This is a week that cannot be written about.  I look at the screen and my mind is whirling with thoughts, none of them useful.  We are trying to superimpose old routines upon this time of the year.  They don’t fit, or they slip loose and nothing is neat and tidy.

Depression is working its disparaging wiles upon each day. Life can be a pretty depressing place.  Reality sharp and ugly.  Having an upside, means there is a downside.

This Christmas/Holiday season seems the neediest that I have recognized in years.  Physical need, financial need, emotional need are all begging on the street corners of my heart.

The people who should be applauded, heralded and celebrated are those who can still dredge up hope.  Hope.  Personally I’m feeling a little blank about that.   I have some painful concerns that have been nagging me lately and disturbing my sleep.

I prefer fantasy to reality, illusion felt good.

The people that you love come complete with their own personality, the messy things.   While my own personality is at war with itself, chiding me for my roller-coaster moods, wishing I had learned to overcome the disheveled parts long ago, tidied up, tucked more in.

It is just another day, after all.  Just one more day in the desert.

I have lost an inch in height.  Does that count for anything?  I was 5’10” in 2008 and now I am 5’9″.   I had a bone density test done, which will reveal its results sometime next week.  I thought I was shorter at the wedding in October.   I am being worn away like the eraser at the end of a pencil.  I need to be sharpened again too.

I am missing my son, in the most painful of ways.   I miss his calm.  I miss his voice and company.   I miss his way of balancing us with his own brand of craziness with our craziness.

I don’t want to veer off the track, I want to stay on the course that I think life should stay on, one that includes loving others because you know how much love is needed to survive while in this world.   Nothing is going to allow you to live life unscathed, nothing.   We are in in bumper cars on a darkened course and it is only happenstance that allows you to get through with less dings than the next guy.  Messy, messy life.

I don’t understand God.  I thought I did, idiot that i am.  Goes to show you I am like a lot of other people out there, deluded by such thoughts!  Jesus is more a mystery than ever.   My theory, if you want to hear it , was that he came to  build a bridge.

I have made pottery cups and bowls – badly – but I made them.   I spent time with the clay, wedging it and preparing it for the wheel.  I wet my hands I used my sponge, I applied leveraged pressure, anchoring my elbow.  I have no idea how all that felt to the clay.  I’ve decided that God sent Jesus to be a hunk of clay like the rest of us, so that he could have an inside line on why we can’t seem to get it.

I am depending on Jesus to interpret for me on a minute by minute basis.

I’m glad the world is celebrating something about Him.  I’m afraid our celebration of the holidays has never been one that Christ was the focus.  Our personal family celebration was one about being a family.  We liked being to together.  We enjoyed just having the four of us.  Snobs.

I always thanked God when the day came and when it was over.  I appreciated the fact He had granted us that time.  I think we should if we are going to acknowledge and celebrate Him as creator of everything do or say something every day.  Just saying.

This territory is brand new.  We did the wedding and survived, so I suppose we will do the same with Christmas, and New Year and our son’s birthday.  It is so much effort.  But then it always has been to some extent – I just didn’t use to mind it so badly.