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The Labyrinth at Union of Body, Mind & Soul

I’m not one for holidays and vacations. I believe in building a life that is enriching every day, one that doesn’t need an escape, but has moments of escape each day.

So as the park in Milton, Delaware, filled with Independence Day revelers and King’s Homemade Ice Cream served family after family, we snuck into the welcoming courtyard of Union of Body, Mind & Soul.

My sons are, well, boys, so any moment is ripe for wrestling, racing, and poop jokes. They’re also loving, compassionate creatures who recognize special spaces and look out for my wellbeing. A silly pose at the center of the labyrinth quickly became a twinkle of calm.

Once we got our selfies and completed the circuit, they went to the serious business of exploring and having a bit of fun with Buddha.

The peace of the visit carried us home to Wilmington and a raucous pool party with new and old friends.

Our life can become unbalanced with activities, explorations, and a constant pushing into the unknown. We are blessed to have found another place where much of that can be unwound and processed.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Rainbows at Winterthur, Moon Shine at Delaware Museum of Natural History

It was a slightly desperate move. The forecast of thunderstorms should have kept us away from outdoor adventures, but I was feeling called to opt outside. For nearly three hours we had the grounds of Winterthur Garden at our disposal. Most of that time was spent running in, out, and around the Ottoman Tent as thunder, rain, and sunshine poured from the sky.

I don’t know how many rainbows we spotted, but the highlights included a double rainbow, a complete rainbow, and a miraculous rainbow that appeared on the near side of the trees.

The storms never got close enough to make us very nervous and we laid ourselves in the grass between downpours.

We snacked on mango and spied snakes, chipmunks, catbirds, toads, frogs, fish, redwing blackbirds, a dragonfly, and a green heron.

More than a small part of me wanted to stay for sunset (we joked about camping out in the Tent), but we had pressed our luck with the weather and more adventure awaited across the street at Delaware Museum of Natural History.

The varying clouds kept stargazing off the calendar, but we learned about the moon and our night sky at discovery stations and during live presentations in the auditorium and STARLAB inflatable planetarium.

We wrapped up the evening with fascinating minerals and legitimately scary foliage in the special Wicked Plants exhibition.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Listen to the Impossible Story

Pull that crystal handle back on your time machine and go all the way back to 12 January, 2018. Go and tell me I’d lose my wife within a month and that before the end of spring I’d be in her parent’s RV guiding my sons on a journey I’d never imagined.

My reaction? Impossible. Mary’s healthier than I am and, God forbid, if I lose her I will be lost. I had considered my own death. I had considered the loss of a son, or two. I had imagined how treacherous the lives of those left behind would be, but I leaned on Mary so hard that I never had the courage to imagine life without her. She was my miracle, she brought me to Christ just by walking like him. She didn’t know a darn thing about soccer and made me a better player, turned me into a coach. She humbled me. She showed me what love could do.

Impossible. All of it. You could go back 13 years and tell me all of this. I would not have listened.

I’m glad you didn’t warn me. I’m blessed our tragedy came down the tracks over six days. I didn’t think about impossible: I prayed for a miracle while planning for the likely. Everything was possible in that moment Mary went to Heaven. I was a super hero. She gave me that magic space ring, that radioactive spider bite, that tragedy that turned Frank Castle into The Punisher. Okay, bad example…kinda. I am more keenly aware of my mortality than ever. This present is the only present I have to make the world better, or worse.

So, let’s make it better I say to myself. The first way to make the world better is by making yourself better (I often ignore this primary fact). The second way is to make your family and friends better (hard to do if #1 isn’t in order). The third way is to help those in your community, physically close to you, but strangers nonetheless.

I had internalized the hero’s journey. From comics to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung to the Star Wars trilogy, I bought into it so much that I committed to taking my sons on a road trip adventure before Mary had taken her final breath. It was that thing that happens to us. Not internal, but received. The type of inspiration that told me there was something out there, that my work and my thinking and my mind were not enough on their own, that the work that must be done is opening oneself up to receive the message. That takes more effort and patience than you may think. Your desires and fears will cloud the message and pretend to be the message. Again and again I have found that praying to hear clearly is to ask for the greatest blessing. The more I listen to people; not their declarations, but their stories, the more I love people.

