With inner clocks that sense
Every additional minute
As it is added to hours of sun
And not because it makes them warm
But because it is all that they know to do
They bloom.
Category: Uncategorized
The way I always thought it should be…
Seattle in early spring is the way I imagined it before I had ever been here. Today was cool (50’s ) and rainy, clouds rolling through. Everything green is glowing, in contrast to the grays and browns of wet rocks and trees. I am usually here during the one week in summer when there is a heat wave, so this sweet chill is a treat for me. I am prepared for this visit with my sweatshirt hoodies and scarves, and of course my walking shoes.
I took my friend Charlie the dog for a walk on one of our favorite routes from last summer. I couldn’t stop looking at all the things that were visible through trees that hadn’t leafed out yet. Surprisingly, there are a lot of houses hanging precariously on the sides of the ravine above the park’s lower trail. I did not know they were so close. In spite of the cold, there are flowers coming out all over, and they are different from the ones in the summer or fall. And the lush moss grows everywhere. 
We walked up to the top of the ridge over Alki Beach (what a workout, gasp..) and I was glad to be here, grateful to be seeing it all. I couldn’t help wishing that my friend Karyn who followed my stories last summer was still here to read again. I was grateful that it was a day when resurrection, physical resurrection, was on my mind. As unexplainable as it sounds to modern ears, a man came back to life never to die again. Because he did this miraculous thing, Karyn will too. This is not a hard thing for me to believe, because I see life coming out of what looks dead all around me. It’s right there in front of us, if we have eyes to see and hearts willing to consider.
Thanking Jesus for doing what he did – the first of many.
Watch your step…
Observation while biking around the neighborhood this morning:
Don’t shuffle, don’t waddle (unless you are pregnant). If you walk like that you will get old, immediately.
Looking for Adventure
I have this fear, and I’m sure we all do – that we are going to run out of adventures and slip ignominiously into the boredom abyss. To stave off this looming possibility I decided to sign up as an Uber driver.
I signed up a few weeks ago actually, almost by accident because it was so easy. I wondered if I could and before I knew it, I had. Not that they don’t vet their drivers, because they do. But it takes a matter of minutes instead of the days that usually pass when you want to be cleared for something.
I took my first rider the next day, just to see what it was like before I left to visit my daughter. I took a nice tourist 10 miles south to visit a friend of his. It was the briefest of exposure to the Uber app but enough to make me think “I can do this. I can.”
Now, more than three weeks have passed, my Mom has gone back to the north woods, and Uber has started sending me messages asking why I’m not driving and hinting about my partner account being at risk (AAAAGGGHHH!!!) They call it an inactivity alert. Of course we wouldn’t want that to happen, so I went driving yesterday. All day. I’ll show them.
It’s slightly addictive. It’s like the feeling I get when I’ve just published a post and am waiting for reactions. The phone starts ringing and flashing. I get such an adrenaline rush. I have to accept that invite. I have to see who wants a ride. I have to get out there and sit in long lines of slow moving traffic.
No, wait…
I thought I was used to the long red lights at intersections. Here in Florida, probably no where else, the traffic is horrible, horrible, horrible in the winter. The weather is nice and that’s why so many people are here, in their cars. But now, the red lights seem much longer, like maybe half an hour when I am trying to get quickly to a passenger. And maybe even longer than that in cases like tonight when five teen-age boys were giggling and snorting over something on their ride to Shake ‘n Steak, in my car.
I won’t get rich driving for Uber (more about that later) but I’m already finding it adventurous. Can’t wait to write about the experience as it progresses… just sayin’.
One Last Place
Rather than gliding smoothly
It won’t budge even though it’s pulled
Forward, backward until fingers ache from the effortl
It doesn’t look that bad
From the outside where the teeth
Are shiny and black and only a small bit of paint –
It flakes off with the wiggling, a sign of the greater problem.
It was in a bad place
Where the humidity and who knows what else
Sat on it for too long a time and it began to change inside
Looking closely, there
There it is along the edges…
Dusty, irregular, misshapen line of gray
The metal of one
Grows into the metal of the other
In a weld of fusion and confusion that renders it immobile, stuck.
Scraping it away
Looking for true strength beneath
There are so many places where the corrosion sits
But, there has to be
One last place, that when it is freed
It moves and becomes, once again, what it was meant to be.
S. Dietz 2016
Letter to My Daughters on Valentine’s Day
First of all, I know that this day has taken on new meaning in our culture mostly because of business and marketing. How completely wrong that there are people who will feel sad and less valued because they didn’t get a bouquet of roses or some candy or a card (from someone who felt obligated to do it whether they wanted to or not…).
Although both of you lovely women might get a gift or two, you both also feel a lack in your life when it comes to the relationships our society idolizes. I want you to be able to see through the hype thrown at you, that sneaks in and lingers in the shadows in your mind – that voice that says…
you are less,
you are flawed,
you are boring,
you are not ready,
you are never,
you are not…
In reality you are beautiful young women who are brave enough to be alone if need be. You are proving it by being alone now. If you were less strong, less committed to your ideals, less in tune with who God made you to be, you could be in a so called “relationship” even now. But getting a gift on February 14th doesn’t necessarily mean you are truly loved with constancy, faithfulness, sacrifice, and without conditions. No love on earth gives you that line up.
Meanwhile you have a treasure trove of people who love and value you for who you have been, who you are now and who you will be. Even more important you have a Creator who knows you better than all these others and who knows the shortest route to your ultimate happiness. Hard to believe at times? Yes. But you are on that route – it’s called life in Christ. It’s marked by lessons in trust that are often hard and seem never to have an end. But you will be taken care of in difficulty and you will benefit from each and every hard thing and they will create an even more beautiful you. It happens faster when you realize that’s the purpose and get to that place of gratitude.
