Some time ago, in a phase of life when listing New Year’s resolutions on a page relieved anxiety about living, I wrote this:

A Year of Celebration:

Life is short. Enjoy the ride.

See beauty. Record the journey.

So simple. I went on to explain to whomever, myself I guess, that the purpose of life is to live it; and for me, that meant to experience; to learn; to celebrate; to enjoy; and to record.

To fully experience meant(s) not only being present in the unfolding of the moments that make up my life, but also by being a clear channel, keeping my mind as clean as possible such that I’m experiencing reality and not a distorted reflection of my own mental landscape. That is to say, really experiencing life means living with awareness and clarity and some sense of perspective such that I’m actually in the moments that I’m living.

Because raw experience will naturally impart learning. I read somewhere that we take human form to learn the lessons that our spirit or soul needs to evolve. I think that may be true. But what I know to be true is I am a learner. I get off on learning. It makes me feel vital and alive inside. “It makes me feel all tingly,” Kalvin says about bubbly water. Yep, get that, learning is like that for me.

Usually, if I’m really paying attention (and therefore learning), I can’t help but celebrate this life, I can’t help but swim around in the sheer outrageous privilege of being alive. For real. It becomes nearly impossible for me not to be grateful and curious about what a new day will bring. It’s like Christmas, every day.

And yet, I struggle. To simply enjoy the ride. I mean, how hard is it to enjoy Christmas? In school, I had no trouble truly relaxing and enjoying the breaks, because I felt as though I had somehow earned the right to enjoy my life. Silliness. Who has to earn their joy? And from whom? Who is granting me my own joy and right to be happy? The agitators and instigators of those questions still live in the dark shadowy corners of my mind. But the answers are much kinder now. Just enjoy life my child. Allow yourself to be happy. Enjoy, without guilt, without to-do lists, just disappear into the moments of your life. Enjoy. Because I do not believe, with any part of my true being, that I was sent here to suffer. To learn, yes, but to suffer, no. To experience joy, yes, and pain, yes. Pain exists, but suffering is a choice.

And so what is left? What’s left is to record. To record and to collect are in my bones. As a kid, I collected erasers, smurfs, sea shells, coins, and sea glass. Now I collect glimmering moments of presence and beauty and try to string them closer and closer together to form a life well lived.

And if I could just truly record those moments, my life would be complete. Because despite a Neuroscience undergrad and an MBA, at root level, I am a storyteller– humbled, frustrated and strangely inspired by my inability to communicate what I see in the world. I try, through writing (just starting), through painting (just starting) and through photography (complete novice there also).

Novice though I may be, recording the journey, I realize at the age of thirty-eight, is what brings all of the above together. To record the journey forces me to experience directly, to live in awareness, to learn, to celebrate, to enjoy. It is what brings it all together.

Recording the journey IS my spiritual path.

Oh the irony, that of all the things I am good at, I have somehow come late to the one stupendously stellar thing that pulls it all together for me, I have come late to party. But at least I didn’t miss it.

“The Year of Celebration” wasn’t that long ago. It was 2014. And when I sat down to write about 2015, what appeared surprised me. More than that, it came from nowhere and sat staring back at me from the white page. “A Year of Talking to and Listening to God.” Well, what the hell does that mean? I remember thinking.

Since then, I’ve let the notion marinate a bit. God. God. I have experienced God in moments too sacred to explain here, in the amount of space and time I’ve given to this post. But the word had somewhat dissipated from my vernacular, only to appear in the last few years, as a subtle and steady presence.

Perhaps it is too much John Denver, You can talk to God and listen to his casual reply. Perhaps it is all the ridiculousness going on in the world in the name of ‘God’. I truly don’t know why the word has suddenly reappeared. I only know that God to me has nothing to do with church and scripture and “I’m right and others are wrong” and commandments and guilt and the rest of it. No. My God is life itself. It is all of it, the joy, the pain, the kids, the evil, the good and bad, ups and down, the entire crazy life with all of its texture and beauty. And I suddenly just want to fall into that.   Thus, the devotion I feel so strongly and suddenly is not to something outside of myself, but to the universal flow of shakti that is all around me, all the time.

I have a friend, an artist, a painter. She’s the real deal, making a living selling whimsical paintings. She has this way of interacting with people, a way of being in the world as if she is constantly asking the question, what am I supposed to be learning from this person? From this experience? My brain literally works differently in her presence.

