LEAPS of faith bring truer LOVE

I am contemplating a jump out of an airplane as a triumph of making it to my 70th birthday. Not that I’ve had to battle cancer, although I have survived a fractured skull.

But that palls in comparison to the leap from the ‘born again’ christian fold where I was indoctrinated (brain-heart-washed) since my very birth. That leap happened in 1984; the book authored by Aldous Huxley: his prescription for me? Scary yet hopeful.

When I tell others I have been married four times, either a look of shock and or judgmentalness creases their face. I used to be ashamed, now I am pleased, because the last leap of ‘marital bliss’ sent unimaginable emotional pain to my small brain.

I cried, I sobbed, I wept, I bawled like a baby. Yelled like a banshee while taking a sledgehammer to my husband’s ashtray: my dear daddy’s ashes mixed with my tears…he’d smoked, was a diabetic; he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of sixty.

In winter 2015, some twenty years later, I accept being evicted from my apartment of 14 years, as I refuse to pay the elevated rent when my water pipes still freeze. I feel lighter in more ways than one; letting go of stuff: table and chairs, sewing machine, dishes, etc. And, my next apartment has more light – but the rotten-egg smelling sulfur water, lack of closets, and a smoker downstairs propels me to sign a year lease for a basement apartment of a friend’s house. I knew it was not enough light; yet I signed the easy offer.

Now that it’s August 2016, I’m finally settled after a third apartment move, where my dream of living with a view of a pond comes true…signing on the very last day before I had to renew my old lease. I’m ecstatic like a baby giggling. Amongst others vying for this apartment, I am chosen at the very time of its viewing! My faith is now in the Design Of the Universe (DOU – sounds like TAO) giving me the LOVE I’ve desperately and rebelliously cried out for years…for ‘cryin’ out loud!!

For all these years, I didn’t know why I’d dreamed of having a pond on my ‘property’ – until the springing of my tears as I spoke out loud of the pond in the fields behind my childhood home. Where I played with tadpoles and the frogs they became. Where I picked thumb-size blackberries with which my mother baked the best blackberry pies! Where my father made a toy paddlewheel in the stream leading to the pond.

My sister and I named it Peaceful Park. Truly peace that “passeth all understanding.”

(My license plate reads CRYBABE for more than 15 years.)