Saturday, August 29, 2015

A Firefly Life, my first YA novel, is out!

A Firefly Life. It's done. And it's out on Amazon, published by Prism Book Group. Hard to believe!

If you liked the TV show Wonder Years, you would like this novel, even if you aren't a teen. Set in 1968, it's about a 13-year-old girl in a small, upstate NY town trying to figure out what to do about a life-changing first crush. Immersed in the music and turbulent culture of the times, she has a lot to navigate: personal integrity, family relationships, her reputation, her friendships, her changing body, her spiritual questions, and a love that feels very much like the real deal.

Okay, enough about the plug. Here's the cover. If you read it, please post a comment (or better yet a review on Amazon) and let me know what you think. Thank you!!


Buy the ebook or print book at Amazon



Friday, November 7, 2014

Hypochondria and Fear of Death: WWWD (What Would Woody Do?)


“I am not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens,” said Woody Allen. Just last year, he also wrote a very funny piece for the New York Times about hypochondria. It’s so easy to make fun of hypochondria, and his description of the thought process behind it is spot on:
       “What distinguishes my hysteria is that at the appearance of the mildest symptom, let’s say chapped lips, I instantly leap to the conclusion that the chapped lips indicate a brain tumor. Or maybe lung cancer. In one instance I thought it was Mad Cow.
       “The point is, I am always certain I’ve come down with something life-threatening. It matters little that few people are ever found dead of chapped lips. Every minor ache or pain sends me to a doctor’s office in need of reassurance that my latest allergy will not require a heart transplant, or that I have misdiagnosed my hives and it’s not possible for a human being to contract elm blight.”
The panic we feel at the onset of strange symptoms is natural, of course, because we are given no assurance of safety in this massive, whirling world of unpredictable calamities. If someone else could get cancer from drinking the water, why couldn’t I? If someone else’s child could be lost to SIDS, why not my child? What guarantee are we given that the terrible news unfolding every day won’t have our names or the name of someone we love on the front cover tomorrow?
I think we can agree that hypochondria is another name for fear of death. Whether we approach the topic of death with crippling fear or foolish bravado, they are just two sides of the same coin. If we refuse to ever leave the ground in any kind of flying contraption or we’re always looking for the next chance to skydive, true fearlessness is far from most of us. I think even the most seasoned airline passenger clenches up (at least inwardly) when turbulence goes from sporadic to unrelenting. And it’s a rare person who smiles in the face of troubling reports from the hospital lab.
What would Woody do? “Talk about a story of it,” as our son would demand at the tender age of two. Our appetite for anecdote and memoir from others who have faced what we’re facing soars whenever we come too close to any kind of loss, real or threatened. We seek comfort in finding out what to expect, in knowing that we are not alone in this. Our desperate fear is really not of death but of the unknown. Most of us fear pain, but we fear helplessness and nothingness even more.
As a child, I used to lay awake at night paralyzed by the thought that one day, my loved ones and I would simply cease to be. My mother tried to comfort me by saying, “You have many, many years before you have to think about that.” But it didn’t matter how many long years I could afford to put off the thought; the reality remained. We were all going to die. It was unthinkable.
A person of faith has one trump card in all of this—the presence of God. The idea that an eternal soul dwells within us, that there is a life to come beyond what we can imagine here, that there is a purpose to each ounce of suffering even though we can’t understand it now . . . all of this is comforting, but only on a cerebral level at best. When we are bleeding or doubled over in pain, we just want to be rescued so we can go back to our regular lives.
Those of us who have lived beyond childhood have a long history of rescues, many of which we don’t realize we had—near misses and collision courses with disaster that were diverted before we ever saw them coming. We are not likely to remember even the rescues we did see, because we just wanted to get back to our regular lives. We remember instead the trauma, the terror, the deepening sadness of the times when we had a prolonged wait to get back to our regular lives.
But when we’re steeped in our regular lives, we are discontent. We want more meaning, more results, more rewards, more love, more power, more money, more stuff. Then along comes a tragedy or a setback and all we want is a return to our regular lives. Sometimes we even make promises: “If I can just get through this and live, I’ll never complain again about my marriage/job/appearance/finances/friends/etc.” Most of us renege on those promises as soon as we are safely restored to our less-than-perfect lives.
What is it we really want? We chafe at a safe existence because we want more excitement, then we cry out in desperation when our regular lives are threatened. We worry over every little lump and soreness, then as soon as we are healthy again, we kvetch about how we “could have done this” or “could have had that.”
In the Haftorah today, I read about Jeremiah’s complaint when God called him to be a prophet (hardly a boring career): “Ah Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak for I am a youth.” Reminds me of Moses in Exodus 4, when he says, “O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither before nor since You have spoken to Your servant; but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” They didn’t want to step up to a life of meaning, to their calling, if they could get away with just living their regular lives.
It’s possible that each brush with death, each encounter with tragedy, each real or imagined health scare, is like that moment by the burning bush. We have an opportunity to experience a faith that transcends our puny existence, to meet God in the midst of something that will certainly turn our lives upside down. Most of us are going to turn tail and run, no matter how much we believe that we love God and trust Him.
The good news is, one day we really will face death or tragedy, or both. And this time, there will be no running back to our regular lives to hide. When we open our hands and let go of all our stuff, all our attachments, we will finally be free to embrace what God has called us to without any more fear. It is unthinkable and unfathomable now, but I suspect it will be unbearably beautiful.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Beauty and Ugliness: Perception Is Not the Whole Picture


