Of all the modern theologies that piss me off, The Secret sits at the top. Not because it’s simplistic, but because it quietly installs a moral economy of outcomes while pretending to be liberating. It takes a small, human truth—that attention shapes experience—and inflates it into a totalizing claim that attention controls reality. It’s cosmic victim blaming.

Once you make that move, everything becomes a referendum on the self. Health, love, stability, loss—each one reinterpreted as evidence of your internal state. It’s prosperity gospel in Lululemon: same transaction, different outfit.

Of the many things I’ve heard since being diagnosed with RA, after a horrific battle with COVID that resulted in double pneumonia and a body that’s never been the same, is that maybe if I get a treatment that works, feel less pain, I’ll give off better energy and things will get better.

Yes, please, allow me to vibe my way out of this.

I understand the impulse to do this. It’s not so much about me as it is a desire to order reality into a worldview that feels controllable, digestible, and manageable. Confrontation with the truth is much harder: You can’t always control what’s going on in your body—your only vehicle to reality. You can eat well (I did), take appropriate precautions (I did), and still get really sick, live with it, or if you’re really unlucky, die.

That is where shit gets real, and no amount of good energy matters.

Attention isn’t leverage. It doesn’t bend reality to your will. It’s looking at what is—and not turning away. It’s love, as a verb.

One of my dear friends just lost her husband. He was my age, not even 50. The day he died, he was having a medical procedure to repair a stent for lung cancer treatment and coded under anesthesia. She called me sobbing from the hospital. All I could say was, “What? It was just a procedure.” I couldn’t reconcile it. My brain skidded to a halt. The world slowed down. The chirping of a bird outside the kitchen window reduced to a 0.25x speed.

“He died?”

Then I saw him, twenty years before, outside behind a friend’s house at a party. I gave him one of my cigarettes. He said, “Don’t tell my wife.” I never did.

This was Monday. The next couple of days were a blur, but then at 11:30 p.m. Wednesday night she called me, sobbing. The funeral home had urged her to donate his body to science. She thought it was the ethical thing to do. But lying in bed, she googled what happened to those bodies. Heads and limbs are severed, sent different places. Organs separated, parsed, distributed. She couldn’t stand the thought of that—of only getting partial cremated remains. She tried to call the funeral home, but it was late, and the woman she texted said it might be too late to stop the transfer of his body.

She needed me to pick her up at six a.m., take her there, try to stop it. So, I did.

We drove in silence. What do you say when you’re on the way to stop a body transfer out of a funeral home as the sun peeks up over the horizon?

The funeral home is situated on the corner of 51st Ave and McDowell, across from a Food City and in the same parking lot as Domino’s.

The front doors were locked, lights off, but I drove behind. The back door was open.

“I’m going in,” I said.

My friend made to get out of the car.

“Stay there, just stay in the car. Don’t get out. Just stay.”

I walked into a morgue at dawn. I yelled for help. Two men came out, looked at me with disbelief and shock, ushered me back outside. I explained, pointing at the car. She got out, came to me.

“That’s his widow,” I said. “Wait, are you a widow or a widower? I don’t know. He’s her husband. You can’t take his body.”

They promised nothing would happen. We waited for the funeral home to open, windows down in the car, the noise of urban Phoenix traffic idling at stoplights, the hum of I-10 behind us. I watched four little birds hop through a water puddle. I don’t know where the water came from. I worried they’d get sick from it, but they flew off after a while.

We made arrangements for a viewing the following week, and I took her home. I watched her walk inside, steps slow, head bent. I pulled away, uncertain.

Was there something else I should be doing?

I sat too long at the stop sign to pull onto Union Hills. Someone honked at me. The morning was fully awake now. Places to go, life to live, no time to idle in thought at stop signs.

There is no system for this. No alignment, no vibration, no abundance mindset that reaches into a morgue at dawn and makes any of it different.

You just go when you’re called. You stand with the living. You honor the dead. You try not to look away.

Everything else is privileged theory that cannot withstand death.

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked shall I return there;

the Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away;

blessed be the name of the Lord.”

In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.

— Job 1:21–22 (NRSVUE)

For years, I mocked it. Sent the zombie memes, made the jokes, exiled on the outside, looking in. But then, in 2022, something shifted. I felt this burning desire to read the Bible.

Isn’t that strange? I have two advanced degrees in religion and philosophy. I’ve read every major religious text from every religion in the world. Upanishads? I can quote it. Bhagavad Gita? What do you want to know? Tibetan Book of the Dead? Let me tell you about the passage that made me quit my job and move back home to Phoenix. Tao te Ching? I can spend hours talking about the Way. But do you know that I’ve not read the Bible, in its entirety, since I graduated from Mormon Seminary in 1995?

I mean, I’ve read excerpts. It should be no surprise that I love Job and Ecclesiastes. From time to time, I’d crack open Psalms to chase down a fragment of one I remembered. I avoided the New Testament with everything in me. For some reason, I could talk about the God of the Old Testament, but the God of the New Testament seemed inaccessible to me.

“I don’t give a good g-damn about the Bible,” I’d say, wave my hand, posturing, confident in my certainty.

Listen, if someone says they don’t care about something enough times, it probably means they do. Intervene if you can.

I did the only thing I knew to do. I went to the Mormon church’s website, and I ordered a Quad. (If you don’t know what that is, you can check it out here.) It’s what I had as a kid, gifted to me on my eighth birthday and baptism day. When I was excommunicated, I threw it in a fire pit, rage, humiliation, and rejection raw. If God rejected me, fine, didn’t need him, I would burn his words.

When my new Quad arrived, I sat it in my lap, hand on it, and cried. I had this sense that whatever was happening was not something I could stop. I had not known how much the loss had devastated me.

Unfortunately, the font was too small for me to read and the book was too heavy for me to hold. I had not factored in middle age and RA.

I downloaded The Bible Project app and made the font gigantic and read it on my iPad mini. (GenX survival font. Give me God, but with wifi and a tablet.)

I started in Genesis, as one should, and read every word through 2022–2023. Then, I started over in 2024 and finished again in October 2025.

When I first read through it, I thought, is this the Bible or Game of Thrones? Listen, it’s pretty brutal there. There were passages that punctured my chest. (Have you read Judges 19? It’s ancient Epstein files evil.) I’d have to set it down, walk away, outside, see the sun, remember the light. It wasn’t until my second trip through that I understood the deeper layer and how it translated to my modern life.

