sweet disorder

manti & ephraim

 

davis was my buddy today.  we spent the day trapsing through graveyards, finding pioneer ancestor homes, taking pictures, visiting the manti temple grounds, attending a few lectures on our famous pioneer ancestors.  

a perfectly lovely day.

sneak peek: bound

i just found the most perfect song for my story.

 

sigh.  

and those hands--belong to another character who i may just love--the one singing this song. 

 

Foy Vance, "Be the Song"

When nightmares come,
keep you awake,
baby close your eyes,
I'll take the weight,
if I go to speak,
I will refrain and be the song,
just be the song.

when inner scars,
show on your face,
and darkness hides,
your sense of place,
well I won't speak,
I will refrain and be the song,
just be the song.

flow down all my mountains,
darlin' fill my valleys,
flow down all my mountains,
darlin' fill my valleys,
flow down all my mountains,
darlin' fill my valleys,

and when you run
far from my eyes,
then I will come,
in dead of night,
but I won't speak,
till mornin' light,
I'll be the song,
just be the song.

flow down all my mountains,
darlin' fill my valleys,
flow down all my mountains,
darlin' fill my valleys,
flow down all my mountains,
darlin' fill my valleys 

greta

i think all the babies in heaven were jumping up and down saying, "please pick me to go be part of the hoopes family.  please pick me!"  

greta was lucky enough to be that baby.

i am lucky that in heaven i jumped up and down and said, "please pick me as your friend!"  

because anyone who knows this woman is blessed.

brooke, i love your guts.  

congratulations.  

to be a mother

there is something so beautiful about watching your friends as mothers.

it is crazy to me that bronwyn is only a year and a half away from the age i was when i met cari, in seventh grade.

i love these pictures.

beautiful children.

beautiful mother.

and i think we all should have pictures of our children and of ourselves mothering them.

beautiful.

i hope these are all enlarged and on canvas soon in cari's house.

and i realized i need to take my own kids down to my studio. . .

cari, thanks for spending the morning with me, and letting me capture your beautiful family.  

spring equinox: part II

(photos from rachel and meagan)

"i solemnly swear i am up to no good."

there was twirling, foot soaking, wreath-wearing, mango-salad eating, and meditating.  

and it was all good.  

spring equinox: part I

we have now celebrated each season.  summer, autumn, winter and now spring. 

we chose the burned and charred fireside from last summer's fire for our backdrop.

there were small bits of green growing beneath our sparkly flats and the charred branches marked our white clothes.

and rachel looked like she had grown up out of the ground itself, with her newly dyed green hair, for the occasion.

and i like to think of these strong women, each of us growing bits of living, admist the sometimes fire- scars of our lives.

where i have been

working on turning this into. . .

this.

 

this was done in one short week.  this is my fanchart.  

i might haven fallen in love.

i might have been awakened at the wee hours of the morning searching for names.

or staying up late.

or sharing too many family stories via facebook.

 

basically i am madly passionate about family history right now.

 

but who wouldn't when you have a great-great-great-great aunt that looks like this:

um, yes.  and her story? even better.

Justine Soqu-stik-en (my native american many greats grandmother's sister). Justine married Richard Fry in a small Jesuit Mission, her father was from the Lake Tribe and had converted to Christianity. Justine later saved her husband, who was bound in a tepee, awaiting execution during an Indian uprising. Her own father pleaded for his son-in-law's life while she waited for nightfall, with her second baby in a papoose on her back (her first baby was killed in a tepee fire), cut the bonds and rescued him (and a friend) and led them across the mountains to safety. Later they became a prominent business owners in Idaho.

what? 

how awesome is that.

and i had a little thought, maybe THESE stories are what i should be writing, ala These is My Words style.

and then this thought immediately came into my mind:

"You don't need to WRITE a story, you need to record it."

 

so, i'm working on recording some family stories.  and linking up some missing links.  and i tell you, it is insanely fun, and cool and crazy and wonderful.  and reading my ancestor's stories have brought me to tears again and again.  

i can't wait to share more with you.

 

like my many greats-grandpa was a bodyguard to GEORGE WASHINGTON during the revolutionary war.

 

seriously?  

 

this stuff is good.

 

for now--because it is SO much fun--head over to www.createfan.com.  if you have an LDS login id, log in and in seconds you will have a beautiful fan chart.  see lots of missing space, try to link a few things up on familysearch.org--and watch your fan fill in.  

 

tim's dad and i are now planning a trip to italy.  you know, for "research" because there are a lot of blank names.

but the greatest thing?  the first day i logged in to tim's account. . .there were only three names.  his.  his dad's and his mom's.  and now?  i can't count.  it is crazy at how much family history work has already been done, and often it is just knowing a few little details to link in with an ancestor's line whose work has already been done.

 

now back to searching gravestones via the internet (check out my few greats grandmother who rode a one-eyed mule as a nurse during the civil war,  her husband was killed in battle-ahem, for the south--his fondest wish was for her to come to utah as they were both baptized right before the war.  and she did.  she remarried and the place she homesteaded?  the very land i grew up on). . .

 

just kidding.  back to cleaning the house, picking up kids from school, teaching a scout lesson, cooking dinner, homework, piano, activity days, parent teacher ALL meeting, young women's, editing pictures, packing for a mini trip, getting ready for a ward book group discussion and treats, and thinking about baseball practice tomorrow.  

 

you know.  the usual.  

beautiful friday thoughts

 

“The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person’s soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack. 

