Lazy W Marie

Carpeing all the diems in semi-rural Oklahoma...xoxo

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turkey palooza love letter to my family

December 3, 2019

In our family, every person counts. We are a big, rambunctious crowd, and while from the outside it may seem that anyone could get lost in us, we always feel the absence of any one member.

In our family, we tease each other mercilessly, sometimes bordering on meanness, but we love each other fiercely and will defend each other to outsiders with everything we have. Sincere efforts are appreciated, too, and applauded. We love doing things for and with each other.

In our family, we value fun and silliness. Greatly. We laugh loudly and a lot. And at everything. Over and over and over again. We play games chance we get.

In our family, kids are precious. And the adults are also kids.

In our family we weep with each other. And although we no longer attend church together, we all feel and benefit from each other’s prayers.

We all crave deeper and continuing connection with each other. We are gently competitive, but we mostly help each other. Everyone contributes. Even the Whos in Whoville have nothing on our family’s sense of teamwork. You know what we should do? Go on Family Feud or maybe The Greatest Race or something.

For us, there is no such thing as a black sheep, because we all take turns being the odd man out, ha. At some time, each of us has wandered from the fold, and we always come back. This gives us hope for our babes who are hurting. We have learned that each of us has an ongoing need for grace and mercy. We all have said and done things to hurt each other, we all have been forgiven, we all want everybody else to stay close immediately and from now on, ok? There are no outsiders in our family. We are all of us, together, even when we are far flung. Every person is worth waiting for.  

(Come home, Joc. We miss you. We need you. We are here for anything you need.)

We love each other. We love each other’s babies and puppies. We feel at home in each other’s homes. It feels like childhood after a few hours or especially a few days together in a shared, confined space.

In our family, we eat really well. We are, I like to think, health conscious hedonists. Giving us home cooked food with whole milk and eating dinner at the table for 90% of our meals, Mom and Dad raised lots of very enthusiastic cooks! This Thanksgiving, two of their adult grandchildren some cooking for the feast, and we were so proud.

We care about beauty and lushness, but we are not too fancy.

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We value lots of traditions, if they serve our communal joy, and we won’t be shamed out of it. We don’t mind test driving new traditions either! The Saran Wrap game is only a few years old for us, but it’s not going anywhere. We also love to share memories and figure out which details we retain differently. (If you think we didn’t have a pet ferret, though, you’re wrong.)

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In our family we work hard and expect accountability. For example, when a projects falls flat, Dad might say, “What did you think would happen when you did that?” And this question doesn’t sting; it only points us back to the process.

We nap hard. We dance, draw,  create, play music, imagine, climb trees, study, clean, and work. Hard. Really hard. All of it.

Our family takes lots and lots of photos! Of everything. We do this because we are amazed by how quickly time passes. We want some documentation of all this life happening. But we also hate for our own photos to be posted to Face book without permission. Ask Genny about having cheeks full of banana at the 5K.

For our family, the two people who started everything as bright eyed, glossy faced teenagers are now our matriarch and patriarch, and for all of our juvenile complaining and petulance in the past, now… none of us know what we would do without them.

In our family we celebrate each other’s successes. We ask a lot about the future, and we love talking to each other about our plans, whatever they may be, big or small. We encourage each other. We have learned to not dwell too long in the past, except to celebrate it and hopefully laugh. We have learned that every single one of us needs some forward momentum. Some encouragement and a push here and there. Also some grace and compassion, all of which we happily provide for each other.

In our family, it’s a lot. It’s a lot of a lot, with no signs of it ever not being a lot. But we love it. Our two sweet members who married into all of this A-Lot-Ness  probably feel it the most. BW and Halee are often a bit wide-eyed by the end of a good reunion, but we trust that they too value the whirling dervish that is our family.

We all need a nap now. And a bit of quiet, maybe some Febreeze for the house and a few raw veggies for our bellies. But truly we just love the happy chaos so much. We love the intense texture and noise and wild flavor of us all together, because as messy as it is, as overwhelming as it can be, as much as the togetherness may stretch each other’s boundaries, this is where each of us originated.  This is the very real and powerful nucleus of Love and Intention and Effort from which all five of us sprouted and grew. How wonderful that we all have grown in such different directions and still “come home” to celebrate so often.

Come home. Touch base. Home base.

“Safe!”
(unless you are playing Wago)
XOXOXOXO

7 Comments
Filed Under: 1000gifts, familyTagged: connection, family, gratitude, love, Thanksgiving, traditions

whoooooshing into summertime

June 23, 2019

On Friday morning I was blissing out, running east into the sun and against wind as hot and stiff as a blow dryer. It was the first day of summer and I luxuriated in every detail. I drank them in. Gnats perished on my glossy shin bones. Saltwater dripped into my mouth and eyes. I inhaled wildflower pollen and sunscreen and celebrated the heat rising up and pounding into my shoes. My work for the week was caught up, and we had a fun weekend planned. That previous night I had even dreamed of Jocelyn in that way that always reassures me she is okay and maybe even dreaming of me, too. I was smiling-with-my-heart-and-mouth-open while I ran, watching neither pace nor distance. Just happy to be on the go.

