Beth Morey's Blog, page 18

On Strength and Weakenss {Lent 2014}

I am not used to living in my own strength.  

I've never been in this place during our six years of marriage, during my three decades of life, where I am the strong(er) one.  Depression, an eating disorder, illness, stillbirth -- these battles crushed me.  And the messages I was grown on, the ones that leeched deep into my core despite their untruth, agreed.  My name is Beth, and I am a problem.

It has taken me years to realize that I was not (am not) a problem, even when I...

Life Lately {February 2014}

 

  from the invitation by oriah mountain dreamer (aff. link)
art journaling . . .




mom life . . . 




artist life . . .
from mandy steward's luscious secret message society zine



an assignment from misty mawn's full circle workshop

When We Have Crippled Ourselves with Absolutes

photo by Jennifer Upton
 "If you understand it, then it is not God." - St. Augustine
When I was a child, I made messes, as children do.  And, as parents do, mine would ask me to clean my room.  I would begin, not by tidying but by enlarging the current mess.  This perplexed and frustrated my parents, and I in turn would also feel frustrated, because they could not see, could not embrace my process.

When I set about to clean my room, I could not do it in an orderly way, s...

The Moon and I

There is something compelling about the moon to me. I see her, and my blood quickens, and a feral drumbeat begins to build in my bones.

I drive down the little mountain that we live on, roads lined with yesterday’s snow. My mind is full of to-do’s and obligations, when I steer my car around a bend and there she is, the newborn moon.
 
Suddenly my heart feels too big for its cage. I pull over, fumble with my phone, take a photo that reduces the moon’s grandeur to impossible triviality, and...

Crowning

I've been trying so hard.  Trying so hard to fit where I've always found my place.  My soul cries out against this effort, and I hush it, muffle it, muzzle it.  Shut up, I hiss.  Can't you see I'm sweating at maintaining my status quo here?

But my soul, she won't be silenced.  Now that she's finally gotten a good gulp of air and gathered her wits abut her, she won't go back to the prison of my benumbed heart.  She won't go down without a fight.

And . . . I don't wa...

Two Years and Three Months Later

It’s interesting – some might say that after more than two years, it’s about damn time that some forward motion happen with my grief, that I should have stopped talking about my daughter’s stillbirth ages ago. But I firmly believe that is it is because I refused to grieve in any way other than my own – openly, vulnerably, saying her name, expressing my pain, entertaining discomfort – that I am now moving forward at precisely the right time for me. . . .    Today I'm writing  over...

When I am Grateful for My Husband's Atheism

I've hinted here and there on this blog that in the early summer of 2013, my husband came out as an atheist.  I'd seen it coming, and he wasn't angry or bitter or any of the things you might think, but it still was shocking to me.  I felt suddenly adrift in our marriage, unequally yolked and all that.  He may not have been angry, but I was.  This wasn't what I'd signed up for -- uneven spiritual footing and what I perceived at the time to be our son's inevitable future of...

When Farewell is Easy and Excruciating [Made 2014 Update]

I didn't expect this, when I woke up this morning.  Didn't expect to for my eyes to open to the new day, only to open all over again to certain, freeing truth.  To the needed, good, but excruciating thing my soul needed.

My soul, my soul, with its wings tethered for all these years to my sides with cords that cut and bite my flesh deep.  My soul, that I've tried to forget, to silence and bury, to form into a shape she was not made to hold.
I'd tried so hard for so long to be what...

When a New Envy Rises

I thought I was done with it. Done with the surge of jealousy, the searing resentment that would boil whenever I saw a pregnant woman at the grocery store, or the doctor’s office, or anywhere (everywhere). I envied her seeming not-knowing, her innocence of all the terrible ways that a blissful pregnancy could end.
The jealousy was one of many facets of that wretched new normal that everyone in the babyloss and grief communities is always talking about. Things are not as they once were, and we...

When Our Love is Conditional

Why do you love me?  Do you love me for my me-ness, or for the me you think I ought to be?

Would you love and care for me if my quest for my me-ness led me out beyond the boundaries of labels and compartments, outside the church walls, beyond the narrow-road living we used to spur each other along?

Would you still love me if I left the word "Christian" behind to step more ever deeply into the excruciating, exquisite mystery of the God-Man and his gospels? Into the femininity of divinity?

T...