Magic

I was really into magic as a kid. I bought a cheap magic set at 12 and tried to learn the tricks and perform them smoothly. My lack of coordination and my personal awkwardness meant I was never very good at it. Although I got a few card tricks down -- mostly the ones that relied on math. They were much less anxiety provoking than the ones that required me to be smooth in my delivery. My friends and I made up stories about magic kingdoms in our backyards. We were always the benevolent but powerful princesses.

My father lived in Nevada and I would fly out to visit him every summer. On the drive from the airport to his home, we would go through a mountain pass (called the gorge) and I fixated on one of the smaller juts of rock as my "magic mountain". It was beautiful, with greens and reds running through it, and felt magical to me when I was 4 or 5 years old. When I drive by it as an adult, I still see it's beauty. Back home, I would tell my friends I had a real magic mountain with some authority. I don't know if they believed me, but they played along.

I think love is like that in some ways. It is an act of faith that requires we believe in something we don't really have any reason to believe in. Maybe that's why the young love more deeply - they don't have as many reasons not to believe so they can embrace the experience so much more fully. The hope and excitement is new and hasn't yet lead to the grief and heartache. In some ways, I am still young. I don't think I draw magic from that beautiful rock in the gorge, but I still believe in the magic of love to transform us into better people. Not because love changes people but because people can be inspired by love to be more deeply themselves. And I do believe our deepest selves are our best selves.

Saying yes to my whole self, one FB group at a time.

I write best when I write about my life, but it seems so very new age and narcisstic to make it all about me. And maybe it's just delusion to pretend it's not. I got the idea of doing this blog and podcast last spring and have been chipping away at the pieces since then. Sometimes I forget that I am not a homemaker anymore, with naptimes to sit and write and create. But instead trying to put together the pieces of my personal life in the pauses between work and running errands. And supposedly age catches up to you. This may be true, but I don't feel ready to buy that completely. Someone called me middle-aged last week and I politely, but firmly, corrected them rather quickly. It's not that I mind aging, it's just that I mind aging.

One of my college bff's and I started an online reunion group on FB. I didn't expect it to be quite as much fun as it is (or full of quite as many terrible pictures of me-- how come the only times people took my photo were when I was chill-axing instead of when I was dolled up on a date?) I went to college at Brigham Young University (BYU) a mormon school and now I work as a queer activist. So saying yes to the past and yes to my present has been something I have struggled with since the day I came out in Feb of 1998. I couldn't say yes to all of myself at the time. I needed to leave my past behind in a heap on the floor to embrace this new part of myself. I made peace with it, but I left it behind and have felt the shape of it within me ever since. So today I am saying yes to my past and my present. Embracing the mormon student and homemaker within and the queer activist committed to social justice. I couldn't be here today without being who I was in 1992. And yet I had a fear within myself that I couldn't stand in both places. When they started a thread asking what people are doing today and I wrote "Exeutive Director at LGBTQ Center in Boulder, CO" without fear, I knew I finally could.