Hi friends, this blog is moving platforms!

Follow me over to racheldevenishford.substack.com

I’ll be writing a longer form piece each week on fridays, as well as publishing monday poetry and midweek inspiration.

Every fourth Friday, there will be a paid subscriber post, and poetry on Saturdays is also paid. If you would really like to read the paid posts and find it beyond your means right now, please don’t hesitate to write me at journeymama@gmail.com and let me know! I’m in a place of wanting to help make a living through the things I love, but I never want to exclude anyone because of money. That’s against everything I believe! I’ve been given gifts like these so many times, so it is a joy to pass it on.

The website, shop, courses, and all my archives are staying here, I’m just switching the blog up.

Much love,

Rae

I hope you had such a beautiful Christmas if you celebrate. If you don’t, I hope that you are finding warmth, shady spaces, or beautiful things to eat during this season!

I’m writing to let you know that registration for my course Writing From the Heart (Reading on mobile? Click here), closes in a few hours! You are warmly invited!

Class starts on January 2, 2023 (in Pacific Standard time, January 3 if you're in the Eastern Hemisphere).

I want to help you take action and move toward your longings in 2023.

This course is for you if:

• you’ve been longing to include a practice of writing in your life and haven’t known how to start

• you want a circle of encouragement as you begin work that will change your way of seeing the world

• you have found a writing practice difficult to maintain

• you want to get past your fears and perfectionism around writing

• you’ve ever thought, “I’d love to write, but I don’t know what to write about.”

• you already love to write but need some new techniques to help you

• you find yourself wondering how to express the ideas you know are inside you

• you are always admiring (or even envying) people who write about their inner world

Writing From the Heart is a ten-week course that goes from January 2 to March 22, with a break from February 5-15.

Class is live on Zoom twice a week, but if you need to follow at your own pace or you're not a in a convenient time zone, all the lessons will be recorded and you can watch on your own!

And, as a special gift, I have extended the discount on this first course of mine! Enter LIGHT at checkout and you'll get $200 off.

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There are still seats available. Jump in!

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Learn more here: Writing From the Heart: Find Home in Your Soul Through Telling Your Story

For mobile, click here.

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Please let me know if you have any questions. How can I help?

Let's write together!

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​All my books​

​Become a Patron​

The fifth episode of The Journey Mama Writings podcast, is out here!

Thanks for reading and listening, everyone. You can find the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, Youtube, or other places you get your podcasts. 

And I fully appreciate your support! This podcast is supported by my amazing patrons. You can support Small Seed Press and my writing and podcasting at Patreon for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a month. (And you’ll get my daily poetry in your inbox.)

The amazing music is by Chinua Ford.

Happy listening!

Dear Wild Seeds,

It's happening!

People have been signing up for their spaces in Writing From the Heart, and I'm starting to get the happy, anticipatory feelings that come when you know something is going to be good.

I love helping people find their creative voice. Love, love, love it!

Do you need some more encouragement about learning how to write your story?

Here are two scenarios that happen to me, regularly:

1. I wake up and am immediately distracted by my phone.
   I scroll and absorb one million things: an angry opinion, a beautiful thought piece, a silly video, another opinion.
   I'm now slightly in pieces because parts of my attention are threaded through the world.
   I go downstairs, make my coffee, sit at my desk, and then get back on my phone.
   Every time I try to work, my attention gets snatched by something else.
   I haven't touched down inside my own thoughts, my own head, my own soul.
   Later, trying to teach kids or be present for my family, I am reactionary and distracted, and I have that bad feeling of not getting my work done, because I know a very important part of my work is my writing and my inner work. Things have begun, and then things cascade, all out of order.
   Life happens to me.

2. I wake up and get out of bed, walking to my porch in the dark to stretch and sit.
   I pray, and once I am done with movement and prayer, I make coffee and start journaling.
   I go through all my different creativity exercises and remind myself of who I am.
   I write things from my life that I am puzzling over, I find ways to make things beautiful or funny, and I come and sit with myself first, before anything else, so I can work from the inside out.

This second scenario is the better one by far, by far.

I have wrestled for years with the voices in my head to find a way through in writing, a way to express, to create, to be, and I am so excited to show some of this to you!

This course is a ten-week course, starting on January 2, (in just one month!), with two hours a week of instruction, and two hours of writing together and sharing! You can do it at your own pace, or with others. This is not a fiction course. You will be learning how to dive deep to find your words and the practices you need to make them come to life every day.