I can summarize it for you, because it’s been my primary complaint about God for years.

The fundamental problem with Earth is that things have to die for others to live. It is not enough that good sometimes balances evil, because evil should not exist at all. Some lives matter more than others, and they should not. Being caught between the living and the dead, as conscious creatures, aware of our mortality, is cruel, unforgiving, and made worse by our worst traits, like greed, envy, and lust. Some days, I think there may actually be a war between darkness and light, and the entire story of human civilization is proof of it.

From the macro to the micro, Earth is fallen. It’s a consistent theme in world origin myths. In Hopi tradition, the Coyote, the trickster, bursts into the Spider Woman’s hogan where they are weaving the rug of creation. He grabs the corners and shakes it, sending everything into chaos and confusion. In Greek myth, Pandora’s box is opened and toil, disease, suffering, and death are unleashed. In Norse myth, creation is built on a corpse because creation itself is violent consumption. In Rig Veda, the cosmic being Purusha is sacrificed, and the world is formed by breaking something whole. In Buddhism, the problem is just built in. To exist is to suffer.

Genesis’ curse, the bitten apple. Paul called it creation groaning. I didn’t know I agreed with them.

Within the sprawling, magnificent, hyperlinked Bible are warnings and solace spoken by saints and prophets who saw the madness and cried out, trying to get anyone to listen.

“It should not be like this. This is wrong. But it is what it is, so let me console you, or warn you, or try to hold you accountable.”

If Ezekiel had an X account, he’d post 150 times a day and no one would engage him. Isaiah would get shadow banned, people would mock his poetry, and then he’d be arrested for public nudity. Ruth would get on TikTok live to tell her amazing love story and be dragged for using her mother-in-law and taking advantage of Boaz. Paul would have a podcast that offended the right and the left.

As the teacher says in Ecclesiastes 1:9:

What has been will be again,
what has been done will be done again;
there is nothing new under the sun. (NIV)

And Genesis, where it all began, tells us the score plainly, but like most things, we miss it.

When humans were exiled from the Garden of Eden, God didn’t say, “Get out because you’re evil.” God said, “You have to leave now because you possess the divine attribute of moral consciousness without immortality. It’s going to suck. I tried to tell you. You crossed a boundary and now there are consequences. Here, let me give you some clothes before I bolt the door behind you. Don’t mind the angels with the flaming swords.”

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you will return.” (Genesis 3:19 NIV)

Brings us right back to the beginning of Lent, doesn’t it?

And with it, the quiet recognition that something is wrong. Every road with me leads back to Simone Weil (Gravity & Grace):

Our life is impossibility, absurdity. Everything we want contradicts the conditions or the consequences attached to it, every affirmation we put forward involves a contradictory affirmation, all our feelings are mixed up with the opposites. It is because we are a contradiction, being creatures, being God and infinitely other than God. Human life is impossible. But it is only affliction which makes us feel this.

But this is what I was missing, all those years. In Christianity, God descends into this darkness and lets it kill him, which is either the most absurd theological claim ever made or the only one that doesn’t feel like gaslighting. It’s so bizarre, honestly, it breaks the frame we thought we were living in.

This drops us into Holy Week, coming up soon. Where Jesus fulfills the prophecies of the brilliant iconoclast Isaiah, enters Jerusalem through the east gate, with the other sacrificial lambs, tips over tables, rebukes authoritarian religious leaders, hosts the Last Supper, gives the final commandment, “You should love one another as I have loved you,” allows himself to be crucified, and then returns.

Easter morning sunrise has its own feel. The sun rising after the dark, new life in spring, promise of summer.

I can’t always get there theologically, but I’m trusting the journey. My faith tends to be rooted in Holy Saturday, where Jesus has died, darkness has fallen, and he has not returned yet.

Mary Magdalene, the ultimate disciple, sits, eyes on the tomb, waiting. I can only imagine how she felt. Her teacher and friend has been brutally murdered by the state. The other disciples have fled. She doesn’t know how the story ends. It’s just that staying is more honest than leaving, and so fearlessly, she waits in the void, between affliction and hope.

In 2009, I was doing hospice volunteer work, and met Peg, a patient with terminal brain cancer.

Her mind fluttered a jam factory in Ireland at sixteen, to the night she met her husband in 1946, to the death of her son. She told me these three stories, again and again.

She laughed telling me about her boss at the jam factory, who loved women and was loved by women — but not by her. Her job was to taste the jam as it cooked, and if it didn’t taste right, tell them to throw it out. She loved this power over her boss — she had the ability to throw out huge barrels of jam if it didn’t taste right.

She told the story about her husband, the night she met him while on a date with another man, and how, at the age of nineteen, she left her family, her country, and moved to America, the wife of an American soldier. They would have two children — a boy and a girl.

The final story was of her son’s death. He had “gotten AIDS in the 1980’s, before anyone really knew what it was.” Her husband, she said, didn’t want him near either of them. But he was so sick, and she had insisted and defied her husband, moving him into their house. She hadn’t cared that he was gay, only that he was her son. She told me this with defiance. She cared for him and nursed him, and one day she came home to find him dead in his bed.

It was here that she paused, the same way, each time, and said:

God always knows what God is doing, but this is the only thing I had a hard time with. I’ve always had a hard time with this. Nothing else in my life made me wonder what God was doing, but when I saw my son lying in bed… I just couldn’t understand what God was doing.

She’d stare forward, her eyes unblinking, and rub her hands together. She’d look back at me and say:

“This is the only thing I have a hard time with, in my whole life. But God has to know what God is doing. God has to know.”

Peg, in the last days of her life, was haunted by her son’s death. When she spoke of him, her posture changed. Her eyes cast downward. Her shoulders tensed. This was not a loss she could reconcile— it pulverized her soul. It was not just grief reflected in her face. Her eyes revealed a soul who struggled not to lose her faith. She could not understand God — and refused to let go anyway.

She died in early August 2009.

She still didn’t know what God was doing — and neither do I.

I’ll stay anyway, with her, in Holy Saturday.

He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem. Surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted. (Isaiah 53:3–4 NIV)

First, I watched every episode of Star Trek Voyager. This started in August, when the flooring in my front room was removed with a jackhammer because someone glued it down. I had to work out of a hotel room. The Voyager rewatch continued through my birthday week in October.

