I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart; I will tell of all your wonderful deeds. I will be glad and exult in you; I will sing praise to your name, O Most High. -Psalm 9:1-2
I am super pissed off at the world right now, but choosing to focus on the beauty that God has brought into my life.
We gathered for our weekly Allschoolers meetup and were surprised by pulled pork nachos on the fire!
Homemade tools, sporting jabs, and teamwork were the usual ingredients in our regular festivities.
This group has kept me warm, sane, and fed these last couple years. We defied Lockdown and came together to serve our children. What we found was a community that none of us knew we needed. I fucking love these humans.
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They change the rules arbitrarily and give you a few days to comply.
Regular people are just trying to get by. They’re trying not to screw up their kids. They’re trying to keep their businesses afloat. They’re trying to stay in shape. They’re trying to fix their relationships. They’re trying to learn a new skill to help create a better world. They’re trying to make their way in a world full of suffering.
The Doomers lack compassion for how radically society has been forced to change in a few months. They don’t see the substance abuse, suicides, and crippling loneliness that people are experiencing. Doomers have taken people’s joys away from them and told them they are selfish and ignorant to complain about it.
They are willing to “beat the virus” at any cost. Whether that is possible is a real scientific debate. What’s not debatable is how far someone will go if he thinks he is saving the world. Fascism enters the human heart when you think you are the charismatic leader here to save the People. You don’t see individuals anymore, you only see the Compliant and the Noncompliant. You discover it’s okay to yell at, shame, and lie to the Noncompliant in order to meet your righteous goal.
That’s why these governors, mayors, and bureaucrats sound like dictators, because in their hearts they are. Then the compliant armies march, taken in by propaganda delivered by experts and validated through corporate media.
They are tearing apart society with their dictates and telling those of us trying to be responsible for our own lives and the lives of our families that we are the threat.
The only things the Noncompliant are a threat to are the centers of power and control.
I’ve got my priorities of responsibility in order: God, myself, my children, family, friends, and community. I seek truth and liberty in each of those responsibilities, not power.
I’m thankful for the way God made me. My soul craves freedom, not just for itself, but for all it can touch.
We met with a new group of home educating families today. The children learned about their bodies and had a lot of fun. It was a simple exercise and we followed it up with a hike through some interesting woods at Killens Pond State Park.
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We’ve been hosting unschoolers for a weekly Lego club called Time to Build and I’m going to start documenting their creations and our experiences.
This challenge was equal parts fun and dangerous and produced a laser canon that my son was happy with.
I got in on the building when one of our younger guests requested a giraffe. I grabbed The Lego Ideas Book and copied this design as closely as I could.
I love this time with friends. The home education community is incredibly diverse and I love getting to know other parents and how they go about facilitating their children’s education.
On the night my wife went to Heaven I was connected to God’s transformational love. Mary and I had recently accepted Jesus into our lives and lived our lives with a focus on love for each other and our sons. I feared losing her love in death. When it came time for her soul to leave this world, a cascade of love poured over me. A rainbow followed her to Heaven and I was filled with light and love. I’ve stood imperfectly on that rainbow bridge ever since.
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It was a super power. I felt like Green Lantern with a ring that could cover the world in love. I said as much at her memorial and lived like that for months, loving on everyone I knew and met.
But there was another comic book character that inhabited me when no one was looking. Frank Castle, The Punisher, had been a favorite of mine as a boy. Now I was watching the TV show and wondering why the darkness of this man who lost his wife and children to violence was speaking to me. I chalked it up to the vagaries of grief. Mary’s death hadn’t felt like heartbreak (I was far too afraid to admit that to anyone), it was a psychological break (didn’t share that either). My ego was scaffolding bolted to a wall that read HUSBAND AND FATHER. When most of that was smashed, there wasn’t enough to hold onto. My mind slowly shattered and I lost a sense of Self as I fell.
I was drinking and hating myself like Castle at night (or morning, or whenever I could). I put on Green Lantern’s ring for the world to see, to cover up a brokeness I could only partly see. For a full year I acted the Jeckyl and Hyde routine. Even after sobering up, I was addicted to the power of the ring, exploiting my imagination to fill the world around me with love.