Impossible. We put this barrier before understanding at inconvenient junctures. But how many impossible stories have you heard? Or lived? Impossible isn’t a dream, it’s a mystery we haven’t explored.

God bless,

Jason

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If It Hurts To Go Anywhere, Go Everywhere

There’s no place we go that doesn’t maintain a connection with Mary. The four of us travelled up and down Delaware and tried on every type of event. She’s in the parks, gardens, concert halls, and campgrounds. In places that she had never been, we talk about what her reactions would have been or how she wouldn’t have forgotten the hummus for the carrot sticks.

It doesn’t always hurt, most of the time we’re smiling and remembering how she heightened every experience with her warmth, her smile, and her ability to be present. Sometimes it hurts like hell, especially when there’s something she would particularly enjoy.

Today didn’t hurt. We had fun with family and friends from Lewes to Hockessin and we’re going to bed fully spent.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Not Alone

I got to introduce a new friend to a place that is covered in Mary’s memory today. We met at Delaware Art Museum and I learned that he had never seen the Labyrinth. We chatted and I got to share my favorite place to gather my worries and release them. Besides Mary, he’s the only person I’ve walked the Labyrinth with as a pair. We remained uninterrupted for a full hour, a rarity on a beautiful summer day.

The acoustics kept turning our conversation back to the present and I discovered how much the space resembled a temple in my heart. Sounds are made so crisply clear that I can more easily turn my mind to God and perceive what He wants me to hear. Even through our chatting and the crunching of the gravel under our feet, I could hear that I was in the right place at the right time.

All is well in my world.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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An Unlikely, Art-Filled Life

These pictures were taken three years apart and neither one by me.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016. Reprinted for the DE Creative Kids Passport, 2019.
Peninsula Gallery, 2019

Unschooling has been the most rewarding journey of my life. I still don’t like the word “unschool” and didn’t know it when I started exposing my sons to art before the youngest could walk. I had no history or education with art, I was sent by my wife as she knew there was no way I would be a “stay-at-home” dad. Story times and family-friendly tours and activities got us into museums on a regular basis and I quickly saw the magic that was happening in my sons’ lives.

Delaware Art Museum, 2016
Brandywine River Museum of Art, 2012
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Biggs Museum of American Art, 2015
Meeting the Twin Poets at Delaware Contemporary, 2018
Shakespeare at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2013
Terrific Tuesday at Winterthur Garden, Museum, and Library, 2014

An intentional learning lifestyle has taken us back again and again to our favorite galleries, where there is always something new to discover.

As we return to all these places in 2019 to complete our DE Creative Kids Passport, I will try not to be overwhelmed by the memories that we have made.

God bless and thank you for reading,
Jason

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Creating The Creator?

The following is my response to an NPR podcast episode that was recommended to me recently.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-brain/id1028908750?i=1000415979970

There’s a lot covered in this episode (after a diet of audiobooks, 2-hour Jordan Peterson lectures, and 3-hour Joe Rogan podcasts, I’m impatient with the old constraints), but the final points struck me pretty hard.

One of the conclusions that is reached is that religion was created for social purposes and that modern institutions are capable of creating models of stability and trust that can now supplant the function of religion. I’m a totally biased libertarian, but find that concept a little bit laughable considering history since Nietzsche declared God to be dead. He was right in a societal manner, but also put forth that Man had blood on his hands and needed to find a way to wash himself clean, to create a structure of meaning without an extra-human source.

Man tried that in the 20th century and it was a bloody mess. We’ve worshiped communism, socialism, capitalism, democracy, and nationalism, none of which is held to a standard that is higher than the humans who administer them. Yes, organized religion suffers the same problem, but there is no church that has killed the tiniest fraction of people as Soviet Russia, Mao’s China, the Khmer Rouge, the United States of America, and the largest governments since Nietzsche’s cautionary declaration.

The same governments imprison more people than any religion is currently capable of too.

I did enjoy the podcast and don’t have nearly the expertise to refute the basic premise, but it doesn’t ring true to me. If I’m correct in restating, the claim is that religion was created to provide social needs. (Strangely, this is refuted during the episode as the claim is that non-physical beliefs exist in earlier cultures without the same problems to solve, and that they were merely changed, not created. Maybe I missed a connection there.)

