It’s a crazy ride…. just hold on

and it’s not a bad thing.

i am in a place of severe surrender… my plans, dreams, hopes, fears, loves, desires… having to open up my tightly clenched fists, releasing tighly wound plans… because i know i don’t know…

so i breathe. sit. breathe again. wait. wonder. pray. sit. breathe…
until i can be confident in who I am to be and what I am to do.

losing everything is hard for me.
but i am doing all i can to make sure i lose every day.

only to find something greater.

three days…
chainsaws, cranes, flatbed trucks, sawdust, and the tree falls.

It has been an interesting thing for me to watch. It has been a process that speaks to me in more ways than I could have ever thought.

Not to get all “poetic” or anything, but the removal of this tree… seeing the process… it has reminded me of the truth that things have to die for the birth of new life to begin. I am not a fan of change, obviously.  (The removal of this tree has altered my mood this week.) but I am in the process, daily, of dying to myself in order for life to spring forth…

even the death of my rights, my plan, my hopes, my fears… knowing that the giver of life breathes it into me… birthing hopes, plans, and dreams that are his.

here’s a few pictures taken today…

Today, my landlord left a message on my answering maching telling me they were going to be “removing the cypress tree from the backyard.”  Instantly, I went out the back yard and started at our ancient, grandfatherly tree.

I wanted to have time to mourn the future loss of our tree, so I got out my camera, and snapped a few pictures… but as I turned to head inside, I heard the voices of the men who have come to kidnap our tree and turn it into wood chips, saw dust, and memories.  Not long after I was behind the closed doors of my house, the chainsaws started, and my back yard  began to fill with hundreds of branches from this ancient, glorious tree.

Here he stood, at 11:30am today:

I am sure he has lived to be about 100 years old… alive long before the house I now live in.  I know he as seen the world grow, and change. 

I wonder what secrets he has in those rings of his. 

I will take a picture of what is left of the grandfater cypress later. But for today, I will say goodbye and watch out my back window… secretly missing the shade this tree makes…

Quite often, i find myself sleeping on an L-shaped reddish-orange couch in Long Beach. Suprisingly, I sleep better on that couch than I do most nights in my own bed at home.

That couch belongs to my twin sister, and this weekend, my sisters and I were together to celebrate my nephew’s birthday. It was in times like this weekend when it dawns on me that we are actually living in the “grown up world” we had watched from the audience for so long.

both of my sisters have incredible boys and great husbands, and when we get together, i am in awe of the journey.  Like many siblings, we were at eachother’s throats for most of growing up. Typical girls, we knew argued about boys, hairbrushes, clothes, and lip gloss… but now, i am realizing that they are two of my favorite people on earth.

Each beautiful and talented and deep… i love that even though we don’t look alike, we are from the same family… and even though we don’t agree about everything, we share the same blood… and when it sometimes seems like we are on either side of the grand canyon in life, we know that no matter what, we will always be……

…sisters.

(here we are in 1983… halloween..)