I had someone come in to steam clean the tile and then started Star Trek the Next Generation. About this same time, I moved on from my Reba music hyper-fixation to Sheryl Crow. That took me through to Christmas, when I jumped to the X-Files and the Sheryl Crow hyper fixation continued, until this past week when it was all ... just over.

I found myself wondering, “Who do I listen to next?” Then, almost as abruptly, I thought, “What the heck just happened?”

Consider the Voyager arc. A spaceship, thrown to the other side of the galaxy, fights every known obstacle to get home, losing time, life, and hope, only to be saved by a future version of their Captain who knew the cost of her iconoclastic idealism and rectified it in real time. I started it the day a jackhammer was used inside my house to remove flooring that should have never been glued down, one week after my ex-wife moved out and I filed divorce paperwork, started a new role at work, and felt thoroughly adrift and alienated from myself.

The foundation of the house had just been re-poured. One day, in early June, I noticed the flooring in the bedroom was warped. A pool leak met a poorly poured foundation from 1979 and the backyard and the back half of the house were dug up. Then thirteen men traipsed through my house with buckets of cement, while one uncoiled a cement hose into the master bedroom.

Who doesn’t need a mythical space captain during this kind of chaos?

During that same time period, I’d lie in bed at night, listening to a Reba McEntire playlist I made. When I get sick, or I have an infusion, or I’m scared, I listen to Reba. Nothing soothes a broken heart like For My Broken Heart and nothing gives hope in darkness like Somehow You Do. Reba vibrates with this energy that says, “Yeah, this is all awful, it’s gonna hurt. Put your boots back on. Let me give you a hug. Now get back on the horse.”

Eight-year-old me first saw Reba on CMT in the living room of our double-wide trailer in Helper, Utah. I remember it because it was a few weeks after my baptism and I had my Kermit and Miss Piggy dolls with me, and Buttercup kept trying to chew them. It was a late fall, early winter weekend morning. There were no leaves on the trees outside the window. I could feel hot air coming out of the floor vent. My mom had made me put on socks with my nightshirt. I’d been sick, maybe even in the hospital. I was laying on the floor, right in front of the television. The carpet was brown and black swirls. The TV was color console, dark grain wood. We didn’t have a remote control yet so I had to punch the numbers into the cable box. Reba was singing Whoever’s in New England, and I thought she looked so sad and pretty holding her coffee cup while looking out the window of her house.

Then, I abruptly shifted from Reba to Sheryl Crow, where I cycled through all of her 90’s albums on repeat. When I was not listening to this, I was watching Star Trek Next Generation. The house was almost finished. I was feeling a bit better. Legalities were wrapping up. I started to think a bit more concretely about the structure I wanted in my life and more than anything, I wanted calm.

Is there anything more calming than listening to Jean-Luc Picard parse through ethical and emotional complexity a few hours nightly? Picard is calm, structured, logical coherence to Janeway’s intuitive and emotional fire. Picard is operating within an existing framework of structure in the Alpha Quadrant while Janeway is literally managing jackhammers in her living room.

And Sheryl Crow? If Reba is the aunt who will bail you out of prison and not tell your mom and dad, Sheryl Crow is the older sister who says, “Yeah, you got yourself into some trouble. Life is often painful, doesn’t work out how you think, relationships end, but jump in the car and let’s take a ride.” Her voice is not perfect. It’s incarnated. It pulls you down to earth, explains absurdity, sadness, and loss with a wink and wise lyrics and then says, “You still need to have some fun.”

I was sixteen when I first heard and saw Sheryl on VH1. I’d just come home from the Ogden Athletic club. I’d been playing a game of pickup basketball with the guys there. I was home alone, making a sandwich in the kitchen, when I heard her first sing Strong Enough to be My Man. I remember leaning on the doorway between the kitchen and living room, chewing a bite, transfixed. My mom had bought a new TV, a floor model for cheap from Sears, where she worked. It was a giant flat screen, console floor unit with a wooden frame. Anyway, the video ended and I thought, “I’m gay.”

Honestly, I am a mystery to myself. I just pulled pieces of myself through time, tucked them back inside, right into their place, and carried on. What else is there to do?

My mom, Becky, the ultimate philosopher, survivor of chronic myeloid leukemia, heart attack, and stroke is fond of saying, “You can’t let the bastards win.” I’ll sometimes say, “Mom, who are the bastards?” She’ll say, “Anyone or anything that thinks it’s going to beat you.” Divorce? Rheumatoid arthritis? House chaos? Death of a beloved dog? “Don’t let ‘em win.”

She’s also fond of saying, “Wish in one hand and shit in another, see which one gets filled first.” Maybe harsh, but also, valid life advice. I find this very helpful when reality does not conform to my expectations.

Sometimes a lot of shit happens, all at once. Stacked losses, cascading into a pool of, “There is no f-in way I can manage all this.” But there’s always this moment, where I find my way to the surface, and I say, “In the game of Becky vs. the World, I’m still standing.”

If reality won’t provide narrative coherence, I’ll borrow some.

“There’s coffee in that nebula.” - Captain Janeway

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” That’s what Priests and Pastors say when they put ash on your forehead. Actual ash, from last year’s Palms.

We are the same material that gathers on bookshelves and under beds. We’re also the same material as cosmic dust, planets, and comets. All of us subject to entropy. It’s the nature of being made of dust.

Psalm 39 feels appropriate today:

Show me, Lord, my life’s end

and the number of my days;

let me know how fleeting my life is.

You have made my days a mere handbreadth;

the span of my years is as nothing before you.

Everyone is but a breath…

Surely everyone goes around like a mere phantom.

In vain they rush about, heaping up wealth,

without knowing whose it will finally be.

But now, Lord, what do I look for?

My hope is in you.

A handbreadth. Four fingers. That’s the measure. All the rushing, accumulating, careful positioning, proving, and securing. Just the breathy dust of a phantom. (I am taking liberty. It’s too heavy otherwise.)

But notice this psalmist doesn’t ask for more time or victory. Doesn’t say, “Vanquish my foes. Save me, God, crush my enemies. Give me until next Tuesday.” They ask for clarity — Show me. Not fix it or guarantee me. Just show me. I want to know.

Honestly, Ash Wednesday clears the fog. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

You’re not permanent. You were never meant to be. This is a relief.