A heartbreak shook me from the cover up game. I had been showering love on a woman and her children and that was taken away. The hollowness of it left me confused, “I’m better at loss than this.”
I don’t know why I picked up Louise Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life. I had carried it around for more than 20 years, a gift from my father. Maybe it was the rainbow heart on the cover.
Rereading the dedication now gives me all the answers. Self-worth, pure love, and self-acceptance were missing from my heart. I saw God’s infinite love as something external. A force or tool to wield, perhaps a weapon at times. I hadn’t personally accepted His love for me. I hadn’t seen the folly in trying to reciprocate a love that I wouldn’t accept for myself.
Through the reading, mostly done in early mornings on my kitchen floor, I turned my gaze inward and began to love the parts of myself that I had been hiding away. I didn’t need Green Lantern’s ring or The Punisher’s toughness to thrive, I needed to accept my own special place in an infinite love that flowed through, from, and around me.
It’s all still imperfect. I’m only a guru to myself. The self work is the thing.
My sons and I were supposed to go on a hike today with other families who have lost loved ones. Delaware’s governor imposed regulations this week that forced its cancellation.
This is not okay. These children and parents are facing crushing loneliness. Some of them lost a mother, father, sibling, child, or other close family member during the Lockdown and have had little contact with others.
My children have made friends in this group and meet new, wonderful children each time we get together.
After having met outside several times this fall and summer, there have been no reported cases of Covid-19 within the group.
This group is invaluable to families who have had much of their support structure taken away during the hardest time in their lives.
This is not okay. Children have been kept away from their schoolmates and all of us have had our grief groups and therapists reduced to Zoom, at best.
It’s very difficult for me to connect with someone through an image. In person, I have anxiety and detachment when one, or both, of us are in masks.
I’m concentrating on gratitudes this month, but today is hard. I’m grateful for this outlet. I’m grateful for my widow friends who will meet in person. I’m grateful for the many connections we made before Lockdown and have been able to maintain through it. I’m grateful that I’ve got a lot of fight in me. I’m grateful for my health.
I have an infinite number of things to be grateful for, but today is still hard.
I got dumped last night and this is one of those posts that I hope no one reads.
I met my now-ex-girlfriend days before 2020 began. We had an instant connection and our romance bloomed quickly. She had met my children and we were in a pretty great place when the Lockdowns hit.
I’m radically full of Love and not inclined to fear death. I lost my wife to complications arising from respiratory infections, so this wasn’t a new threat in my life. I feel like a minority in this view and I was pleased that my girlfriend was accepting of my perspective. There’s no way that two people can have the same risk assessments, but we were pretty close.
We each wrestled with the anxieties and confusions of the mainstream narrative and the Lockdowns. We stayed together through tough times and supported each others lows.
That romance has come to an end, but I don’t have animosity. I am filled with gratitude that I had a supportive and loving partner through most of this year.
We’re all connected in many ways. Most of those ways are unknowable. Every day we interact with people who have contagious loved ones, emotional traumas that may be triggered by our careless words, and an innumerable number of threats to our safety.
Life isn’t safe, but it is better than the alternative.
I’m grateful for Lenore Skenazy. She’s helped me to find a deeper trust in my children. The more I embrace their sovereignty, the more the whole world is set free.
An old Italian dude once nicknamed me Maradona. I don’t know, maybe it was because in my twenties I played like I was high on cocaine. Come to think on it, I did everything like I was skiing the Mexican alps. I guess that’s why I can be thankful I never tried the stuff, I was terrified my head would explode.
So we lost that great player today and I got to hit the pitch and feel like the world wasn’t upside down for 50 minutes.
It’s getting harder to find soccer without arbitrary rules imposed by losers who couldn’t keep up with the slowest players I know. I’m blessed to still get chances to play normally and improve my health while having more fun than most people allow themselves.
Thank you to all my teammates and those special individuals who keep hitting me up to play.
