coming

Ive been doing a lot of reading and watching and absorbing for the last five years. in two languages. alongside people of many different cultures. Culture is a gigantic and basically invisible barrier to achieving enough understanding between humans that we get to have real world peace. Gigantic and very translucent- I don't have the words yet to explain it, but they will come. and there will be a lot of them.

Anyway. I have been a sponge for five years and I am about to ring myself out. And it needs to be OUT not just expressed. Rung out onto the floor and left for people to accidentally step in, then maybe their socks get so wet that they have to remove them and walk around the house bare foot for the rest of their lives.

I want to make use of this "ring-out" in the best possible way. I don't want to waste a drop, so I have to slow it down. The actual expression has to come out at a reasonable pace. I am only one of me. The family is still number 1. The ideas have built over five years; grown from roots that need to be explained and explored. The expression is important, and needs to be efficient, but it also needs to have all its corners.

So it comes. It comes soon. I don't want to link my personal identity to any of it. I don't trust "the internet" with my personal identity. I want the ideas to stand on their own. A huge challenge is anonymizing the context enough so that it is still genuine but also hard to place.
I live in a bubble. You can be famous in one part of the world and live as not in every other- that kind of bubble. I don't know anything about either place I am attached to without putting the effort in to find out. I am an outlier. I have spent my whole life telling myself that my experiences are not unique or special, don't get it twisted. But now, that is an undeniable fact in some aspects of my existence.

The combination of my experiences has shown me something that is not the same as other people. From that demonstration, I have made choices that are different and through that I learn things other people don't know. And of course, one can find another person in the world that has made the exact same choice- or knows the exact same thing. even in the exact same moment. But the choices before and the ones that come, the lessons learned from choices- eventually it leads in different directions. Chains of choices. One of the many ways Jesus saves is through being a love activated highlighter of the "choice chains" that are harmonious with mine.


And that is all for the first day in years that I have had pre-scheduled, truly legitimate alone time.
EAT IT.
no, but seriously, thanks for reading.

january five this year

on January 5 2015:

I woke up in a weird way. I just opened my eyes and I was awake.
Normally I spend a long time between asleep and awake. I fight the transition because I always want more sleep. It is the curse of being a narcoleptic, co-sleeping parent of young children. Never get enough of that sweet sweet premium quality sleep.
Normally my children are talking (babbling in L's case) and climbing on top of me as I go from sleeping to waking. They crawl all over me as they play with each other. In their games, their knees and elbows inevitably gouge my full bladder. Eventually sleep is not possible even though I want it and the best place for my body to be is out of the bed.

So it was weird to just open my eyes and be awake. And it was weird that my children were both sound asleep right next to me. Even more weird was the message that was in my brain and in my heart... just all over inside me. A message that said:

"Everything you have been planning is going to change now."

And I know in my heart that message came from God. I know it was a prophecy of sorts- using that word in the most humble and innocent way possible, mind you. But it doesn't really matter where the message came from- the fact is, it was there. And it felt really weird in a peaceful way.
Just like how I woke up. Weird and peaceful.

I lay there feeling weird and peaceful, contemplating this message that made no sense. I looked over at L and his eyes partially opened. He woke up immediately once he saw that I was awake. He crawled all over me and then E. So E woke up. And just as things started to feel normal- the weird feelings of my wake up fading away alongside the peaceful feelings- my phone rang.

It was a short enough conversation that basically went like this: Hej, this is the lady from the kommune calling. You know how you were supposed to put L in dagplejer with the dagplejer mor that you have been waiting for since before he was born? She decided not to be a dagplejer mor any longer. She quit, so your son has no dagplejer place now.

Ok. I cried after the phone call. Mostly because it was overwhelming to go from feeling like everything was going to change, to something big actually changing. I had planned for L to start dagplejer in January of 2015 with E's dagplejer mor. I planned on this for the entire time that L was inside and outside of me! The plan was dashed in a two minute conversation, so I was shocked. But I don't think I would have cried if I had woke up in a normal way.

