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Feeling Triggered?
Feeling triggered lately? Yeah, I thought so. Me too. I don’t blame you. It would be hard not to be triggered with all the fear hanging in the air like a thick layer of pheromones. What’s your poison—your particular trigger?
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Time after Time
I’ve been thinking about time this week. Physics majors, as I was long ago, are surprised to learn that physical laws do not depend on time going in only one direction. There’s only one law that requires time to move in a single direction, the second law of thermodynamics, which states that entropy is always increasing. Energy gets more dispersed, not less.
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Take Back the Night—and the Garden
I found myself in therapy in the late 1980s because I didn’t understand how to receive the nurturing I deserved, especially in sexual relationships. My therapist, Fred, had been trained in Primal Therapy. The process of unraveling soul-crushing trauma by following the trail of excess emotion turned out to be a very effective tool for me. In fact, I uncovered so much that one day I actually found myself reliving my birth. It was terrifying, so much so that I vowed I would do what I could to make my children’s births less traumatic.
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Mama Mary: Nature and Nurture
As I mentioned in my post about the Agony in the Garden, I love gardens. Flowers, particularly, mean a lot to me. A beautiful flower can almost always strike a joyful chord in my heart, even if I am in the depths of despair. So when Perdita announced that this would be the “Flower Power” novena, intended to nourish the garden that is the Way of the Rose community, I was all in.
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True Love Stories Never End
Many of you know I’ve written a memoir about my relationship with my ex-husband, which went from deep love to intense loss and betrayal before winding its way back to a different, but no less powerful, kind of love. Mama Mary’s been pushing me to get this book “out there” for a while now, especially now because there are so many people who are dealing with loss. The last couple of months I have been working toward that goal, but slowly and with great resistance—okay, perhaps terror is a better word.
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Agony in a Garden?
Have you ever heard a phrase you’re very familiar with and suddenly it meant something different to you, as if you were hearing it for the first time? That happened to me very recently when I was praying the Sorrowful Mysteries with the Agony in the Garden.
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Going Public: “This Is Who I Am!”
I’ve noticed a theme on Way of the Rose novena posts lately, people baring their hearts and souls and changing themselves and others in the process. This is a theme I would like to see continuing. I think it is very important that as many of us as possible stand up and say, “This is who I am.”
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Tiger Mommying
There was a really popular book by Amy Chua called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that came out in 2011. It was about a strict, disciplinarian form of parenting that was supposed to result in kids who graduate from Harvard and Yale. This is not that. It may even be the opposite of that.
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Full of Grace
Mama Mary’s been prompting me to consider the idea of grace in a novena post. When we say the standard rosary, we say the phrase “full of grace” 53 times, so it must be a pretty important concept. I confess, my understanding of “grace” has always been a bit fuzzy. I’m sure it’s really awesome, but what exactly is it?
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Death as a (Potentially) Glorious Part of Life
Yesterday, I talked about death and how the rosary gives us two examples, one violent, one peaceful. One sorrowful, and one glorious. I didn’t make that explicit yesterday, but it’s there isn’t it? Mary’s death is literally classified as “glorious.”
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