This is a life-changing thing. At least, to me it has been. There will be limited spaces, to keep it safe and warm, an encouraging group.

Today (December 2) is the last day for the Early Bird Discount. Welcome!

Check out Writing From The Heart.

Here’s the mobile-friendly page.

***

Sign up to get blog posts in your inbox.
You can also get my four free series starter ebooks by signing up here..

Support my work by becoming one of my Wild Seeds at Patreon. You’ll get poems in your inbox and other extras. 

Here’s an easy link to All My Books.

Hi friends,

I’ve been writing newsletters and Instagram posts about my new course, Writing from the Heart, for the last week, and it has just occurred to me that despite all the places I’ve written, I didn’t include this blog! What???

I don’t know why these kinds of announcements don’t occur me to me when I think about the blog, but maybe it is because I tell stories here. This has been the space, for seventeen years now, that I have used my words to get through my days.

From this blog, I started writing fiction, and continued with poetry, and told story after story both about my everyday life and from the life of my imagination.

And again and again, people have commented with extremely kind words about how I put things into words and how they feel that they can’t do the same.

But I have a strong conviction that everyone can write and that everyone should write! So here it is: my first online course. 10 weeks of Live teaching on Zoom… I will take you through writing as a practice step by step!

My hope for everyone taking the course is that they will emerge with a writing practice and with confidence. That they will know their words matter. This is so very, very exciting to me, I love to teach, and I love to see the points of people’s journeys, see their aha moments, see their joy in creativity.

You can view details about the course here. (Or here if you are viewing on a mobile device.)

I’ve also written a little list: Five Reasons to Write About Your Life:

Five Reasons to Write About Your Life:

1. You honor your life with your words. There is something specific and necessary about you, about the days that you are in and the people who surround you and the things you like and make and choose—no one else can tell this story and it is here for the telling.

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2. Writing is a way into love. You befriend your life when you put words to its patterns and movements. When you love it, you can live in it with friendliness and ease.

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3. Humor is an antibody to self pity or despair. When you write about hard things with gentle humor, you take away their power to diminish you.

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4. Co-authoring your life reminds you of what you can do and what you can’t. You can listen and love and respond and order. You can tell your story. You can’t control others. But you can be a part of what happens to you by witnessing and responding to it.

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5. A collection of words is a body of work. However you choose to share or not share, a body of work is such a beautiful thing to build. These are my days, you say. They are funny, sad, beautiful, blessed, heartbreaking, overwhelming, and joy-filled. They are lumpy, curious, sparkly, clumsy, spacious, and slow. See how they build over time. See how your response in words builds and becomes something for you to hold.

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If you want a guide and a kind group of people to accompany you as you begin to write about your days, I’m here! Writing about my life has changed me. Here’s the link again for desktop, and the link for mobile.

Because I forgot to blog about the course, lol, it is still open for Early Bird registration this week! Until December 4, you can take $200 off with the code EARLYBIRD at checkout. 

I hope you join us. 

All my love and thank you for reading my words for all these years,

Rae

The thing about where I live is that it is the most incredibly beautiful place, and also you have to learn to like critters, or at least co-exist with them.

We love critters. We draw the line at some of them. For example, the family of scorpions that Kenya found in her bed one night. But how can we draw the line, really? We aren’t in charge here, THEY ARE.

Here is a list of the things that live on our property at any one time, sometimes in our house.

frogs (many kinds)

toads

crabs

blue-headed lizards,

skinks,

snakes,

rhinoceros beetles,

beetles of more descriptions than I can offer,

cicadas,

ants—so, so many ants

huntsman spiders

many other spiders

cockroaches

geckos

touqays (like giant geckos, very loud)

mice

rats

worms

centipedes

millipedes

sparrows

mynahs

bulbuls

greater coucals (arm birds)

butterflies

moths

wasps (especially mud wasps— i found a nest on one of my original paintings the other day!)

bees (there is a hive in the rice barn)

and more other flies, mosquitoes, and bugs than we can even quantify

the animals that tend to live in the house with us are frogs, crabs (they hang out in the shower), geckos, and all kinds of bugs. Sometimes people say, “You have a huge spider in your bathroom,” and we say, “That’s right, she lives there.”

Part of this is due to my—what should I call it—laissez-faire approach to life? I often don’t change things even when they really should be changed. It seems that they must be that way for a reason, who am I to question?

