I cannot imagine a God, who created this world, filled with so much diversity, so much light and so much in the deep, to have meant for us to skim the surface, not when the landscape of human experience is so vast and rich. So this is a reminder, as much for me as anyone, do not neglect the shadow.
The Nuvaring Before I got married, I went to the student health center for a pre-marriage gynecology appointment. I was a student at Brigham Young University (BYU), 20 and a virgin. I didn’t think of myself as prude or naive, but I was probably both of those things. Raised in the conservative Mormon faith, I…
“It’s like a spider,” she said. “That’s what they told me at the Alzheimer’s Association when I was taking care of mom. And the spider goes around and around until it stops and that’s when you can’t remember.”
Last week I found myself rolling back and forth on the ground with a bunch of giggling asian women. I was in my kundalini yoga class at the YMCA. We were doing an exercise where we put our hands out in front of us, superman-style, while lying on our stomachs, then we turned to the right until we were on our backs, then back to center/stomach, then to the left. As I rolled back and forth on the floor with these giddy women, I thought, I live such a rich life!
I’m going to pause here because THIS is mind-blowing for me. I’m not required to constantly shift and work and adjust and strain until perfection is obtained? Really? There is space in life for a moment’s pause to sit and smile?
I’m trying to figure out how to honestly share my experience of my faith without alienating my LDS audience. And per usual, I’m going to go with the truth as close as I can tell it.