The Crazee Chick's View of Life

We Meet Again I would address him with a cool, 'hello there, handsome' as if it our meeting had been mere coincidence.  It wasn't--I'd gone seeking for him and I wasn't ashamed to admit it. Across the room he stood, in that familiar blue jacket--only slightly tattered and torn--the mere thought of touching it caused my skin to flinch and flutter.  Like a moth to the flame I inched across the room ignoring the shouting inside my head : 'he's not the only fish in the sea--go find another!'  My eyes focussed intently on the one 'fish' for me and I pushed forward. We'd met years earlier: I was younger, less worldly, and oh so vanilla and he was anything but. He regaled me with tales of adventures (he liked to call them missions), travels to off-beat destinations, and tete at tetes with world leaders.  I was heady on his words and he would grin as he teased me with a little 'ubiquitous' here and an 'avant-garde' there. Was i...

A writer (and truth teller) that I really admire, Janelle Hanchett (The Renegade Mother) , offered to run her writing class FO FREE y'all  on FB during this COVID crisis.  After jumping for joy over her generosity and kindness I signed up and the first lesson last week was about finding your voice.  If you've ever read my blog you'll quickly notice that this piece I wrote is for the first time ever, NOT in my voice, and yet oddly enough it is. My husband has some reservations about me sharing such a personal story so I hope it's not too much for you to handle. The assignment was to write about a time where we had to find inner strength. This is my story.

D o you consider yourself to be religious or spiritual? For many years I considered them to be mutually exclusive.  If you weren't religious, how could you possibly experience spirituality?  How did you categorize it? To whom did you attribute the moment? My religion defined God--it gave him a face, a body, a personality, and from that I knew who looked down upon me at night as I uttered my evening prayers.  When I had a spiritual moment, I could see who had blessed me with that opportunity.  It was clear, so very clear. And then one day it wasn't anymore.   After a lifetime of being a devout christian I became disillusioned with organized religion and God and I separated myself from both.    And that was hard, so very hard.  It was then that I began to consider whether or not religion and spirituality were in fact mutually exclusive.  Could I still feel indescribable joy, or a burning in my soul, if I was ...