Then a whooshing, tttzzz-aaahhh sound assaulted my periphery from the left. The shadows were all behind me, and my music was a bit too loud, so all of my terrible reflexes ignited at once and I jumped mid stride, yelped, then screamed because my own yelp scared me, and all of this nearly caused an approaching female bicyclist to wreck. She wiggled on her two-wheeled vessel, gave her own little yelp, and stuck her muscular legs out to either side to regain balance. Her arms stiffened, and her helmeted head twisted to look back at me and, thankfully, laugh. We both started laughing so hard that I had to stop running to catch my breath. She pedaled away (almost) calmly down the trail.

About 45 minutes later my new BFF had changed direction and was headed toward me now. I saw her from a reasonable distance, started laughing again, quite involuntarily, and she also laughed a little but punctuated the whole exchange with a head tilt and Robert Duvall-style half-nod that said as plainly as any unspoken gesture can say, “Fool me once…”

Maybe she didn’t realize we were BFFs.

I regained my composure (mostly) and jogged in my very own lane past her, definitely surrendering the opportunity for some last minute eye contact. Still running into the glare, still lapping up my own sweat, still loving that so much hard work and consistent effort lately had brought us to the brink of a true summertime weekend. The luscious details are icing on a cake of Overall Life Satisfaction, and I am forever grateful.

I wish I could find this bicyclist and apologize for nearly wrecking her. And ask her if she is always so apt to being almost wrecked. I also want to know if she felt as happy that morning as I did, barring our near miss with asphalt. She definitely had that glow, that strong energy of Life Right This Minute, and I love thinking about it.

The End.

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Filed Under: UncategorizedTagged: carpediem, gratitude, love, running, sieze the day, socially awkward runner, summertime

worry door cracked open

August 2, 2015

This is the door to our smoke house, which is actually more of a garden shed right now. The door was salvaged from a century-old Land Run house in northwestern Oklahoma, a property belonging to my husband’s family. I fell in love with the chipped milk paint (original, not fashioned in a trendy boutique), the heft of the door, the memories attached. Its hinges are rusted and the window opening is only covered by hand pleated drop cloth fabric stapled on, a band aid really, but it’s beautiful to me. I love how ivy grows around it and how it creaks and swells with rain. How difficult it is to open and close. You have to kinda lift and scoot it. At the threshold, mud collects and sometimes we find snakes and scorpions.

worry door

Most doors are easy to open and close. That’s the nature of most doors, to be used and used easily and often. But we barely use this outbuilding, at least not on a daily basis, so having a cumbersome but beautiful door here is fine.

Speaking of doors that aren’t supposed to open much…

Do you remember the Worry Door? The vision I had almost exactly three years ago of the big, thick door that was forcibly (but lovingly) sealed shut against a room containing all of my worst fears? Well, something strange and wonderful has been evolving here lately. The Worry Door has been cracking open, only to be either pushed shut in a spongy, gentle way (like we do this antique wooden door with the muddy scorpion-rich threshold) or maybe, sometimes, left just barely ajar.

Weird, right? After so many lessons on keeping it locked shut, no matter what?

Well, in the time since my first hard lesson that worry is wrong, I have been on a spiritual and emotional roller coaster. I’ve learned a lot not just about the direction to worry not and only trust but also about my own personal strengths and weaknesses, my own propensities and, honestly, addictions to negative thinking.

And you know something? I have made a ton of progress. I have literally broken my addiction to negative thinking, and now I kind of have a healthy aversion to it. When I am in the company of people who cannot resist bitterness or anger or something similar, I get itchy. My vision narrows and turns inward to sort of protect myself, you know? Like a filter. My heart can feel some fear but now I deal with it swiftly. My mind can be aware of horrible possibilities but sort through them and take action instead of simmering in awfulness and poisoning my reality. I’m learning how to magnetize for amazing things, not terrible.

For these changes I am so deeply grateful.

The reason it is now safe for me to sometimes leave the worry door cracked open is that I have learned how to funnel that previously dangerous energy into prayer and allow a healthy amount of fear to fuel my days instead of douse them. Does that make sense? This is such a far cry from how life was before the Worry Door vision. The world is expanding, in really tangible ways and in beautifully abstract ones, to so many possibilities. Imagination, prayers, faith, and exponential growth. Love is ruling everything, even the cracked open doors.