And then maybe I blink and realize, oh yes, this is my house; if I want the critters to leave, I have to shoo them away. I notice this most when I am with friends who optimize things. They change things. They ask me if I want them to change things for me. They ask me why I haven’t changed things already. They use words like, “this could work better,” or, “this would be easier if…”

It’s like a superpower that I do not possess. Things are just the way they are, here for me to observe and write about. This is how my brain works.

Anyhow. I have a story for you, and I promise we will come back to critters eventually.

The story starts at the dentist. I was there with Chinua and Kenya, the support for their work that day. I was the driver. Kenya’s was minimal, a five minute tightening of her braces, but Chinua’s was more extensive. He needed a dental surgery, so they took his blood pressure and that was when they noticed that it was extremely high. The kind of high where they bring in more than one machine because they are convinced that the first one must be broken. That high. He went ahead and got the dental surgery that he has been needing for years (praise be!) and then the next day, we put Kenya on the bus to come home and I drove Chinua, who was in a fair amount of pain from the surgery, to the hospital to talk to his doctor about a medication switch.

Our plans all got a little squirrelly at that point, because they were concerned about my dear Superstar husband and wanted to do many tests and say many SCARY WORDS (like clot, or infarction) about what might be wrong with him. They admitted him to the ICU (SCARY) and I drove home over the mountains to get some clothes and prepare for a stay at the hospital. It’s a three hour drive and it was late when I left, so I drove in the dark and I let myself cry a bit. I let myself think about the unthinkable. And then I went back to what I have learned about big scares:

One thing at a time.
Don’t rush into the possible loss of a possible future.
Just do the next thing.

So I drove and prayed and got home late. I slept and then went to Shekina Garden and cooked the Sunday community lunch. (Of course, Ro and Winnie offered to do it for me, but I felt that cooking lunch would steady my soul, and I didn’t know what was coming over the next weeks. Surgery? Long days in the hospital? I didn’t know when we would be back.)

While I was cooking, though, I got a text from Chinua, who had already seen the cardiologist. “Nothing is wrong with my heart. It looks good.”

(I could have told them that his heart was expansive and beautiful, a wonderful specimen, full of music and creative worlds. But I’ll take “nothing is wrong.”)

There was still that pesky sky-high blood pressure, though, so I packed my backpack and drove back over the mountains to my Love. The kids were pretty incredible. Kai and Kenya, previously the little scamps who used to sit on the Leaf Baby when I tried to use the bathroom, are now fully-fledged adults, calm and responsible. So I was free to drive back to Chinua. Hospitals in Asia often have a policy that a loved one has to stay in the hospital room with a patient, so the choice was even removed for me. I had to go. I wanted to go.

So we spent two days in the hospital room together. Other than the fact that Chinua was hooked up to IVs and that people came in to talk to us about blah blah blah medicines and kidneys and sleep tests, it was like a long date. A weekend away.

It was restful. I love my husband, and I just like to be with him.

But the nurses, one day, when I was out looking for food, asked Chinua, “Did you see a frog?”

“A frog?” he asked. Was it some kind of test? He didn’t say anything to me about it until we were driving back home, over the mountains again, and I yelped VERY LOUDLY. I pulled over quickly to the side of the road.

A frog had jumped onto my gas pedal foot, surprising and cold and slightly damp. I pulled over because I didn’t want it to go under the pedal, I didn’t want to squish it. We managed to pick it up and send it off into the jungle with words of blessing, and then Chinua told me about the frog in the hospital room. Frog in the hospital room. Frog making itself known after hours of driving in the car.

There are two possibilities here, folks. Or endless ones, really, but let’s focus on two:

1, The frogs were one and the same. This little guy hopped out of my backpack, explored the hotel room, then back into my bag and into the car when we left.

2, and I think this is more likely, I brought TWO frogs with me to the hospital. One in my backpack somehow and one in the car. The backpack frog now lives in the hospital or has escaped in someone else’s bag. The car frog hung out in the car in the parking long for a few days, then said hello by jumping on my foot while I was driving. Now he lives in the jungle between Pai and Chiang Mai.

What this means to me is that even when Chinua and I are doing our best to be hospital people, in rooms with tiles and white walls, and machines and elevators, we somehow still bring wildlife with us. We bring frogs. What must those nurses have thought? It makes me laugh.

We’ve been home for a while now. I’m still processing all of it, and Chinua definitely is because he’s figuring out meds and his new machine for sleep apnea, and all the other things that are coming along right now. We are immensely thankful that his health checked out in so many ways. We are navigating health challenges that come from growing up, being adults in the middle of our lives.