If I’m just dust, then I don’t have to carry eternity on my back. If I’m just breath, then I can stop pretending I control the wind.

Psalm 39 pivots right where you think, “Am I reading the Bible or a Beatnik poem?”

“But now, Lord, what do I look for? My hope is in you.”

That’s the turn. If everything I can build is temporary, then hope can’t be built there. Nothing can. Wealth, security, reputation — it’s all just very organized dust. All this political nonsense and cruelty? Very noisy mean dust.

Hope is something else. Something never dependent on us. God help us if it were. (We are messy dust.)

See, Lent is about scale. I am dust. I am breath. My days are a handbreadth. But none of it contains my hope.

Or, more succinctly said:

Stop trying to scale infinity using IKEA instructions.

You are dust. Act accordingly.

And hope anyway.

1. Most of what goes wrong in your life is going to be your own fault. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You do the best you can with what you have at the time.

2. It’s like your life is a video game—it’s only after you clear a level that you realize there was a shortcut there the whole time. Don’t fret. Just remember it next time.

3. From time to time something really awful will happen that won’t be your fault, but through the intricate absurdity of the universe, know that this will be the thing for which you blame yourself. Try not to.

I wrote that in my thirties, as the starting words for a character named Mickey Madison, whom I still love, and who needs to find a place in the world. I wrote it with bold confidence because I’d just survived a dark night of the soul, was in between arcs in my life, and for once, the wilderness didn’t seem too bad. I owned nothing but my car, a Kindle, MacBook, and spent six months recuperating in a small room in my parent’s house with only my two dogs for company. It was when I accepted a job in New Jersey.

Later in the story, Mickey Madison said, “It’s a good thing you don’t know what’s going to happen because none of us would live at all.”

Mickey was a mess, but she was wise. Me? Well, the jury is still out.

At the time, I thought this list was about responsibility, maturity, and emotional hygiene. I thought it was a gentle corrective to self-pity, a reminder to stop catastrophizing, a way to keep moving forward without turning every mistake into a moral failure.

If I made the mess, I can fix it was my mantra.

What followed—then and since—has been the ongoing realization that I often know things intellectually long before my nervous system catches up. Since my nervous system has more impact on my day to day reality than my brain, this hasn’t always gone real well.

It’s as if there’s a highly rational upper floor in my brain calmly saying, This is what’s happening. Pay attention. It’s usually right. But down below—on the other floors—there’s a party, a panic attack, a doctor’s appointment, a work meeting, a Beth Hart song, and an inordinate amount of worry about a potentially infected hangnail. When is there time to pay attention?

So it’s strange, years later, to look back and realize how much insight I already had—and how thoroughly I ignored it. Not out of denial or stubbornness, but because knowing something and being able to live it are very different skills.

That third point? That one aged like a prophecy.

The worst things that happened later—the ones that cracked my life open, reordered my priorities, rearranged my faith, my body, my relationships—those were not things I caused. But they are the things I still interrogate myself over most relentlessly. What did I miss? What should I have seen sooner? Where did I fail to prevent the inevitable?

Turns out, my brain would rather indict me than accept the chaos. Self-blame feels like control. If it was my fault, then maybe I can stop it from happening again. Maybe suffering has rules. Maybe there’s a cheat code after all.

Spoiler: sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes there is no shortcut. Sometimes the level just hurts. Sometimes the lesson is not insight but endurance.

Why would we ever try to assume that suffering is deserved, proportional, or educational? That idea belongs to Job’s friends—and God explicitly tells them they’re wrong. They’d just spent days telling him those boils had to be his fault. Did he use a new detergent? Not wash his bed mat well enough? Job, in this moment, appreciated the back-up when God clapped back on it with thunder. Jesus did not take the shortcut. Could have called down legions of Angels, right? Didn’t. Remained. Died on the cross.

Because you see, the thing I’m finally learning is that the shortcut was never the point. RA welcomed me to incarnational spirituality at ground level. Mickey didn’t know it yet, because I didn’t, that the goal wasn’t understanding and philosophizing, but staying. Staying in the body. Staying in grief. Staying in love.

So this is me, almost fifteen years later, ground mostly under me. Not because I’ve mastered anything, but because I am still here. Still blaming myself sometimes. Still trying not to.

There may be no shortcut. But there is fidelity.

“Those who endure to the end will be saved.” — Matthew 24:13

It can be wrapped in chains and a cinder block, honestly, and sunk in Lake Pleasant. Like a time capsule where I dumped all my baggage, got Job’d (in the best ways possible—it could have been worse; I hope God is not reading this), and somehow left it upright. I’ll tape a Post-it on the inside, against the window that lets the future look into it, saying, “Note to the future: I survived this and was only moderately unbearable. Please clap for my sisters.”

I’m being dramatic, and really, life doesn’t unfold in tidy calendar years, but arcs that begin inside dorm rooms in 1997 and end in stucco houses in 2025. Time is a pattern strewn through a lifetime. Choices made, life lived, sometimes tidy, sometimes messy, sometimes thin, sometimes chubby. All of it honestly and with great effort. (Sometimes too much effort.)

Have you ever had a somatic time slip? I did a few weeks back. I popped the back off a picture frame and I slipped through time to September 2011, in a different house, light through different windows, but the feeling met me like it was fourteen years earlier and I’d not moved. It was just a moment but felt like a lifetime. I sat down on the kitchen chair and looked around me. Was I still where I started? Something inside me clicked off, complete.

The last few months of this year have been like this for me. Unravelling, unspooling moments of clarity, release, and somatic understanding. It seems as though my body knows a lot before my brain will accept it, and I’d probably be better off if I listened more.

On Christmas Eve, I went to my church, sang Christmas songs, lit a candle, and celebrated the Light of Christ entering the world. Then, I came home with the single mission of staying awake long enough to accompany Bertha to Midnight Mass. I put on a pot of coffee and decided to watch Christmas episodes from my favorite television shows. I started with Bones, the one in the first season where they’re exposed to Valley Fever and she solves a cold case and finds a $100,000 penny. Then, I thought about The X-Files and Lilly Tomlin and went to The Ghosts Stole Christmas, and that was all it took. It was a gateway episode, and I was on an X-Files bender for the next week.

So, that’s me. Been watching The X-Files on DVD like the world never invented notifications. I’ve not been interested in wearing pants or making plans. This is a modern cloister walk—but with pantless solitude, X-Files, an old ornery rat terrier, and somatic time slips.

