I haven’t posted anything in a while, so I thought today – New Year’s Day – would be a great time to get something up. So here goes . . .

Several months ago I had a "déjà vu smell" experience. It happened while I was at Brunch on the Beach at the home of Paula Thomas on Alki. As I stood in the kitchen surrounded by women of our church, the smell of the sea air wafting through the house caused a kaleidoscope of memories to replay in my mind – walking on Alki with my dad as a small child, getting caught in a rip-current at Ocean Shores while clam digging, a serious talk at Golden Gardens with my then boyfriend Tom before we got engaged, walking the beaches of San Juan Island with him on our 7th anniversary, and our last walk on Alki just months before his death in 1994. It only took a minute for the images and emotions of those life changing moments to pass through my mind, but it was a powerful whole being type of experience.

When I got home, I immediately sat down to document the experience while it was still fresh in my mind. The words just seemed to flow from my fingertips; the emotions and lessons learned from each shoreline walk brought smiles and tears. After more than two hours of writing and editing I was ready to publish the post. All I needed to do was insert a picture to make it look appealing.

Note to self . . . always write your blog posts in Word and save them before you actually start working in the blog program. That’s what I usually did, but that day I deviated and started writing directly in my blog. As I was trying to get the text to wrap properly around the picture, I mistakenly hit CTRL A (select all command) and the back button. That combination deleted all the content of the post. Before I could hit undo, I lost my internet connection and the blog program froze up. My heart sank; I knew I had lost it all. 

I tried for an hour to reconstruct the post, but the process of getting it out of my head and into black and white had literally sapped all the memories and insights from my mind. My creativity had been exhausted. As the deaf saying goes . . . train gone.

Maybe it was a sign that those writing efforts were for me alone. I needed to re-live the pain and joys of those events privately, and voice gratitude to God without an audience. Believe me the time was not wasted even though I had nothing to show for it. I am grateful that I cannot lose the memories and the sense of gratitude as easily as I lost my ponderings.

At this moment I can’t recall any of the "ah ha's" of that day, the only two things I can salvage are the verse Paula gave to us with a piece of beach glass, and the poem Tom wrote and inserted into a music box filled with beach glass and shells.


Music Box & Poem

Beachcombing
Though not the glorious vessels they once were – some destined for beauty and the aesthetic, others molded for service.
Though broken and worn by tumult of winds and wave, even the smallest piece becomes a “treasure” for those who are thoughtful and would take the time to look.

Ecclesiastes 2:11 – He has made everything beautiful in its time.

I am thankful for the opportunity my déjà vu smell experience gave me to reflect on God’s faithfulness and sovereignty in my life. I wouldn’t trade one moment of my life - even the moment I deleted my blog - for a life without the presence of God. He is working even in the small things of my life to make me all that he wants me to be. As Ecclesiastes 2:14 says, “I perceived that whatever God does endures forever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it.”

True, so true . . .

Why's and What's - Part 1

So in my initial post I mentioned that there are some why's and what's that would be sharing. Here is an excerpt from my musings from Sunday, June 14th.

It began growing in my mind again a few minutes ago – the thought that I needed to write down all the things that were going on in my head –all the stories that have been my life, all the experiences that have shaped me, the life lessons that I use in my everyday and especially the feelings that accompanied me through it all.

It began simply enough, this desire to sit down at a computer and write until the thoughts are all exposed in black and white. Today is a gray Sunday in the middle of June 2009, a welcome relief after a string of 75+ degree days. I love Sundays, not just because of worship in the morning, but because for the last few years I have made it a point to make Sundays my day to be refreshed – I truly try to experience Sabbath rest. Typically Sundays are my day to say no to everyone and everything, except church and my weekly responsibilities there. As soon as church is over, I head home to eat alone and do whatever it is that makes me feel refreshed inside and out. Sometimes I bury myself in a good book or put in a movie to escape into someone else’s story. Sometimes I take a nap for 2-3 hours to recover from one of my exhausting weeks. But the most refreshing part of Sundays is when I put on a worship CD, sit down with my Bible, word study dictionaries, my colored pencils and a pot of tea. As the worship music fills my ears, I study for 4-5 hours and write note after note in the margins of my Bible. It never fails that I learn something new about God’s character and the way He works in my life. The time passes so quickly that I wonder why it can’t be like that every day. I feel refreshed and ready to begin another week.

Anyway, I need to get back to how I got to be at my computer attempting to write down my thoughts.

One this particular Sunday, I am sitting in my reading chair with my cat Jill on my lap purring, while I am shaking off the effects of a 30 minute cat-nap (no pun intended). I woke up processing in my mind the book that I had finished prior to my nap – A Walk with Jane Austen: A Journey into Adventure, Love & Faith – by Lori Smith. I am in awe of (okay, envying) the fact that she has actually found the time and energy to write down her thoughts and feelings about her time traveling in the footsteps of Jane Austen; in awe because for years I have been meaning to do the same thing. Well not exactly the same thing, but nearly the same thing. My pipe dream has been to take a year off of everyday life, find a place that is peaceful yet entirely out of my comfort zone – like a small village in Italy or Ireland – where I would meet new people, experience a different culture, smell the roses, and write whatever comes into my head. But always the reality that I have a mortgage and am less than 20 years away from retirement, with little means of support, brings me back to my senses before I act on my dream.

Back to the book . . . There were so many points in Lori Smith’s book that resonated with my own life experience – too many to recount here without feeling like I am writing a book report. I kept thinking, “How did she do that?” How did she let herself write this book that wanders from topic to topic, from recounting the history of Jane Austen’s life, to actual events that were happening at the moment (some of them quite embarrassing), to mulling over events in the past and what she thought or felt about her life? While I loved the book, it all seemed so crazy quilt-like - all these random thoughts and experiences, never coming to a climax or conclusion, just meandering to and fro, finally ending before I felt like it should without the “happy ever after.”

As I mulled over the stories and I kept thinking, “Kelley you should do quit saying that you want to write your story and you should just do it. Don’t worry about taking a year off or finding a quiet peaceful village in a foreign country. Just get out your computer, curl back up in this chair, and do it.” But in the midst of my resolve to do so, the reality of how impossible that will be hits me full force. I am reminded of the many times I have tried to keep a regular journal, only to peter out after two to three days. Or the one time that I actually took a week off work to begin my memoir and couldn’t focus for more than two hours because of the construction going outside my condo. I have constantly failed in these efforts because: 1) I don’t have the discipline to keep up a daily routine of writing, exercise, devotions, or anything else for that matter, 2) I am a perfectionist and rip up page after page because I can’t say it right, and 3) my daily existence (which I often describe as boring) just seems to be sucking up all my time.

I wish that someone would invent a machine that transcribes your thoughts as you think them. Then it would be so easy to communicate what is going on in this brain of mine. Then when the amazing “ah ha” moments come – while I am in my car or the bus, when I am recounting a story to a friend, or when I awake in the middle of the night and am too tired to get to my computer or grab a pen – the thoughts would be recorded. And the machine wouldn’t be bound by the delete button, or spell-check, or any other barrier that keeps me from getting my thoughts on paper. The barriers are many – I alluded to some of them above, but there are more.