And yet, we are still us, still bringing wildlife everywhere we go, even when we are being proper city people, even when we leave our kids at home. Frogs jump on board.

It has been raining for days. Streams flow from the mountain tops and flood the roads. So far, Shekina Garden (next to the river) hasn’t flooded again. There was a mini flood earlier in the season, but now it is just soggy and slippery with mud, and the stove and fridge and everything else are on the countertops, just in case.

I am ready for the sun. This has been a very very long rainy season. But clearly, the weather is not up to me, and I am thankful that we haven’t had the flooding other places in the world have. 

Over a week ago, my hands and feet broke out in something called dyshidrotic eczema. This followed a fall, a wound on my foot, and a round of antibiotics. I clearly overwhelmed my system. Poor body. Poor girl.

Of course, I go into contemplation of what is actually happening to me. I find it interesting that this situation makes me need to distance myself from my hands. My hands! My own hands. Do you know how you normally pay attention to something sore? Like, I won’t use that part of my body because it hurts. But with this, everything I do with my hands hurts, but it’s not like I can’t use my hands, so I do it anyway, and I have to put them at a distance. 

Sorry, hands. 

I was at the vegetarian festival here in town, telling Naomi and Ro about this particular thing I’m noticing, and our friend Michael, who was sitting with us, nodded. Michael’s in his eighties and has pretty bad arthritis, so he understood.

“When I do things, I have to say; I am not the pain.”

I am my hands. But I am not the pain in my hands.

Anyway, my hands are healing. I have cut out sugar and gluten to help. ALL SUGAR, EVEN FRUIT. This is not good timing— our rambutan tree is going off for the very first year. I should say, my landlady’s rambutan tree on this property that we are so blessed to rent. And I cannot eat rambutans right now.

All of it has me thinking about chronic illness and my normally okay skin, which is getting a bit more wrinkly with a few too many patchy freckles joining together, but I’ll take it! I’ll take the non-itchy, non-hurting skin! I’m also thinking about how quickly things can change, and how I should really declutter my things in case I die suddenly. Normal, normal person thoughts.

I think it’s all a symptom of sensing the brevity of everything. Especially now, as we leave one season and enter another, with our friends and dear heart companions, Naomi and Josh and their kids leaving Thailand. (Perhaps you will think this is a seventeen-year-old blog about people leaving. Perhaps it is.)

But I find I want to capture everything, to go back to all the days I didn’t write and write those moments down. There were years when I felt I couldn’t write about our normal life, and I needed that time, time to be quiet (and write fiction), but now I want to remember, to pore over every photograph, to stare into our eyes from five, six, seven years ago. I love you, I love you.

Kenya and I have spent a few evenings sketching and painting side by side under strange orange light that lies to me about which colors I am using. We paint outside, at the “dining room” table, in quotation marks because the room is a carport with only one wall. Large beetles fly overhead. The painting settles me in a way that nothing else can. I am looking for new ways to see, especially with sorrow ahead. Some of that sorrow will be in the shape of children leaving home. (This is a blog about people leaving, after all.)

But Kai, our twenty-year-old, has come back for a time, and he and I drove home together the other day. We were having one of those surprising conversations that goes deep and needs more time, causing us to sit in the car in the driveway to finish talking. Isaac was at home waiting for us, and he wanted our attention. He kept opening the door and dancing or singing silly songs to us, and when I asked him for more time, he stood in front of the car, in the light of the “dining room,” and kept dancing.

“I know you have been through this several times before,” Kai said, “but can you wake me up in four years?”

He meant after the most annoying parts of the tween years are over.

“But isn’t it amazing, how much he adores you?” I asked.

“It is,” Kai said.

“Hold onto that.”

As for me, a lot of life hurts right now. And I know that it hurts for a lot of people, people everywhere are going through so much, so much. But I also know that I won’t be sleeping through it. It is so, so beautiful. I might sketch every single frame, keep it close, let it sing through my itchy, rashy hands.

***

You can get my four free series starter ebooks by signing up here.

Support my work by becoming one of my Wild Seeds at Patreon. You’ll get poems in your inbox and other extras. 

Here’s an easy link to All My Books.

On my last post, Dee commented that motherhood is more of an offering than an investment. Whew. That is a mouthful. An offering.

I wake up and have to choose. To consume? To invest, strings attached? Or to hold my hands out: an offering?