— Keith Miller  

the work of the every-day

"nativity" by brian kershisnik

 

you all know i love kershisnik's paintings.  and lately, i've been looking this one up--toolook at, over and over.  

and today, as i looked it up again  i was struck by the thought that it encompases "the work of the every-day."

the daily-ness.

we do spiritual, life-changing work every day, but it often just looks like the every-day.

here, we have a depection of one of the most significant events of all time and it looks a bit like the every-day.

the exhausting, simple, all-encompassing work.  

and perhaps that is why i love kershinik's angel paintings so much.  the concept that we are surrounded while we are going about making those tiny decisions.  the ones that might not seem so big.  but they are important enough that there are hosts surrounding us--i wonder if in often breathless anticipation to see which way we will go.

will we listen to that small whisper to email a friend?

or drop something off for a neighbor?

or try that brave new thing that scares us?

and those little every-day things are the very great work we are doing.

disguised in overalls (isn't that a president hinckley quote?).

 

the shopping, planning, and cooking and calling everyone home to the dinner table.

the every-day.

the homework, practicing piano, library trips, scouts, activity days.

the every-day.

 

the small consistent things that build faithful, kind, smart muscles in ourselves and family.

nursing babies.  cleaning floors.  shuttling children.

the work of the  every-day.

 

which is really what christ did.  washing feet.  helping at a wedding.  feeding people.  comforting friends in sadness.  the work of the every-day, exalted through an atitude of charity.  

 

kintsukuroi: filling our cracks with the golden atonement

This is the base of the talk I gave at New Beginnings a couple of weeks ago.  

 

In Japan there is an art form known as “kintsukuroi.”  It means to literally repair with gold. It is the art of repairing broken pottery with gold or silver lacquer to make the final piece a greater work or art for having been broken. 

I want you to take a moment to see how you view yourself [do it before reading on].

 

You may at times feel like broken pieces of pottery.  You may feel that you have to make those broken pieces look just right before you can hand them to the Lord.  Do not wait.  He will make them beautiful.  He will fuse you together with gold.  I once thought that the Atonement was only for those who had major sins and because of that I waited too long to access it daily.  It is through the Holy Spirit that you will feel the power of the Atonement working in your life.  It will take practice, just as listening to the Spirit takes practice. 

I think many of us are familiar with the concept of being cleansed from sin.

The Atonement can also be a resource of comfort in pain.

But ultimately the Atonement is what changes us. 

With Christ’s help we will change our very nature.  To become something more valuable and beautiful—because of His filling our gaps with gold.  

 

Tonight I want to share with you an experience about another Stake’s New Beginning’s night.  It is from the book The Uses of Adversity [by Carlfred Broderick], given to me by a dear friend who has seen her share of adversity.  In the book the author describes an New Beginning's event when he was a stake president in California.  The program was set up like The Wizard of Oz, complete with a yellow brick road and the buildings in Oz looked a lot like the LA temple.  At the end the director, went on about her "wonderful life with her charming husbadn and her perfect children and promsied that the young women could look like her and have a husband like him and children like them if they would stick to the yellow brick road and live in Oz.  It was a lovely, sort of tear-jerking event." 

And then the woman conducting asked if the stake president had any final thoughts.  

His reply: ". . .I do not want you to believe for one minutes that if you keep all the commandments and live as close to the Lord as you can and do everything right and fight off the entire priests quorum one by one and wait chastely for your missionary to return and pay your tithing and attend you meetings, accept calls from the bishop, and have a temple marriage, I do not want you to believe that bad things will not happen to you.  And when that happens, I do not want you to say that God was not true.  . . [that] they promised me from the pulpit that if I were very, very good, I would be blessed. . .Sad things—children who are sick or developmentally handicapped, husbands who are not faithful, illnesses that can cripple, or violence, betrayals, hurts, deaths, losses—when these things happen, do not say God is not keeping his promises to me.  The gospel of Jesus Christ is not insurance against pain.  It is the resource in event of pain, and when that pain comes (and it will come because we came here on earth to have pain among other things), when it comes, rejoice that you have resource to deal with the pain.”   

 

I had an experience lately where Tim had asked , “Did you meditate this morning?”  “Yes I meditated” I said through gritted teeth.  I felt terrible and then I felt more terrible that I couldn’t even do it when I was trying.  It is times like that when we may feel tempted to reach for something to fill us—whatever that may be—gaming, gossip, addiction, chocolate cake.  I found myself empty and reaching.  And rather than reaching for something that would not fill my spirit I sent up one of those deserate prayers.  There was a physical feeling of warmth and comfort and I had the impression, “I will fill you.”  I had been looking for things to feel the gaps.  Nothing will fuse us together and make us more beautiful than our transformation than the Atonement. 

[I shared many thoughts from Brad Wilcox's talk at the Women's Conference]. 

 

We do not need to walk around in broken pieces.  We do not have to wait until the final judgement to utilize Christ's Atonement.  "Come unto me, Come as you are.  Right now.  Not once you are wroth.  But come now, when you are in the process of breaking bad habits.  Not once you forgive, but while you are struggling to forgive." (Brad Wilcox)  Christ sees you as you are and as you can become and He thinks you are beautiful.

At the beginning I asked you to see how you view yourself.

Now take a moment and feel how Christ sees you [take that moment before reading on].

If you cannot get that feeling now I challenge you to find a quiet place to ask him.

 

I hope we can all see each other as we can become through the Atonment.  It is the power to change us, to cleanse us, to heal us and to make us beautiful.  He will fill us.  He will fill our cracks with gold and we will be more beautiful and valuable because of it.