I wrote to her not long ago of a vision I had of myself standing on a rock amidst a sea of joy. It was all around me, wonder, awe, joy, contentment, fulfillment, purpose, ease, love. And all I had to do was jump in. And yet I stood there, watching it, witnessing. Goodness. Surrender, my child. Surrender.

And so here I am, a few months into this year, trying to comprehend what it means, to talk to and listen to God.

So far, this is what I’ve come up with. What appeared on the page was a request for an active devotion to life itself. To the unfolding of the day. It is honoring the struggle and the ease; honoring effort and surrender. It is living in the knowledge that this is my life, these days, these hours, this is all I get, this unfolding, this day to day, this reality, in its beauty and is ugliness, in all it’s joy and pain, in all it’s uplifting promise of a new day and heart-wrenching nostalgia of what will never be again. This is it. This moment, this reality, is the manifestation of God, the only one I get, and the extent to which I can live in reality instead of in my mind, in the future, in the past, in nostalgia or in excessive anticipation, is the extent to which I can communicate and be with ‘God’.

Truth is, I see divinity in direct proportion to the amount of consciousness I bring to each moment of each day. That is the extent of it, really. And so perhaps the sea I envisioned is just that, reality, the moment, the only moment available to me. It is now, to go all Eckart Tolle. But honestly, seeing God in the now has been around a lot longer than that guy.

My reality is all around me, all the time. The joy of Grace and Kalvin’s smiles. The frustration of their whining. The way the snow catches the sun. The wag of Timber’s tail. A warm bath after being cold. The tricky part about being truly present, about jumping into the sea of joy is the almost immediate accompanying fear that it won’t last. It is as if joy has an inseparable twin — the deep aching longing for time to stop for a moment. Stop, please. Freeze Grace in her love and adoration and clinging and cherishing and the way she mimics how I sit, how I brush my hair, how I drink from a straw. Freeze Kalvin in his sheer joy at so many things, cars in particular, but really anything. The way he folds himself in half and claps his hands when his happiness is uncontainable. Freeze my little miracles smiling up at me with innocent joy and love and earnestness. Freeze the snow hanging suspended in the air, catching the sun. Freeze this moment that I’m living in. Freeze all of it. Stop. And yet, Life can not, will not, and must not stop.

I think part of the existence of the twin is the fear that life won’t bring the same gifts in the future. Of course it won’t. But perhaps it will bring something else. Perhaps something new will materialize that is equally as daring and sparkling and alive. And perhaps the power of active devotion to God (Life) is to know that it will, to make space for it, to look for it, welcome it, cherish it, celebrate and honor it, just as I do the moments of now. Perhaps active devotion to God is the faith that the joy in the moments that exist now, live in the future as well.

I started querying agents for my book, DOCTRINE OF CHANCES: A MOTHER UNHORSES EVIL a few weeks ago. I have received a lot of interest and a lot of rejection. And I can’t help but ask, in the middle of this process, what is it I want? Do I want to be a writer or a published writer? Do I want to write or be a writer? What do I want my life to look like? What kind of mother? What kind of wife? What kind of friend? What kind of human? What kind of artist? What kind of instrument for life itself? In what way can I leave the world a bit better? What, exactly, am I doing with my life?

And the answer comes, I am living. I am sharing a life with Kalvin and Grace and Dan. And so many others. I am learning, and I’m learning to celebrate and to enjoy. And yes to record.

The form of writing, what has brought me back to the page to create something new after so many months of editing, is this: I write to live. Yes, I wrote DOCTRINE to heal, to make sense of evil in the world, to inhabit the experience and absorb the learning. I wrote INSTRUCTIONS to connect to Kalvin and Grace and to want I want for them, as well as to record who I was before they arrived, both for them and for myself.

But mostly I write because it makes me feel more alive, it makes me pay attention; it inspires me to see beauty and live with awe and gratitude as my constant companions.

And, as life loves irony, writing inspires me to walk away from the page, to go outside and play in the snow with my kids, to call a friend for dinner, to bath in the woods, to live. Writing feeds life and life feeds writing and around we go in a beautiful dance that has everything to do with God. And so here I am. Back where I started. I wasn’t that far off in 2014. And nor is 2015 so different.

Talk to God and listen to his casual reply.

Life is short. Experience directly, learn freely, celebrate joyfully.

Enjoy the ride.

See beauty. (Live in awe)

Record the journey.

How hard can it be? 🙂

Off to go sledding with the munckins. Enjoy the day.