Telling stories is an offering, making art is an offering, writing books is an offering. My life is an offering. Listen, listen, we can live a different way. Lightly, kindly, with dancing hands and feet. Each poem is an offering. Each meal is an offering.

I wake up and I have to choose. Sometimes the night sits heavy on my heart. All those fears that came to visit me, the feeling of being in the middle where I cannot see the way forward and the way back is full of sorrow and impassable anyway. Choose to open your eyes, lovely. Make your coffee, take a breath. Share a story.

*

Okay, here is a story, a snapshot: (This snapshot will immediately turn into something more like a tangle of yarn in the bottom of my knitting bag: You have been warned.)

Today I have promised to buy two people slices of cake. Two. These two are my sons. One of them, Isaac, is getting cake because he was brave and got through the scary time of being rushed by two dogs and bitten and going to the hospital. I know!

(What is going on with us, lately? Maybe this is just life in a big family.)\

The other son, Leafy, is getting cake because he got all the stamps on his sheet in Thai class. It’s VERY kind of his Thai tutor to continue to give him the stamps and the prizes, because he’s not exactly a kid anymore. Come to think of it, Kenya still gets the stamps, which makes me wonder what exactly are the parameters of being a kid in this class?

This could be the title of our life right now. What are the parameters of being a kid? And what are the parameters of being an adult, and what is the line between the two? And what is a household boundary and what is being treated like a kid and these are the conversations we have since we have adults and kids and adult kids all under one roof.

Two dogs, as well. Seven people and two dogs, and sometimes guests, under a roof that doesn’t always keep the rain out. I’m not complaining, I’m the most blessed woman. I know the transience of time, the way I will look back on this with love filled eyes.

If it was me, receiving cake today, I would buy a slice of red velvet. But I’m guessing Leafy and Isaac will buy cheese cake. (Edit- wrong, Isaac chose red velvet cake, and Kenya threw a wild card and gave me money to buy her a slice of cheesecake as well.)

Probably I should just turn Solo loose on learning to make cheesecake. It’s the kind of thing he’d figure out quickly.

Example: He’s been craving sweet potato gnocchi like the kind we had once at a foodstall in town, so he asked me to buy some sweet potatoes. After a mishap with the first ones I got, which he baked and then realized were full of bugs, I found some bug-free purple sweet potatoes in the market and brought them home.

Solo got straight to work, and in a few hours presented us with gnocchi in a pesto sauce he created with cashews and some slightly wilted Thai basil that I had in the fridge.

IT WAS SO GOOD. It was so good. And purple! So, the question is, is Solo an adult or not? He is only fourteen, but he has adult gnocchi skills. It’s one of the things about Solomon— you offer him some ingredients and he sort of goes swoosh swoosh and comes out with something genius amid very little fanfare.

Like the time I gave him some linoleum for cutting and suggested he make a lino print for T-shirts because we were doing a handmade gifts only Christmas, and he came up with this mind-blowing design. His first time!

Lest this turn only into a brag post, listen my friends: My days are filled with questions about whether my adult kids are going to be okay because of things I discover they cannot do. In other words, things I forgot to tell them. Let’s say I’ve been more concerned about listening well to one another and picking flowers and printing T-shirts than every single practical thing they need to do. Yikes. Will they be okay?

But then, I could ask will I be okay? I am and I will, and STILL I find that a large part of life is about fixing large holes of my own (or Chinua’s) making because of things we didn’t know how to do. Things we still don’t know how to do.

Here’s a story that is about that, and also about gnocchi, because every story I tell is somehow connected to some other story.

One day Chinua and I were driving along a road on an island in the Millennium Falcon, our big station wagon. This was once upon a time… six months ago. We had just recovered from MOMID MIMEEN and were busting out of the house for our first drum lesson, feeling blissful about finally getting back out into the world.

Chinua teaches West African drums, and I take his classes, and he’d been given the opportunity to teach on the island. But 1. Google Maps doesn’t understand Thailand, and 2. it was storming. Trouble commenced. Google routed us up over a hill with a dirt road, and at one point, the road was swamped and crumbling, water streaming across it. Chinua chose a point on the side that looked smoothest and the least like off-roading.

This was his fatal mistake. The smoothness hid the fact that it was soft—incredibly, puffily, quicksand-like soft. MilFal sank in up to her axles, and that was it for us. A couple of men drove along behind us and tried to help pull us out with their truck and some of the logs they had just bought for their construction job. These were wooden poles, and they just weren’t strong enough to hold our car, despite us all getting thoroughly wet and trying our hardest and our helpers being remarkably cheerful about being late to their job and wading around in the water and rain. They took a photo of the situation to send to their boss, so they could explain why they were late.