Bertha and I did make it to Midnight Mass. I drove her there in misty rain, car lights orange against wet asphalt, Christmas music low on the radio. St. Helen’s is a mid-century church. It is lovely but doesn’t have that haunting sensation of older Catholic church. (You know, when you walk in and think, “Am I in church or a dungeon?” I like those churches.) We found good seats in the middle, just close enough to smell the incense and for me to be worried about so many people drinking out of the same cup.

I have no idea how to follow along to a Mass, but I tried. The music was modern, full band. (Also disorienting. I felt like I’d overtuned to a Christian contemporary station rather than NPR.) But once we got started, it was rejuvenating. Following along with something so old and grounded. Billions of people have said those same words every year at Christmas in the two millennia since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Tell you what I’ve learned the last couple of years: Deconstruction as a tool is awesome to dismantle unethical and corrupt power structures. But you can’t live in it. To try is like saying your leadership philosophy is a Six Sigma fishbone diagram. Instead, try rolling into a Presbyterian Church service when your life has been cleared out to the studs to find that structure is already there, just waiting. Like a Midnight Mass with one of your oldest and dearest friends when you’re both a little worse for the wear at the end of the year.

The rain continued to soften the edges of the night, and carried me into Christmas, where I enjoyed a lovely day with my parents and siblings. NBA Christmas Day took me into the wee hours, and we can circle back to the X-Files bender.

I’ve paused said bender to watch the Suns.

So that’s where I am, at the edge of a year, not making resolutions, not optimizing, not even pretending I know what comes next or WTF is going on. Just watching basketball and X-Files like it’s liturgy, letting my body finish its sentences, trusting that whatever is real doesn’t need me to rush it.

If this is a threshold, it’s a quiet one. No trumpet. No fresh notebook. Just rain, old stories, ancient words, and a sense that for the first time in a long while, nothing is chasing me.
Which feels… holy enough.

Also, Go Suns!
Refs, YOU SUCK!

Today is the shortest day of the year.

It isn’t hard to imagine our ancestors, thousands of years ago, orienting their lives by the actual rising and setting of the sun—the turning of the seasons, the balance of warmth and cold, when they could plant, tend, harvest, and store. Light wasn’t ambient. It wasn’t assumed. The day and the season told them when to work, when to rest, when to hope.

For us, this way of living is foreign. Our un-rooted lives are open twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year—electricity, smartphones, Wi-Fi, Walmart supercenters glowing in the distance, beacons of car batteries, medicines, and ready-to-eat food. (I’m not complaining. I love Wi-Fi, Diet Coke, and on-demand antibiotics.) The seasons and darkness no longer tell us when to stop. But for those who came before us, a story or a myth that brought love and light into the darkest part of the year wasn’t decorative. It was life-bearing.

In Rome, that story took the form of Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun, celebrated on December 25. Rome also observed Saturnalia, a mid-December season of reversal and mercy, where slaves and masters exchanged roles and gifts were given freely. Farther north, in Norse and Germanic lands, Yule marked the turning of the year. Evergreen trees were honored as signs of life that refuse to die, and the Yule log burned for days to call the sun back. In Celtic Britain, myth spoke of two kings locked in an annual struggle: the Holly King, ruler of the dark half of the year, and the Oak King, reborn at the solstice.

All these myths tell a variation of the same pattern I named in the first Advent post: exile bends toward return. Suffering paves the path for redemption. Love doesn’t erase darkness—it outlasts it. Threaded through all of these stories is the same quiet message: life must be insisted upon.

What makes that insistence possible is love—not as sentiment or softness, but as a convergence of defiant hope, peace, joy, and attention. Love is what keeps us here when leaving would be easier. It is what allows us to stay awake to the world without turning away.

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:7 (NRSV)

Simone Weil, our philosopher this Advent, called this insistence attention. For her, to love was to look without flinching—to remain present to affliction without consolation or denial. This is not optimism. It is endurance with eyes open.

Sometimes Weil’s insistence upon affliction and what she called decreation—the dismantling of the ego—feels stark. Decreation is necessary. It creates space for God by undoing the false self. But we cannot stop there. If we do not follow that movement forward into love, we risk nihilism. I wrestled with this for years. It felt incomplete.

Until I stumbled across Julian of Norwich.

I didn’t know it was still possible to meet a new mystic. I thought I’d read them all, in my recursive, obsessive (often arrogant) desire to understand God.

A brief aside about Julian: she was a fourteenth-century anchoress, enclosed in a small cell attached to a parish church, living in consecrated solitude—praying, writing, offering people advice through a small window. She ate simply and lived deliberately. (Does the Catholic Church still do this? Where can I sign up? Sophie has to come too. Julian is often painted with a cat, so I think it’s fine. Sophie is cat-sized. DM me if you know.)

Listen—Julian was a quiet badass. She spent nearly thirty years writing Revelations of Divine Love, reflecting on a near-death experience she had at around age thirty. I’m only halfway through the book because I want to savor reading it for the first time—and because it’s so dense I can only read it first thing in the morning, when my brain is at full power.

Julian’s premise is simple and profound: all things exist because God loves them. Her theology is famously centered on an image of a tiny acorn, held in the palm of her hand. Everything that is and ever will be is contained in the smallest potential.

Like Weil, Julian understood affliction. For her, near death opened the way for God to descend. Unlike Weil, who died very young, Julian’s faith withstood time. This matters.

Julian does not minimize suffering, but she refused to grant it the final word. Where Weil names affliction without escape, Julian names love without limit. Between them there is no contradiction—only deep accord. Affliction tells the truth about the world. Love tells the truth about what holds it. The paradox is not resolved, but it is held.

“It lasts, and ever shall, because God loves it.”— Julian of Norwich

As we arrive at the final week of Advent, it is love we are asked to attend to—not after the darkness has passed, but precisely here, at its deepest point.

This is where Christianity makes its claim. Not as myth or symbol alone, but as flesh.

“Do not be afraid; for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people.” — Luke 2:10

The renewal of hope, joy, faith, and love arrives not as an idea, but as a human being—Jesus of Nazareth, God made manifest, born not in a palace but in a manger, to refugee parents, in occupation, poverty, and risk.

Light does not descend from above, untouched. It enters from below.

