“The way of a fool is right in her own eyes, but a wise woman listens to advice.” Proverbs 12:15

           It’s true; I received a publishing offer for my memoir, Finding Home with The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Billy Graham. This is very exciting, as it’s pretty tough to even get a publishing house to peruse your manuscript if they’ve never heard of you.  I’m thrilled that I even have an offer to consider.
But as the proverb above states, I’d be a fool if I didn’t take wise counsel from lawyers and experts in the publishing field on whether the contract I’ve been offered is fair and will promote my hard work to the best that it can.
I’ve been known to be impulsive, but I don’t want to be on this matter. I want to chew on the advice of people smarter than me. And I want to listen for the Spirit of wisdom.  So these days, I get up early.  I think, pray and write… and as Anne Lamott likes to say, “More will be revealed in time.”

I feel for the girl in this sketch. She looks off into the distance as if she’s longing for another place. Maybe she’s longing for home?  The one she left or one she hasn’t found yet? I wonder.

My artist friend, Tara Deetscreek (www.taradeescreek.com) drew this sketch using unprimed canvas, ink wash and colored pencil. She calls it “Wistful Wanderings” and the inspiration for the piece comes from my newly completed memoir, Finding Home with The Beatles, Bob Dylan and Billy Graham.

I am currently shopping it to publishers. But the publishing world is complicated in 2014. A lot more rides on the writer’s ability to market her own work. That’s where you, my friends, family and acquaintances come in. I’d be honored if you’d follow this meditations blog as I journey toward print publication. The more people interested in seeing my book published, the more likely my chances of publication in a saturated market.

In this blog I’ll update you on publication progress, and I’ll write here and there on themes I cover in my book, especially the one I see reflected in this artwork: the universal longing for a sense of home.

There’s a lot of dust in the dark, behind our refrigerator. I knew this to be true, even without beholding. But yesterday I saw it.

We took down B’s old, bachelor days microwave, to replace it with a shiny, clean model. When we pulled the old microwave cord out from behind the fridge, it was encased in dust, like fuzzy, grey sausage. Gross.

It was alarming to see so much dust.
But did I think the dark, untouched places stayed clean?
Had I confused unseen with unaffected?

Why didn’t I want to clean that fuzzy cord? My gut reaction to the sight of it was,
put it back! Hide it!
Something in me wants to hide a mess.

But that response doesn’t usher in peace.

Does what I do with my hands all day pair with the unseen recesses of my heart?
Or are they so starkly different?
I don’t need them to match, just compliment each other.
Like yellow throw pillows on a blue couch.
Like pinot noir and a soft, double cream brie.
Like the heart and the hands.

Tonight you looked up, leaning your head way back trusting me to hold the weight, you wanted to see the stars.

“Wow!” You called out. “Wow, the stars!” And then you said, “Jesus there!”
I had a momentary lightness then. A relief of the dread that plagues me in the night when I wake up.

You said Jesus when you saw the stars. I’ve thought it too before, but never said it. Jesus being of the stars. Them a mirror of him.

To you Jesus is our hands folded in prayer. Jesus is the cartoon face on your children’s Bible. Jesus is something in the timbre of mommy’s voice as she says the name. Something, someone she doesn’t own or totally get but reveres and wants you to want.

Mommy doesn’t care if you become an engineer. I’d be just as thrilled if you are like B’s cousin’s husband, Tommy. In love with Jesus. Taking it one sober day at a time with 10 years clean under his belt, selling generators and serving the homeless every Sunday under the 6th street bridge. Tommy is massively in love with Jesus. Anything you’ve got to say about Jesus he leans in to hear. Reads the Bible at daybreak. Smiles at everyone. Gets grace.

You can be like Tommy and Mommy will lean back into a posture of trust, point up at the starts and say, Jesus!

On this, the last day of the year, B. took apart the crib Ace has been sleeping in for 3 years. Suddenly I wasn’t ready for Ace to be three. My heart was still stuck at the baby stage.
We had borrowed the crib. I hated the thing at first. It looked old and rickety…unstable. I had a 4 lb. preemie that resembled a baby squirrel. I often burst into tears at the sight of his tony body. And I was the post-partum poster woman of instability. The last thing I wanted was an wobbly crib for my child. My peace of mind couldn’t handle it.

We had tried co-sleeping with Ace the first few days home from the hospital. But he made goat noises all night long. And his presence in the pack and play next to my bed was so entirely strong upon my senses that it was like having Jesus in the room. Sleep wasn’t happening. We needed the crib. And a friend of mine was practically throwing this one on us. We had to take it. Our budget demanded that we accept her generosity.

The day B. assembled the crib might have been the day of my worst hormonal nose dive. I sat in the rocking chair holding 6 day old Ace, watching B. through a film of sleep deprivation. I felt bonded to nothing. I felt loose and disconnected. Christmas was just weeks away, but holiday mode was as far away as Bethlehem to me. All I felt was a wordless desperation to get off the roller coaster ride of new parenting. I felt on the brink of collapse, as I watched B. fumble and curse the screws and bolts that would hold up our child as he slept.

And so we lay him a manger. Well, not quite. We laid him in that old crib, right in the center of it, like a tiny potato.

And with time and sunshine and some stiff drinks with friends, my post-partum depression fizzled away and my love for our son expanded.

For 3 years my heart slept in that crib… my hundreds of nights, my countless sun-ups, laying him down in peace on the soft sheet, picking him up and out of it with joy… a million thank you, thank you, thank you’s when he stopped crying and went to sleep in it. And now he is three, and yesterday, when I awoke him from his nap at 4 pm, he stretched his big self out and could almost touch the two ends of the crib. His last nap in the baby bed.

People say, it goes by so fast, doesn’t it? The baby years? But “fast” isn’t quite it. It’s more like when you wake up on new year’s day, and you first step outside, you see in the trees the colored streamers that party goers have strewn with drunken joy into various tree branches. The streamers cling to where they were tossed.

So does my heart. Years later, I find that my heart still clings, like colored streamers, to the baby days— where first it was tossed in drunken joy.