From Joesph Campbell, Carl Jung, and my personal experience with the creative process, I’ve gleaned that there is knowledge to be received, that it exists a priori conscious thought. It seems to me that religion comes after the spiritual realm, not before.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Living Dream

It’s hard to communicate how significant Shakespeare has been in my life since before I met Mary and through to our life without her.

Mary and I saw Patrick Stewart as Macbeth in London during our honeymoon nearly 12 years ago. It was Mary’s first exposure to the Bard on stage and it was pure luck when we stumbled upon the chance to see one of my favorite actors in an amazing role.

A couple years later we would take our new baby to see Twelfth Night under the stars as performed by Delaware Shakespeare at Rockwood Park in Wilmington, Delaware.

Passing on my passion for reading and writing has been one of the few things I’ve really desired for my children. I read 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea to my first born in his first months and never stopped introducing some of our oldest stories at ridiculously early stages.

Neither of us came from theater backgrounds and would not have predicted how our boys would take to the stage.

They’re in two productions of Shakespeare’s plays this summer. Their partnering up to play the comedy team of Dogberry and Verges in a homeschool production of Much Ado About Nothing is very special and the result of a lot of dedicated work.

However, their involvement in Delaware Shakespeare’s production of The Merry Wives of Windsor touches me in a way that stretches back to the chance to reintroduce Mary to the Bard and share my love. To imagine them on the same stage where Mary and I had one of our last date nights…it helps the world make a little more sense.

They won’t have any lines, but today they had their first rehearsal and my heart swelled as they took on the choreography like pros. I see them building their own lives and it is an immense blessing to watch their journeys.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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My Darkest Place

A terrible drawing, to be sure. Not because I have zero talent, but because this is the direction I conceive my journey to be heading. The point Jung was making is that the journey upward is precisely equal to the internal depth one is willing to explore. My scribble is entirely downward, I even left the rest of the page for more roots and more darkness.

I don’t like dwelling here, I’m an amateur Dante trying to find the bottom of the crevasse so I can climb to the city on the hill.

Jordan Peterson talks about facing the worst part of yourself, the treacherous, jealous, even murderous part. I’ve thought hard about what I could do if I let myself be thrown into that chasm and give into the temptation of self loathing and turn it against the world. I’ve thought about how easy that path might be, how many excuses I could make for myself when it all falls apart. I don’t think I could hurt anyone else, but I became sure that I could hurt myself if I became my worst incarnation. I see that I could drink myself to death if I gave into every injustice, perceived or real.

That’s my darkest place. But like that doodle, there are a lot more roots to explore. I can’t rule out finding something worse, but for now, I find strange comfort in knowing how awful I might become.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason

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Hard Questions

Thank God we had a winning soccer match tonight.

Otherwise, I may not have been able to field challenging questions from my ten-year-old. He opened with mumbling and I was an impatient prick until he fell to tears and said, “I’m afraid of what happens when people die.” This wasn’t just about his mom, I could see it in his eyes, he was contemplating everyone’s death on an empathetic level that would be overwhelming to anyone. I remember contemplating pain in a similar way when I was his age, it was so frightening that I closed off my empathetic self for decades.

So I was faced with the light task of not ruining my son’s compassionate path to adulthood. I held him and we talked easily about Heaven, the inevitability of death, and the power we have to choose how to face it. He’s a smart kid, he’s worked out much of this, but needed to cry through it a little. We turned to the subject of Mary and how he thought he didn’t properly say goodbye. The last thing he really remembers about her was watching the first half of the Super Bowl in the hospital. With the Eagles winning, it was a nicely exaggerated happy moment.

I asked him to remember all the times Mom said, “I love you,” and how many times he said the same to her. I told him, “Mom taught me about always doing this because we never know when we won’t have another chance.”

We talked about how he and his brother bravely came to the hospital and faced the news that Mom probably wouldn’t survive. It took them all day to be ready to see her and they stood shoulder to shoulder to tell her goodnight.

I told him that it was the first step towards Mary’s peace with dying. She’d find peace with many other friends and family over the next 36 hours.

There were more questions about the details of my comings and goings and what happened at the hospital while they were at home. We both got our tears out.

I thank God again for the wisdom these circumstances has afforded me and my sons. We’re not letting this break us, but allowing it to make us stronger.

God bless and thank you for reading,

Jason