Empires and institutions rise and fall. They always do. Rome is a memory. Its gods are footnotes. Those who crushed Jesus matter little now, their power dissolved into dust and textbooks. And yet this child, born in obscurity, still speaks—like Julian’s tiny acorn, planted deep in the earth, now a forest.

“For to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” — Luke 2:11 (NRSV)

This is the insistence Christianity makes in the longest night: that love does not conquer by force, that power is revealed through vulnerability, that God does not wait for the world to become safe or orderly or bright enough. Love takes a body, a fragile one, and asks a human woman to care for it.

Honestly, if there is a better story, I’ve never read it. The creator of the universe (universes?) incarnates on planet Earth as an infant, born to a teenage mother, in a manger? Born not to raise armies or destroy Rome, but to teach an upside down ethic about how to be in the world? His message was fundamentally misunderstood in his life by those in authority - and it would be today too.

“But I am among you as one who serves.”— Luke 22:27

The message endures not because it was enforced or protected by power, but because it inverted power itself. Jesus named love not as domination, but as service—an ethic so opposed to earthly power, in all it forms, that it could not be absorbed, only resisted or received.

Merry Christmas. May the light and love find you—today and always.

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”— John 1:5

For some reason, I keep thinking about Miss Congeniality. Throughout the film, she’s obstinate about the beauty contest, scoffs at its sentimentality, until in the end, she wins, and while crying, says, “… I really do want world peace.”

So do I.

But damned if it doesn’t feel like a fever dream. An idealistic, immature notion in a world as fallen as ours. I know it’s not possible as is. The fundamental flaw of third-dimensional earth is that something must always die for something else to live.

Even when life feels calm, ordered, and well tended, catastrophe still arrives. People become ill. Marriages end. Friends die. Jobs disappear. Homes are lost. Sometimes the will to continue goes with them. This is life in a stable modern civilization — with stocked grocery stores, running water, no raging gunmen factored in, and the luxury of calling this peace.

Beyond it: Jews celebrating Hanukkah gunned down yesterday. Students at Brown taking final exams when a gunman opened fire. Women and children trafficked. Persecuted Christians in Africa. Civilians killed in wars worldwide. Billions of sentient mammals confined to factory farms. No accounting balances. Nothing cancels out. We count the dead, we bury what we love, we wait for morning — and still the night remains.

Peace exists only where suffering is briefly not happening.

Leonard Cohen might say here, “You want it darker?”

Suffering is my theme. It’s what kept me from God for years. I used to be even angrier. I could not reconcile my belief in God with this suffering, and honestly, I still can’t. I have so many questions for God. Why, if you can create this, do you allow this suffering? If it’s a flaw in your operating system, wipe it and reboot. Intervene. Make it stop. These aren’t rhetorical questions. This is my deepest prayer, stuck on repeat. In quiet moments, it terrifies me.

Here’s the unsettling truth: Scripture doesn’t give a satisfying philosophical answer. Not really. It doesn’t explain suffering — it inhabits it.

The Bible doesn’t offer world peace. It offers God entering a world without it. It offers a child born under an empire’s boot. A refugee family fleeing violence. A Messiah executed by the state. A resurrection that refuses to erase the wounds.

Christianity does not claim the world will behave; it only claims God shows up anyway, apparently undeterred, knowing full well how this goes.

The peace we’re promised isn’t the Miss Congeniality fantasy — a sentimental desire for global harmony while beauty queens wave from a glittering stage. It’s the kind of peace that walks into darkness and stays there long enough to transform it. Advent peace is not naïve. It’s not childish. It’s not “everything will be fine.”

Advent peace says:

The world is broken. God comes anyway.

You will suffer. You will not be alone.

Evil is real. Still, light enters the world.

“A bruised reed he will not break,

and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.”

— Isaiah 42:3

The older I become — and especially after this year of demolition and rebuilding in my own life — I understand peace less as a global fantasy and more as a structural reality in the soul. Something that takes shape slowly. Something built plank by plank. Not an escape from suffering, but a way of not being destroyed by it.

Peace is the inner architecture that allows you to keep living in a world that won’t be fixed today or tomorrow. It’s the quiet that shows up in the ruins and says, You’re still here and God is there with you. Keep going.

And here’s the real twist: I think world peace may actually start in those ruins — in the small, stubborn refusals to participate in cruelty, apathy, or despair.

A month or so ago, I took my sister to school so she could ride to the airport with colleagues and not leave her car. On my way home, I saw a stray dog standing alone in a field at 99th Avenue and Camelback. I was in the middle lane during rush-hour traffic, and by the time I turned around, the dog was gone. I filed a report with Glendale Animal Control and hoped someone else had stopped. Still, it stayed with me. Had I waited too long? Could I have done more?

That was Monday.

Friday night, I picked my sister up from the airport to take her home. As we turned onto a quiet street in Sun City, a small white dog came running toward the car. I turned around slowly, headlights sweeping the road. My sister and I scanned the street until we saw her — tiny, white, wearing a collar — darting beneath a parked car.

I stopped. We both jumped out, trying to corral her. She slipped past me and ran down the street, where a woman stood frozen at her screen door.

“What are you doing?” she called.

“There’s a little white dog out here,” I yelled back.

“That’s my dog,” she cried, running toward us.

I pointed behind her house where the dog had fled. Moments later, she scooped her into her arms, sobbing. The dog had slipped out hours earlier while she took the trash out. She had been waiting by the door, hoping and praying.

I took my sister home — to her dog.

A few days later, I drove down that same street and saw the woman walking two dogs — the white girl we’d seen, the other scruffy brown and black. We waved and chatted briefly. The world had not been fixed. But something had been restored.

I don’t know what happened to the first dog. Faith lives in the space between what we never know and what we are given to see. The balance of uncertainty and grace. Like life itself — tragic and simple, often unresolved, occasionally redeemed.

In the end, here is where I land:

Peace is a stray dog reunited with her human. Peace is a home repainted, simplified, softened after chaos. Peace is a body that stops bracing for impact. Peace is finding your spiritual home in an unassuming Presbyterian church you passed for years without noticing — and discovering the quiet fidelity of its people.

Peace is not the world remade. Peace is the person remade within the world.

Love of God is pure when joy and suffering inspire an equal degree of gratitude.

— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

I took the dogs to the vet today. I love seeing Shellee and the team at Desert Sky Animal Hospital. While I waited to check out Dr. Kellee told me she shared parts of this story earlier in the week when someone made a stray comment about ‘being careful with protein powder.’ We laughed and I promised I’d surface it up from the archives and send it over.

So here is this classic, Kale Farts & Ikea. It’s timeless. Enjoy.

Kale Farts & Ikea

*I originally wrote this as a guest author post for a “Share your most embarrassing moment” series. I won.

Date: 2/2014

Location: New Jersey

You asked for my most embarrassing story, and you’re getting it. This is a cautionary tale about good intentions gone wrong with kale, a blender, and a trip to Ikea in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

I was living in New Jersey with my twenty-one-year-old nephew. He decided to get fit and took my credit card to buy a Ninja blender for the apartment. He started making smoothies every morning before he bounded off to the gym.

He then drank this smoothie every day for a week or two. I encouraged it. I was busy with work, not really paying attention to what he was doing. We’d also just begun to recover from an apartment flood. A fire sprinkler pipe had burst during an arctic blast and all our furniture floated away. I needed to wait for the insurance check so I could replace our furniture and toss out our air mattresses. It came on a Wednesday night, and I told Mick we’d need to make a trip to Ikea Friday night.

Hearing that he’d soon have a bed again made him generous. “Let me start making you a smoothie. You know, to help you. It’s been stressful.” So, I agreed. I mean, what could it hurt? I asked what was in the smoothie. He told me apple, banana, carrots, kale, spinach, ice, and water.

Looking back, I should have asked portions of each.

I was all in. I heard him blending my smoothie that morning before he left for class. He proudly told me it was waiting for me in the fridge.

It was amazing, and after, I was so full. But by late morning, air started leaking out of my butt against my will. I walked around all day, a tiny cloud of putrid air-puss floating behind me. People looked at me from the corners of their eyes. I could see their disdain and judgement. I heard someone whisper, “Is that her?”

It hurt so much to hold it in, but I was afraid of what would happen if I let it go. At lunch, I got in my car and felt the sweet relief of release. I had to roll down all the windows.

I texted Mick.

Jen: What did you put in my smoothie? Tell me exactly. I can’t stop farting!

Mick: Two Apples, banana, cup of carrots, three cups of Kale, two cups of spinach, some weird algae superfood I saw on a Netflix documentary, ½ cup of blueberries and strawberries, maybe a peach, protein powder, coconut milk, and ice.

Jen: You are trying to kill me! Do you know how tender my intestines are? I have Celiacs! That’s three days of servings in one smoothie!

Mick: Dude, it’s the kale. It’s good for you.

I held it together as much as I could at work, but driving home, my car filled with gases so noxious they wouldn’t be welcome on Venus.

I texted Mick: Oh my f-ing Gawd!! My guts are on fire! What did you do to me?

I got home and sounded like a marching band as I walked the dogs. Each step expelled more of the gas festering inside of me. The smell was pure evil mixed with a dark descent into the abyss. My guts felt like I was listening to alt-right talk radio.

When Mick got back home, around eleven, he said, “Oh my god, dude. I had to hold this fart for the whole class. I thought I was going to die! I’m not kidding. It’s still coming.” It was too. As he stood talking to me, air leaked out of his butt. It sounded like air seeping from a balloon when you pull it tight after blowing it up. (Do you know what I’m talking about? I used to do it all the time as a kid. I’d inflate the balloon, and then grab both sides of the air entry way, and let it hiss. Sometimes, I’d let it go so it flew around the room.)

I laughed hysterically, my eyes watering from the laughter and the smell. “I got to my truck and let it out and it was so sick. It wouldn’t stop. It went on and on.” He made the sound for me.

I heard it coming out of his mouth and his butt the same time.

“Oh my god, go away,” I said, throwing a pillow at him. “Slow down on the smoothies. It’s too much.”

He disagreed. “Dude, it’s the kale.” He said this as the noxious gas leaked slowly from his butt, steady in its release. I don’t think he even realized it was still happening. It was totally involuntary.

The next day at work, I had a bit more control, but not much. I hadn’t eaten at all because I was so afraid of adding to the chaos inside my body. I told Mick to meet me at the office with his truck so we could go to Ikea. It had snowed heavily the night before and everything was buried under at least ten inches of snow. I was cold, tired, miserable, homesick, and the smoothie was rotting inside me.

He showed up, oddly on time, still farting. I could hear it as I stood by the truck window while we discussed our plans. He followed me to Ikea. I hate shopping. I really hate shopping at Ikea. But I dig the furniture, so did what I must.

We walked through the sliding glass doors, and I began farting again. It was a combination of stress, anxiety, and the prospect of navigating miles of Ikea. Their floorplan traps you. You can only move forward. Turning around is impossible. The yellow arrows on the floor demand you only walk deeper into the cavern of prefabricated modernity. It comes with the promise of well styled, cheap home decor, but that comes with a price. Maybe you leave a piece of your soul at the mid-point to help fund such a monstrosity.

By the time we finished, I felt like I’d just completed Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s journey. I was changed and had met many helpers along the way. A married couple with three kids were our companions on our long trek. I really wonder what happened to them. I’d overcome anxiety, over-stimulation, and overwhelming options and selected furniture.

We checked out, pushing two large and loaded carts.

I told Mick to run and get my car and then his truck. I’d wait with the stuff. I really wanted to just stand outside and enjoy the fresh air. In a few dark moments, deep in the heart of Ikea, I was worried I’d never see the light of day again.

Mick brought my car around first and I loaded it while he went to grab his truck. I saw him zoom around the corner and throw it into reverse, backing right up the loading dock where I waited. He is such a show-off. He jumped out, opened the tailgate, and the back of his truck was full of snow.

When I saw it, I farted so loud someone three cars away said, “Oh my god, what was that?”

Mick said, “Anything in your pants?”

“It’s all your fault. And I told you to scoop the snow out of the back of your truck this morning!”

“You did not,” he said.

“Well, I thought it. Anyway, you knew we were coming here? It didn’t occur to you to push it out?” I farted again. It felt like a baby dinosaur was hatching inside me. Or an alien. Something was breaking free, stretching out its arms and legs after long confinement. I feared what was happening inside me at this point.

“Dude, it’s the kale,” Mick said, pointing at me.

“It’s all the fiber you put in that smoothie. Who the hell does that?”

He shrugged. “You drank it dude.”