Chinua caught a ride with them so he could still teach the class, and I sat in the car and steamed, not emotionally (I was actually a bit blissed out, I like weird moments like this) but literally, with dampness and heat, until I managed to find a tow truck with a winch. Winches are great, by the way. Underrated. They really do the thing they’re meant to do.

Anyway. A few days later, my friend Naomi told me that she was talking to the woman who used to make sweet potato gnocchi at Street Vegan, a little gem of a restaurant here in Pai. The gnocchi Solomon loved. The woman had the picture of us and our car stuck in the mud! She knew we had been stuck because the men who stopped to help were her workers, building her new shop on the island.

The same shop that she closed down here in Pai, where we ate sweet potato gnocchi and Solo had it for the first time and wanted it ever after, so that when he couldn’t get it here anymore he had to make it himself.

And here’s how this all comes together: While I waited for the tow truck to arrive (two hours, if you are wondering) I saw many people approach the same washed-out bit of road and get out of their cars or off their motorbikes, stamping on the ground to find the hardest, most solid part to cross over.

That’s how you do it! Chinua and I didn’t know, so we got ourselves in a pickle and then found a way out. And all these years later, well into middle age, we still do that.

So sometimes kids will magically make the best gnocchi you’ve ever eaten and sometimes they will just have to figure out how to get themselves out of pickles, and the moral is that I don’t need to entertain every single worst case scenario out there.

I can trust and so can you, we can trust that the same wildness we get ourselves through in this world will not swallow our kids whole, even if they do sink up to their axles, every once in a while.

(HOW’S THAT for tying it up? I didn’t even know that was going to happen.) Offerings, you guys, offerings.

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I am glad I chose to write today. I feel better already.

Sign up to get blog posts in your inbox.

You can also get my four free series starter ebooks by signing up here..

Support my work by becoming one of my Wild Seeds at Patreon. You’ll get poems in your inbox and other extras. 

Here’s an easy link to All My Books.

“We have a lot of kids,” I say to Chinua after we pick Kai up. The car is full of them, and this is so literal, in the space sense. Our car is full of our family. Six out of the seven of us now reach between 5’11” and 6’4”. In a Thai market, a Thai mall, a park, a street… we tower and fill the space. People stare. I mean, they always have, really, but the stares have changed from “awwww” to awe.

I feel the awe. And I feel the space between then and now, the space ahead that is unknown. What other people are there for us? Who else will be in our circles? How will we move through the world later, when we are not together?

We’ve had some starts and stops with the segmenting of our little unit. Right now, Kai will be back with us for a few months while he prepares to start school in the spring, we hope. The ache of separation is alleviated for a short time. There is a different ache. So many nearly adult minds are whirring close together.

I find myself speechless, at times.

And I am so immersed in our stories.

*

Lately, I have been struck by how there are calls everywhere to make life into a formula or an equation. If you do this…advertisers, influencers, food and exercise specialists, parenting and schooling experts promise, and add this, you will have a sum or a product of this.

Hmm. I think it’s not going to work.

I love math.

I love the way it inhabits everything from plant cells to stars. I love the math of possibility, of chemistry, the math of art, the math of words and phrases, of rhyme and music.

And yet, humans evade simple formulas, don’t we? Simply by adding people into the formula, the equation breaks down.

There is, quite simply, no formulaic way to live life. No way to ensure health, faith, wealth, or lifespan of the people you love. I am sorry. I am sorry for us that this is true.

So what do we have?

What is life if not a formula?

The only answer I can come up with is: a story. A series of stories within stories within poems, within music, but all telling stories. I think. I can’t be sure because there is no formula. But Jesus didn’t tell parables for nothing, I am starting to see.

*

In your twenties, perhaps, you still believe in formulas. Although something about this generation of upcoming twenty-year-olds seems to be that they, also, don’t necessarily believe in the formulas of the past.

(Study + Work + Consistency= A future—not necessarily.)

I had my own formulas, though mine weren’t exactly wealth-building formulas. They had to do with children and love and faith and care and work and community. I have lived a life where I have been loved and cared for by so many people—this is not a story about lack of love. But, maybe, lack of assurance. When some of my formulas broke down, I simply switched them out for others. Do this and this within a community and it will last forever.

