Excerpt from Love is Born in Giant Fields of Crazy: Lessons in Love

“Our faith itself is a potent force. When faith in love and its miraculous authority becomes a thought form that guides our thinking, it turns into an extraordinary power that transforms our lives.” ~Marianne Williamson

This is what it feels like to watch someone I love fall out of the sky:  I tilt my head back, shield my eyes from sun glow, and watch tiny specks drop from a plane so high, I cannot actually see it in the cerulean blue sky.  I only hear a distant drone.  Big Red, our 120 pound Golden Retriever, begins to pace around my legs in a tight circle.  The behavior is so unusual for this markedly obedient dog that I sense something’s off, but I keep my eyes skyward, fascinated now by a long, colorful cloth spiraling up from…

The dogs and I came upon a young woman lying on the beach this morning.  Selah did a puppy bounce around her waiting to be adored, but the girl did not stir or move or react.  In the predawn she looked like a slight shadow, very young and curled around herself, but as I kneeled next to her I saw the distance in her wide open eyes. She stared out into the surf and might have been dead except for the intense shivering.

I took my sweatshirt off and put it over her and sat down in the sand.

In this beginning of the second half of my life I have learned to listen more to my intuition and my heart, than to my head.  So I did not dial 911 or yell for help. Lights were on in a few of the oceanfront houses, but it was just us…

I think the purpose of knowing freedom is to free someone else.

What good does it do to wrap up our heartache and loss, fear and anger, even joy (if it appears to be boasting) and hold these emotions captive for a private showing, preferably behind closed doors with a licensed keeper of secrets. It’s a cultural norm and a family tradition and I make no judgment at all.

I just don’t follow the rules.

I’ve come to know that where there is damage and pain there is also truth to be found. And when one of us somehow finds our way out of the abyss or the tunnel or the woods, we need to share our way out or through.

With the World.

It comes with risk, this story telling. Still, I release my life and lay it bare for the entire world to see that it may provide…

How is it that I find myself at 3:30 in the morning on my back porch with an old box of matches?  I ask this aloud to Spike.  He does not answer.  Instead, paw on my leg, tennis ball in his mouth, his brown eyes look up at me, hopeful.  The print is faded, but I can make out “Subic Bay Christian Serviceman’s Center” and on some dare to the full moon, I slip out one match, strike it, and marvel at the spark and fire, the sharp, pungent smell of thirty-three-year-old sulfur.  Spike is not impressed with this magic.  Still, my spontaneous grin ignites a full body wag and thumping tail and I cannot help but throw a high curveball into the moonlight and watch as he ducks under the fence and chases across the pasture.

Surely, it is no accident that on this particular night I woke up…