“Just clean out the snow,” I said. I had to walk away from the smell where I was standing. I was dying inside.

I leaned against the glass window by the door and watched him push the snow out with the brush I’d bought him to use to clean off the truck windows. He piled it right behind the truck, in two piles on either side of the tailgate and a small one in the middle. I pointed.

“So now we have to lift everything up and over the snow,” I said.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’ll do it.” He lifted a long piece of furniture up and couldn't get it to clear the pile of snow. He tried a different angle and still couldn’t get it in the truck.

“Want help?” I walked forward.

“Will you fart while doing it?”

I ignored him and lifted the other side. We slid it into the back of the truck but as I stepped forward to help him push it all the way in, my foot slipped off the loading dock and I slid from where I stood down the incline of snow in the middle of the tailgate. I looked like a tobogganer. Had I been in the Olympics, I would have won at least a Bronze medal. I careened under the tailgate and slid until I was under the truck.

I farted the whole time. I think it might have propelled me forward some.

When I finally came to a stop, I heard Mick laughing. I closed my eyes and just held still for a few minutes. When I opened them, Mick was hanging over the side of the truck. His face was upside down and he laughed so hard there were tears.

“You okay?” He didn’t really care if I was okay. “Did you poop your pants because it sounded like it.”

I twisted and stuck my legs out from under the truck, near him. “Please pull me out.” I heard him jump over the side of the truck. He grabbed me by an ankle and drug me out like that. A crowd of bystanders had gathered on both sides of the truck. Someone went to get the Ikea store manager, who rushed toward me, holding a walkie-talkie. I heard him say, “I’m on scene.”

I waved everyone away. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone that close if I had to fart again. I reassured the manager I was fine. They helped Mick load the rest of the furniture. I got in my car and drove away.

I never went back.

It took a week to recover from the smoothie.

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Junie B. Jensen

July 21, 2007 (Gotcha day 3/4 years old)- June 29, 2017

AKA: My littlest. Bo-bittlest. The littlest, bo-bittlest of the bo-bittlest clan.  Widdle Waddle. Bug. Buggest. Beagle butt

I got you almost 10 years ago from people who couldn’t see past your anxiety to understand your value. But I did. I saw the soul in your eyes. I knew you belonged with me. You ran out of their house and saw me and peed on their porch mat. I laughed and you jumped into my arms. You never looked back. I took you home and woke up the next day to find you’d destroyed every pair of shoes in my closet and a couch cushion.

It’s no surprise that as I mellowed these past five or six years so did you. Before that we both left a trail of destruction in our wake. We taught each other commitment, patience, and unconditional acceptance. Together we learned to be still. To be. We made our way through the darkness together and then we rested and just enjoyed each other’s company.

How I enjoyed it! When you were younger we’d walk for hours and I’d laugh at your insolent refusal to be decent on a leash. You hated being constrained, stuck, or held back. (We are twin souls.) I laughed chasing you when you'd talk me into taking off your leash. You always had to test the limits. You were just so naughty and defiant. You knew what you wanted to do and didn't care what I thought you should do. (We are soulmates.)

You accepted every dog you met. You never resented all the dogs in and out of our house. You welcomed them, excited, and then taught them all how to Dog.

A wise woman told me earlier this week you were holding emotional space for me. You felt like you could move on now – I’m okay. You’re not going to be part of my next chapter here. You’ve got some other work to do somewhere else.

Your little body struggled so much these past few years. Finally, the pain was too much and at 14 years old, you told me today it was time for your story here to end. What a story it was!

I still remember the day I came home from work to find you sitting in the middle of the kitchen counter. You’d pulled the kitchen chair to the counter and climbed up. You opened every door in the kitchen. Had you not still been up there I might have thought a poltergeist had visited. You scattered plastic containers. Cereal boxes and spices lay on the ground. You looked so perplexed sitting there. I was so angry but then I saw the look in your eyes. Your anxiety was so uncontrollable you couldn’t understand what you’d done. I realized you were not so different from me and I picked you up and held you on my lap. You shook and whimpered. I cried too. We were both so self-destructive. Somehow, our own way, we managed to pull it together.

You were all DOG. I remember the time I tried to stop you from eating that gecko you caught and swallowed alive when I tried to take it from your mouth. Then you climbed on my lap with your sad, Bette Davis eyes as it wiggled in your tummy. I told you I wouldn’t feel sorry for you but you still insisted on stretching out across my lap, on your back, and I rubbed your tummy for you.

Thank you for all the mice, snakes, birds, and geckos you brought me as gifts. I love you too, even though you were not a vegan.

I’m sorry for the times I yelled at you for eating my books. I’d let you eat all my books if I you didn’t need to go now. It’s so silly the things we get worked up about. Anger is so silly.

Junie, I don’t know what this planet is because it can be awful. Being born and growing old and hurting along the way is stupid. There must be a better way to exist and I know that is where you’ve gone. I'm upset you must go without me because I know that scares you. I know you feel better when we are together. I do too.

I guess it’s time for us let go of our separation anxiety and surrender to this transition. I’ll always carry you in my heart. I know I’ll be in yours.

I will miss sharing my watermelon with you. Your snores. Your beagle bay – which shakes the windows and rattles the pictures. I will miss the tiny cries you offer when you see me after you’ve not seen me in a while. I’ll miss my driving co-pilot, best friend, and teacher.

I will miss your beautiful presence. Your energy filled up my life for 10 years and I am so lucky I got you.

Today you were in so much pain. You knew what was happening in the end and you peacefully settled. You kissed me and then rest your head in my hand. Then, just as we thought you were going, you lunged to me and kissed me and I felt your last breath on my face. Everyone gasped because they knew what you’d done. You told me it was okay, thanked me, and made sure the very last thing you did while you could was love me. It was like you said, “Oh, wait… not yet! Hold on! One more time…” Your heart wouldn’t stop beating until I whispered it was okay to let go.

I'm sure you've already found Scully & Penelope. Keep them safe until we are all together again. Play. Run. Kiss. Snuggle.

Until I’m ready to join you, Junie B. Jensen, I will never go a day without thinking of you.

Jen

Your Human

"And she'll tease you, she'll unease you

All the better just to please you

She's precocious, and she knows just

What it takes to make a pro blush

She got Greta Garbo's standoff sighs, she's got Bette Davis eyes" ~ Bette Davis Eyes