Happy Valentine’s Day daughters, and remember…
You are more than you sometimes feel you are.
You are on your way to perfection.
You are fascinating.
You are ready for whatever is next, with God’s help.
You are always in His view and his planning.
You are a daughter of someone called The Eternal “I Am”.
This Is Where I Start
“And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.”
From “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” by William Wordsworth
A Striking Story
There are many things I don’t care pretend to understand, one of them being how messages travel through the air to our various devices. One of my irrational fears is that the air around us will one day be as crowded with planes, drones, internet chatter and streaming movies as our highways have become crowded with cars and trucks. The changes in my lifetime are highlighted by this story that my mom told me this week.
It started with a discussion about the holes that the husband is always cutting in our doors and walls to balance the air flows in the house. Mom remembered a door in the farmhouse I grew up in. She had to stuff paper, cloth, whatever she could find, in the cracks around it to keep the breeze out. Dad eventually paneled over the door which was the best solution to the problem. The door was in the corner of our living room and that corner was where our first TV sat. It rested on a square table, designed for it, with a cut out to keep the bottom of the TV from overheating.
As mom recalls, we were among the first in our rural neighborhood to even have a TV. We would not have had it except for Uncle Bob and Aunt Irene from the “big city”. Uncle Bob was an artist working for Western Printing illustrating children’s books. They were not rich but it seemed so to us. They took real vacations and brought their speedboat up to the lake near our farm where we all learned to water ski. Uncle Bob liked new cars and traded up frequently. They had a dog of recognizable breed and a house in the suburbs.
They were also generous and passed things along to our family (Dad was Aunt Irene’s little brother). In the early 1950’s one of the hand me downs was a used TV. They got a new model and in those days no one would have thought they needed two so they brought us the old one. It was such a miracle, that pictures could come from hundreds of miles away into our living room. We gave no thought to them looking like they had been filmed outdoors on a snowy day. To make out anything at all on the screen was fascinating to us.
We did have one neighboring farmer who had television and he showed my Dad how to get a better signal from the one broadcasting network 240 miles away in Minneapolis. As I pictured it from Mom’s description, it was a uni-directional array of poles and wires in the field behind our house, designed to “suck in” Ed Sullivan and Lawrence Welk from the sky. Other factors frequently interfered and kept picture quality down but that didn’t keep our family from hosting others to come and experience the wonders of television.
My hands on memories of TV watching came later. A new station originating only 90 miles away in Duluth gave us options, but that also meant upgrading our so called “antenna” in the field. We graduated to a tall pole mounted on the side of the house with a grid of rods that could be rotated in any direction. One of us kids would station ourselves to watch the TV while another would go outside and turn the antenna and a third would relay messages back and forth.
“Stop!”
“No, go back, it was better before!”
“Are you still turning?”
“We’re getting nothing now, turn some more!”
“Wait, I saw something!”
The flat, plastic coated, double wire, had to be stripped and the exposed copper threads were twisted around two screws in the back of the tv. That, the on/off switch and a dial with no more than 10 positions for channels, was as complicated as it got.
As exciting as it was to watch shows like “Sky King”, “Roy Rogers”, “Rin Tin Tin” and “Robin Hood”, our real excitement came one day out of a clear blue sky. Our antenna towered above our house which sat in a clearing surrounded by forest and fields. I suppose because it bore a remarkable resemblance to a lightning rod, nature mistook it for one and sent a bolt of lightning its way. Electrical conduction being what it is the lightning zoomed down the wires and into the house, where it burned a hole in the bottom of our TV and scared us half to death. We could have been electrocuted.
But it was the start of the television era for us and we were hooked. Oddly enough, I don’t remember the lightning strike making a bit of difference in our TV watching habits. After the TV was repaired, we just sat a little further away.
Anniversary Thoughts
January 14, 2016, 43 years since I married the husband. What have I learned in all this time?
There are always new things to discover in a relationship, new ways to look at old things.
It is better to work on familiar problems with a person you know and trust, than to start over from zero with someone you don’t know.
The husband and I are both persons before God first, then we are a couple.
Praying for my husband gives me a whole new reason to be interested in his growth.
Praying with my husband, before God, is the safest way to be vulnerable.
Letting the culture tell me what to expect from marriage is a big mistake. Every couple I’ve known is unique.
If I have to have things done my way, just do them and be glad.
If I want help I must be willing to let him help in his way and be glad.
We were not brought together because of the things we have in common but because of our complementary differences.
Bad feelings change over time.
Good feelings change over time.
Being in trouble together brings us closer, thankfully.
Nothing makes it easier to forgive than needing to be forgiven, but don’t keep score.
It is okay to take care of myself and avoid the martyr complex. I am more fun when I’m having fun.
Asking kindly for things works really well.
I say I have learned these things, but actually, I’m still working on many of them and seeing progress. God has given me marriage and family as a school. There are “treasures” of learning as a result of keeping covenant over time – I am humbled and blessed to be in a safe and loving relationship that allows me to learn and grow spiritually. Thank you, Dennis, for being a faithful man who has never held me back, never “lorded” it over me, never intentionally been unkind. I would marry you all over again.
Love, the wife.
Shoveling the Drive
While some are bundled up and shoveling the white stuff, I am in my shirtsleeves and shorts shoveling the red stuff. I’m not complaining.
If you’d like to check out Just Jot January, the rules are here.
I Just Have to Say... 