Let’s just say that my formulas didn’t include a global pandemic. And so, now here we are with our community whittled away. But this is not our story. Our story is rich with love and beauty. This is how I will tell it, and how I will keep telling it.

And even though the formula for mothers seems to be to work and invest everything, literally everything, in order to end up alone, this also is not the story.

Because no formula can capture the beauty and tragedy of motherhood. Or community. In the end, I have no product to take out of my pocket or put in my bank account. I have days and days of lived experience, stories that no one can ever take away from me.

Build homeschool groups and teach so families will not move away is a formula with no product at the end of it, because it involves too many things that cannot be controlled.

It is a saggy, sad, pathetic formula.

But as a story, it says: We spent days and days laughing together, we made a play and performed it, and there have been hundreds of nights of playing “ghost” in the dark, skateboarding made a comeback, then build-up tag. I read so many books to so many kids, on good days and bad days, and sometimes it was so hot that I could barely stay awake. We wrote many words while the timer was running and made up silly stories and wrote them down. There was only one day that I walked out because no one was listening and I was fed up. We planted rice and climbed trees. We did this for over a dozen years, I loved the kids, too, all of them. And one by one they moved away, but every moment mattered.

*

What then, is a story? Maybe just a way of being close to your life. Of loving it and the world.

I love you, I love you. I love you now, and now, and now. In a story, people weave in and out like threads. There are acts and parts and chapters.

*

There is a lot of power in telling your own story.

*

And honestly, in life, formulas are terrible. They make you feel as though life is transactional and you are not doing it quite right. That if you had pinched a little here, pulled a little there, maybe you wouldn’t have aged. Or gone through normal sorrow. Or been in the beautiful mundane parts of life.

There is so much that formulas can never value, can never quite see. Tell your story, instead.

(More on how, later.)

***

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Umbrellas are wonderful because they show up in unexpected places. This is what I thought to myself the other night as Chinua and I were driving home from a date that didn’t go badly but didn’t go well. Poor Chinua had a migraine and needed to head home right away—also, he couldn’t eat much, so I ate all the sushi, no regrets!—and my headlights lit up an umbrella that was hanging upside down from a bourgainvillea bush as though it was simply an offering for a wet passerby.

I thought the same thing when I spotted a man in full army fatigues walking in the rain with a pink satin umbrella. Or when I saw two umbrellas sitting side by side at a resort, both the brilliant saffron of monk’s robes. Umbrellas are wonderful. Some kind of strange addition to any day, something that covers and maybe has polka dots. Or ruffles. Or shiny satin.

Umbrella thoughts.

***

Goodness, what a slog of self-doubt I have to wade through just to wake up. It’s boring, honestly. My doomsayer doubts that I can do even very normal things, like walk downstairs. It tries to convince me that all is hopeless, that “going downstairs” is something for the very attractive among us, those with excellent teeth and long eyelashes.

“Don’t try it,” my early morning doomsayer warns me. “You’ll never make it to the kitchen.”

And I lie there and think, “this voice is probably right. She has never ever lied to me before, never ever.” This is for two reasons. First is that my early morning self tends to be gullible. She’s a bit malleable, a bit soggy from sleep and strange dreams. The second is that my kitchen really is rather far away. It’s not in the same building as my house, actually, and if it’s raining, the doomsayer has even more chance of convincing early morning Rae that the best solution to the problem of not being able to get out of bed is not getting out of bed.

The truth is that the solution to not being able to get out of bed is getting out of bed, which is unfair, illogical, and demands muscular ability that even caffeinated Rae finds hard to access.

Just saying. Great forces are against me, and it only gets worse as I get older. This is not an exaggeration. (It might be an exaggeration.)

***

Teenagers are the most exquisite creatures in the history of creatures. (Along with those other most exquisite creatures like newborns and toddlers.) They are also hard to write about because of these incredible, life-altering things going on with them. But maybe I can say just a little.

One, they stretch, and it is like something out of Science Fiction. At least, in our household, it is. Solo grew so fast that we could see it happening in real-time. I’ve never seen anything like it. It doesn’t seem humanly possible. The growth is so explosive in my family that some of my kids end up with stretch marks from literally being dragged up high into the sky.

Speaking of Solo, the poor kid has been dogged by venomous caterpillars for his entire life. When he was two or three years old and we were visiting our friends in Varanasi, India, he kept running out into the courtyard in the mornings and stepping on the stinging caterpillars that had dropped from the mango tree the night before. I couldn’t stop it. Every day they were swept away, every night they dropped, every morning Solo ran out and ended up with terrible stinging feet.

