I’ve learned how little I know, especially when I think I know something (and really that train of thought can get me chasing my tail so long I’ll never write another public word again if I don’t break it off). Perhaps I will need to just set that all aside, and accept that, contrary to what seems like the obvious thing to do with such an exceptional life experience, I may need to just set it on the shelf, and go on writing without having actually made sense of it all.

I do like writing. I love words. Next to flowers, they’re one of my favorite aspects of this world the Lord has given us. Mostly, though, I like the thinking and the moments of clarity and understanding that come along as connections are made and truths are realized, but really, in the end, like flowers, such things are gifts, and it’s not up to me whether I am to be a receiver or not, and so I just wait and cheerfully tend to my work elsewhere.

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A house divided against itself cannot stand, and a mind divided against itself cannot write. Having taken a stance in behalf of the FLDS at a time when the church into which I was baptized 13 years ago has taken a bafflingly aggresive public stance against them has placed me in a very awkward situation. I can’t help but wonder if the leaders of my church are as misinformed about these people as it seems most everyone but their few-and-far-between allies is these days, for the Spirit has whispered to me gently but intently that I was to seek out understanding, that I was to learn about them and their ways. As I followed that personal prompting, a most amazing thing happened. I found that as one allegation after another began to fall away, the people I thought I was learning about bore little to no resemblance to who they actually are. I have been blessed to learn about them, and even to get to know some of them. I have come to love these people.

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Those closest to me have known that my mind has been consumed to a great degree concerning ways of living, particularly the paradoxical requirements of living life as a saint in modern society. Much of my thinking has touched on or been inspired by the lifestyle lived by the members of the FLDS who reside at the YFZ ranch in Texas, brought to public view by their recent, heart-wrenching, constitution-crunching persecution and the veritable mass-kidnapping of their children. Since learning of their plight, I have followed the developments of their case closely. I have haunted their new church-sponsored websites, FLDS Truth: the truth about the FLDS faith, Captive FLDS Chilren, and the blog-like Truth Will Prevail waiting for the next development. Three times now, a name has caught my eye, “Maggie Jessop.”

Maggie is absolutely brilliant.

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Note: I originally published this for just a few minutes right after I wrote it, but then I took it down and sent it in email to select group of my closest friends and confidants. I have decided to go ahead and make it public now.

I can’t speak as to how legally defensible it is, and judging by the recent treatment of the members of the FLDS church, it isn’t, but I would like to claim for myself, and for others who choose it, the right to opt out.

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Normally, you wake up in the morning, and you know who you are, what your place in the world is, and what that world is like. The fact is, there are countless worlds, even within your neighborhood, and it’s up to you which one you choose to live in. There are countless realities, of infintely varying shades and hues, even within the very same home. How you choose to live, who you choose to be, what you choode to do with your life and time, and how you choose to do it. These all rest on a sense of identity and a confidence in your context. What if one day you woke up and began to question your context? Am I where I need to be? Am I living how the Lord wants me to live? Are these values and ideals His true values and ideals? Am I just fooling myself? Am I holding true, being “in the world but not of it,” or have I sold out to the world and man’s ways?

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It’s time.

My experiences in the hospital have at long last stopped stirring and settled into their place in my mind. In the end, like most of life, all the pain and anguish and ludicrosity have become little more to me than a handful of anecdotes ranging from the embarassing-yet-hilarious encounter in which I, being dosed beyond belief on morphine, vehemently argued with someone that the woodgrain on my hospital room doors was actually an intricately crafted painting in which there were pictures inside pictures (such as a tiger curled up in the nose of the dragon which itself was contained within the arm of the princess’s dress, and so forth) to the more sobering, desperately frightening recollection of just what it felt like to fight for breath as my own blood began to flood my lungs while I was lying in a CT scan machine before they knew what was wrong. Yes, it’s quite a range.
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This past December, Joel Dehlin, spotlighted the book Leadership and Self-Deception, by The Arbinger Institute. At Joel’s suggestion, I picked up a copy, but, owing to other events and the misassumption that it was just a business book, I ended up placing it on a shelf not to be looked at for several months. Some time later, as I was browsing through amazon, I was looking at their entry for The Peacegiver, and I noticed Leadership and Self-Deception listed in the “Customers who bought this also bought” section of the page.

I was instantly intrigued, and proceeded to click around. “Oh look, the guy who wrote Peacegiver is the managing director of Arbinger, and oh, hey, that other book that my friend sent me, Bonds that Make Us Free, is by C. Terry Warner, and look, here in the intro he tells the story of how Arbinger came to be. Hmm, what’s this whole Arbinger thing about?” Click, click, “hmm, interesting.” Click, click, click, “oh, my husband might really dig this.” (He’s in the midst of what, for lack of better terminology is a kind of moral philosophy research project in his spare time.) “Click, click, hey there’s more; this looks great. I’m defnitely giving it to Robert.”
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Though my body still draws inviolable (and intolerable!) limits on my activity from time to time, I am pronouncing myself “more or less all better.” One of the consulting surgeons on my case told me that after six weeks, I’d be ‘better’ at 80% of my usual capacity, but that it’d be about 4 months until I was a full 100% again. Considering I volunteered to help teach a routine to the Beehives in my ward and proceeded to not just dance, but full-on hype the routine to a room of tweens and early teens (never an easy task) to the point that I got them to really sell it with me for an hour and a half last wednesday, I’d say this 80% is serving me pretty well. Ok, so, um, that much dancing definitely helped me get to know some of those limits (I paid for it for a day or two afterward), but still, I did it, and it–felt–great!!

Come to think of it, this 80% is serving me so well, in fact, that I’m going to shut this silly laptop and go engage my day. I suggest you do the same.

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I hate writing these posts that’re about nothing but the condition and events of my life. I would much rather write about my studies and ponderings, the whisperings of the Spirit, or something else with some mental or spiritual sustenance to it, and I will get back to that eventually. In the meantime, for those who have asked, I wanted to let everyone know that I am doing a little better every day. I am actually unmedicated today, completely–not even Tylenol, for the first time in weeks, and I am certainly holding my own. I’d say that my physical state can officially be downgraded from ‘pain’ to ‘discomfort,’ and that’s some seriuos progress.
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