Look in the mirror. On a good day, we might check out a few different angles and think, ‘Not bad,’ give the glass an encouraging smile, and walk away satisfied. But on a bad day, no amount of repair can disguise the bad skin or stubborn wrinkles, let alone the desperate expression that hovers behind our eyes like a neon sign: Defective! Imperfect! We can’t get away from that mirror fast enough.
And the sad thing is, for most of us, this encounter with the mirror then rules the rest of our day, more than we realize.
So here’s the question: Is it possible for us to set aside both our self-satisfaction and our self-loathing to embrace the larger picture of God’s intent for us within our true appearance? And what is our true appearance? A poet friend aptly described an “appointed” appearance, wondering if perhaps the man in the moon would bemoan his less-than-full glow even though the whole Earth certainly relies on his appointed phases. He doesn’t have the luxury of jazzing himself up to hold onto that brilliant glow. Instead he must endure the bad days when he is barely a sliver, or even worse, invisible.
How many times have I confided in a friend when I’ve felt especially ugly and hear her insist that I look “just fine”—even a friend I trust to tell the truth? Conversely, how many times have I pranced into a room believing that I look fabulous, only to receive the identical level of interest and attention as on any other day?
It’s easy for someone else to say, “Looks don’t matter. It’s what’s inside that counts.” Of course, I know that intellectually, and my eye automatically forgives and accepts imperfections of all kinds in others. Just not in myself.
Is this really just about perceptions? I think it’s way deeper than that. Beauty and ugliness extend to behavior as well. Take the ups and downs of love relationships, for instance. A beloved spouse, the one we delight in and admire above all others, can behave in a petty, impatient or inconsiderate way. We face grave disappointment and the fear that this could become the new reality. We’re not sure we can handle that, and yet at the same time, we can discover the transcendent beauty of the commitment to weather it through. Those moments of ugliness can only be conquered and transformed by that devotion, that sacrifice of our preferences for the sake of another.
Just as the eyes forgive imperfections and adjust to accept them, the heart can forgive disappointments and adjust to stick it out. I can't imagine anything more important to God than for us each to get this major truth at some point in our lives, and not just understand it but live it. The imperfect becomes lovable. Can we extend that mercy to ourselves, too?
The Haftorah for this week ends with the famous verse in Micah, “He has shown you, O man, what is good; And what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” It would be the height of humility (and a blessed relief) to be at peace with my bad hair/bad face/bad body days in favor of the bigger picture of how much God loves me and uses me to preserve His goodness. A look in God’s mirror every morning would cure the self-loathing blues and temper the self-satisfaction smugness, if I would but look there.
Then maybe, like the man in the moon, I could realize how my appearance is used day by day in the unfolding of the magnificent tapestry of love that is the real purpose of our lives.

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Dying to Live


I watch my children’s age group, the 20- and 30-somethings, sorting through just what kind of life is worth living—in what or whom should they invest their energy and trust?
Our generation, the baby boomer 60s children, blew the “ought to” right out of the water, for good reason at the time. Now I see our own children struggle to make sense of a shattered moral code, an anything-goes culture that has careened out of control like a runaway train from the utopia and collective conscience we believed in. What “ought” they do? What “should” they commit to?
Hippie culture is still alive, new age and holistic solutions abound and mainstream themselves, while a return to the land and an ache for a simple life close to nature wafts by us all with a tantalizing fragrance just out of reach. It is especially evasive to our young people.
How can they give up their reliance on their iPhones and iPads and TVs and Youtube and Facebook? How can they hope to function free of the culture that both numbs and comforts them so effectively? My heart hurts to see the yearning in their eyes for something real despite their hard-nosed certainty that such a thing is not reliable. They are surrounded by ephemeral things, by critical data that is both stored and owned by a Cloud, as capricious and unpredictable as the wind. How, then, can they trust in another apparition, whether it be love, honor, truth, or God?
And how can we, their parents, recapture the fervor of our beliefs? How can we hope to extricate it from the long march of self-serving we have held in order to provide a fake and unreliable utopia for these dissatisfied young grownups?
Reading this week’s Torah portion, the first section of Deuteronomy, brought home to me how aggravating it was to Moses that Israel turned away from what God provided—everything needed for a true paradise, a complete deliverance from slavery and hopelessness. And he knew that Israel would go on in that direction, as it surely has and as have we.
The original pure and beautiful thing was twisted into a tangled, impossible mess of history and habit. Ditto for our 60s ideals. There can be no shared paradise, no utopia, no true community until we humans no longer try to define and control it. Up the ladder, the closer and closer to God we get, the deeper becomes the temptation to define and control even the most sacred of things. 
So what’s the answer? The impossible. God will have to turn everything upside down, and one day, we’ll see and understand how right that is.