I was putting L in dagplejer so I could go back and finish my Danish education. BUT, a few days after I find out I don't have a dagplejer place for L, I also find out that I am actually not allowed to return to Danish school. The details are, at best, sketchy. I am actually still in communication with the kommune about whether or not the decision is accurate. It seems like it does not fit with the law.

But still, the plan was to put L in dagplejer so that I could go back to Danish school. And all of that changed. And even more has changed since then. I thought I knew what was going to happen for the first six months of 2015. I had a plan. I shared that plan with every one in my life. They all knew what January 2015 meant for me. Now, not even a single element of that plan is the same. Everything has changed.

city bike

When we lived in Canada I started playing waterpolo. It was fun. It was good exercise twice a week. I felt like waterpolo was a really good sport for me- it was "my sport." When we moved to Denmark, I could not find a waterpolo team to play with. There just are not enough people here- not every sport has a group of people who want to play it. And they already have handball, which is like waterpolo without the water. Danes love their handball. So I decided last year, around this time, that I needed another sport to call "my sport." I thought that doing triathlons might be it. So I started swimming, running and riding my bike every week. After the new year, I signed up to do a team triathlon with some friends. I would be the swimmer. I thought it would be a good way to get a read on the triathlon culture in Denmark. My training was going well, so, kind of on a whim, I decided to sign up for the mini triathlon that the running club in my town was holding a few weeks before the team triathlon.

My "thing" about triathlons is that it is an expensive sport to get started in because you need a lot of equipment, the most expensive being a racing bike. I was not sure I wanted to do triathlons regularly, so I was not about to go out and buy a bike just for racing. We don't have the disposable income to even entertain the idea. I had read many times about how important having a racing bike to do any triathlon was- even your first one. But no one really explained WHY and I just assumed it was because most people don't actually own a bike that they ride regularly. Most people have cars. We don't have a car, so this advice about getting a racing bike did not apply to me. I had a bike. I bought a racing seat for my bike (because it happened to need a new seat) and figured I would be fine for this mini triathlon.

So I show up for the race. There was some coordination with the kids because Marc had to go into work for a bit beforehand. I set all my stuff up in the transition area. Marc helped me understand the race instructions because they were given in Danish and two sets of non-fluent ears are better than one. And then I got myself ready and started the race. The swim went well. I was faster than most of the women. Then came the cycling. As I think back, I was unprepared in so many ways for the cycling part. I had no map, physically or mentally. I had no spare tire anything (though I do have this stuff in my tubes to self-seal punctures). And, I was on a three gear bike called a city-bike, because it is made for casually transporting oneself around town... like in the city. But everyone else was on road-racing bikes. And the advice to be in a triathlon riding a race bike made so much sense as I was passed by everyone. Because I could see that for every push of a pedal, a racing bike travels farther and faster than a city bike. So the other riders had to put in a significantly less amount of energy to complete the cycling portion of the race than I did. I was wasted before I even started running just because of the bike I chose to ride. My endurance and physicality did not really matter because my equipment made the cycle section of the triathlon so much harder for me. I was so tired, I had to do the run slowly. So the few people who had not passed me in the cycling portion, were able to do so in the running portion.

I finished last, obviously. I was happy I finished at all.

Our life in Denmark is surrounded by people who have a lot more access to family and to money than we have. That is just the facts of our life right now, facts that have come out of choices but also out of uncontrolled circumstances. I do not resent these people for the lives they have made, just like I didn't resent the other triathlon participants for the bikes they were riding. But I can see that for the same amount of energy expended, they are able to do a lot more than we are. And the result, especially since adding a second child, is that we really can not keep up. We have to live our life differently and we are the only people that have to do that. So we end up struggling with feelings of isolation and loneliness. We started this year just weighed down by these feelings. We entered the spring with the realization that life is not sustainable this way. But we weren't exactly sure what, if anything, could change. The only thing that we felt that we could do was pray about it. And those prayers led us to another family. A family who is riding on the same type of bike as we are. And we have decided to ride together... maybe eventually we will link our bikes to each other. It just feels like, if we are riding together, life won't feel so much like a race where we are being left behind anymore.