We have a lot going on in life, a whole lot of really heavy stuff that never makes it to this blog. Private struggles, family issues, church problems, seriously life altering stuff that Handsome and I never thought we would face. As cathartic as writing can be, I have so far felt like sharing most of it here is just not appropriate. We barely even discuss most of this stuff with our closest friends and loved ones, because we know by now that only prayer and trust will change anything. Talking about problems tends to grow them, you know? Still, some people know a little about what we are dealing with, and occasionally a well meaning friend will ask me a question like, “Well have you heard from…? How long has it been now?” And when I answer truthfully the look of shock or maybe disappointment in me as a person is pretty hurtful. Or maybe, in an incredulous tone, someone challenges me, “Well what if (this) happens? What will you do? What is your legal recourse? Aren’t you gong to do anything?” Surely from the outside some people may think me apathetic by taking less action than they would in my situation, but they don’t see how firmly I am trusting God. How excited I am by what is coming.

Maybe they don’t see that praying and believing is doing.

Yep, I know this sounds a little vague and for that I’m sorry, but it’s just an example of how your Worry Door can be cracked open by someone else. Despite your best efforts, sometimes other people will very nearly insist that you fret over stuff. They mean it with love, usually. They want what they perceive to be the best thing for you. Okay. And sometimes they could be projecting their own fear onto you. Trying to find solutions ahead of time in case the same tragedy befalls them later. That’s human nature. Don’t waste energy being mad about this, and please don’t let it end any otherwise good friendships; just learn how to field it.

One more thought, then I will leave you to your beautiful Sunday: Yoga has been a useful tool in this journey. Often in a sequence, the instructor of choice will offer advice to just acknowledge a toxic thought and let it pass. Spending too much energy resisting or battling opposition can sometimes heighten the threat. Instead, combat these moments with a flood of positive thought. Replace the What if this horrible thing happens with What if this amazing thing happens? Try that for a while and see if your outlook improves.

Love is far more powerful that you are by yourself. Learn to tap into the power of prayer and faith and stop relying on your own muscles to hold this door shut.

Deep breath. Balance. Center. Clear mind. Peaceful heart. Trust that Love is in control of everything and faith can move mountains.

XOXOXOXO

 

 

 

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Filed Under: faith, thinky stuffTagged: love, worry door, yoga

I love people who…

August 24, 2014

Smile at people who aren’t smiling.
Get excited when the weather changes suddenly and dramatically.
Are nice to waiters and waitresses, even not very good ones.
Can see intricate shapes in the clouds and are happy to point them out.

Sweet Darria pouring her love all over Fancy Louise, her chicken who lives here. xoxo
Sweet Darria pouring her love all over Fancy Louise, her chicken who lives here. xoxo

I love people who will describe their food to me in exquisite detail
and who have to make an effort to eat slowly because it’s just so good.
Who will talk about their next meal while eating this one.
Don’t mind long, somewhat rambling stories and who, in fact,
ask silly little questions along the way.

I love people who understand the difference between cluttered and dirty…
And between a collection and a hoard…
And between eclectic and crazy. Not that crazy is all that bad.

IMG_0546

I love people who respect that everyone mourns differently.
Who don’t judge each other for not displaying grief and pain publicly.

I love people who sing along to rap music with great enthusiasm,
as if the lyrics all apply directly to their life.
And who sing along to country music with salty twangs, whether genuine or not.

I love people who love babies and old people equally.
But are ever so slightly unnerved by cats and frogs.

tiny tiny green frog

I love people who are world-class experts at something beautiful or difficult,
but scarcely anyone knows about it. Perhaps they are even self-taught. How wonderful.

Who get emotional over nature, the art and science of it.
And who feel connected to certain parts of nature in such a way
that they feel displaced everywhere else on the planet.
And who feel similarly about books or movies or artwork or music. Anything, really.

I love people whose cars smell really good.
Who make eye contact easily.

 

Dusty has been extra cuddly this week, even though I gave him a terribly choppy haircut right after this photo was taken. He is a quick forgiver.
Dusty has been extra cuddly this week, even though I gave him a terribly choppy haircut right after this photo was taken. He is a quick forgiver.

Who can remain calm in the midst of a life storm, gathering their energies
and creating a nest of love and safety.
And who quote the Bible with love and for the edification of others.
And they believe every word.

Do any of these lines describe you?
Then I love you, and I bet hundreds of other people do, too.
And I wish you the most beautiful, restful, battery charging Sunday possible.
I hope you get a glimpse of dreams coming true.
I hope you get a boost of faith for unanswered prayers.
I hope you get clear, calm direction if you are feeling lost.

Thank you so much for stopping by the Lazy W.
Now you tell me something you love about people.

You are not alone. You are loved.
XOXOXOXO

23 Comments
Filed Under: animals, daily life, faith, thinky stuffTagged: life, love, people

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Hi! I'm Marie. Welcome to the Lazy W. xoxo

Hi! I’m Marie. This is the Lazy W.

A hobby farming, book reading, coffee drinking, romance having, miles running girl in Oklahoma. Soaking up the particular beauty of every day. Blogging on the side. Welcome to the Lazy W!

I Believe Strongly in the Power of Gratitude & Joy Seeking

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"Edit your life freely and ruthlessly. It's your masterpiece after all." ~Nathan W. Morris

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