Bees in My Bonnet

 These are the days I walk around seeing life with new and different eyes. They are eyes bathed in the furnace of suffering, with understanding unobtained before now.  Those dreaded words landed like a thud: "They discovered cancer." My Mom has been diagnosed with Small Cell Lung Cancer, typically a cancer only seen in smokers or their partners. It feels heavy and dark, and menacing and cruel, and so many other things that words don't seem to describe.  (Taking Mom to the hospital in Arkansas with my sister) It is one thing to hear about it. And to feel sad. To think on it. To learn of it. To wonder where this goes - typically nowhere good, except, I suppose, heaven. Heaven is good. I'm okay with the heaven part. It's the process of getting there that somehow unnerves me. I've had little fear of death in my life. God gives us these years, some more, some less, and we must reckon with the undeniable reality that 100% of people die. The statistic stares us blank...

 I happen to be a person (I know, I'm stating the obvious. But I'm going somewhere). A person in a nuclear family - where I am the wife and Mom.  I also once came from a family where I was the daughter and sister. And families teach us things - about who we are, who we are in relationship, who we are in the world. And families, no matter how independent we each think we are, shape and influence how we see ourselves and our relationships and our identity, our honor and esteem, our worth and dignity. We all come from some family system - I'll venture to say - even if we are raised in an institution or in some non-traditional structure. We form a 'self-concept' from those around us - our closest relationships tell us who we are, in essence. And somewhere along the way, our family - my family now, and my family before, has told me what it is to feel shame. This is not unique to my family, nor to yours. I believe it is universal. We develop a code - often unwritten and u...

 I recently read an article that referenced something about 'the true, the good, and the beautiful.' Isn't it a bit audacious to state anything about these 3 things? Isn't it a bit presumptuous? A bit, you know, not very inclusive? I mean, who gets to say what is true, (like, is it only 'your truth'?), what is good ('what's good for me may not be good for you!'), or what's beautiful? Just referencing these three things, without qualifiers, without inclusive language and disclaimers, is bold, daring and even more than a bit assertive. It says, in essence that truth exists without qualifiers. That goodness exists without my deeming something good. And that beauty is more than simply in the eye of the beholder - that beauty exists alone, without me giving some special framework or caveat about my individual kind of artistic expression. I mean, I play at art, but I'm not sure I'd call it beautiful (nor would anyone else with any taste, I imag...