So when I got a call that he’d had another encounter (there have been many in between) with stinging caterpillars in his shirt, I was not surprised. But I was not prepared for what I found when I picked him up—this kid’s whole (stretched over six feet) body was covered with painful hives.

I was actually really concerned for him. I think it’s time to buy an epi-pen. But he took some medication and put some hydrocortisone cream on and he’s fine now. Stinging caterpillars are like his nemesis. What a strange nemesis—but then, Solomon has always been unique. He also just turned fourteen, if you want your mind to be blown, long-time readers.

***

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The fourth episode of The Journey Mama Writings podcast, is out here!

Thanks for reading and listening, everyone. You can find the podcast on iTunes or Spotify, Youtube, or other places you get your podcasts. 

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The amazing music is by Chinua Ford.

Happy listening!

I began this blog seventeen years ago and named it Journey Mama because of a dream. I felt stuck and needed to travel in words and memories, needed to journey even if I wasn’t physically going anywhere.

Things change, and they stay the same. I feel stuck now, too, though I live across the world from where I did back then. Though I live in an interesting, glowing, incredible place. I did then, too. My stuck-ness seems to come from within.

And yet, there is something true about feeling stuck in this beautiful valley. In 2017 we took our last family trip to the US and Canada, a wonderful whirl of camping and visiting family. In 2018 we took our last family trip to India. Before this, there were travels nearly every single year. India, Nepal, Turkey, here in Thailand of course, Canada, the US, Israel. We were travelers.

We still are, inside. But that was the last time we traveled farther than the south of Thailand. (I took a short trip in 2019 to sell our van, an anxiety-ridden blip that taught me I can do hard things, but I don’t count it as an actual visit.)

We have lived a rich traveling life. Is it over? Is it meant to be over? Lately I feel like I am in pieces, scattered and floating. I come to this blog again, to still the storm inside and to dream of a journey.

But it feels hard to dream, post-pandemic. (Mid-pandemic?) It feels like a practical joke, like the rug might be pulled out from under us if we try to make plans. Is this what I’m feeling now? The lack of ability to see the future? Is this what is drawing my molecules apart?

I have always had a hard time seeing the shape of the world. I’m better in the particulars, the curve of a tree, the feeling of a small hand in mine. Now, seventeen years after I started this blog, I am thinking about how to celebrate my twenty-year-old son’s birthday. My fourth child is turning fourteen in a week. Things have changed and stayed the same. I can’t see the future because my children will leave and I don’t know how to foresee that.

Writing about it is different, too. The richness of living with older children is like eating one of those really chocolatey chocolatey cakes. They are full of their own ideas. Talks are deep. Things are sometimes private and harder to write about. There is a lot of cuteness, but they don’t always want me to share it. They are not toddlers anymore.

I found relief in writing for so long. Writing helped the big truths feel more true. But over the last few years, some of the underpinnings of who I thought I was unraveled, and I have felt a little like I might unravel, too.

This is not so much about faith. I actually find that my faith is very similar to what it was when I was a child, when I was immersed in a celebratory, musical tradition that was bathed in the Holy Spirit and all about the twin disciplines of experience and compassion.

I am different now, more contemplative for sure. Not so much into hype. But when I look back, I see a familiar shape of faith. When people in my life have deconstructed and thought about, for example, hatred for their bodies, I have thought, I don’t think we were taught that. How could we have hated our bodies when we were taught to dance in the aisles? We didn’t, that’s all there is. I didn’t. That’s just one example.

(And I was taught that I could bring all my friends to dance in the aisles of my churches. That is what we did. It’s what I still do, in a way, though my church is a garden, now.)

So, no, it is not faith that has unraveled, or not in God, anyway. Maybe it is my faith in people. I think the unraveling has had something to do with my beliefs about how we change the world.

I thought if people simply had things written well for them, they would have epiphanies and revelations. Love, as well as knowledge, would change everything. So my writing had all this hope attached to it.

Knowledge and love do change things, but maybe on a smaller scale. I see that mostly I write for myself, and hopefully it helps someone else, too. Every single prayer, poem, story I write addresses some kind of need I have: to see the world’s shape, to see truth’s shape. I can’t go without writing for long before it all becomes nebulous and airy. And love? Well, love is powerful, but it cannot control. There we go, there is the truth that I avoided. I have loved and loved, I have thought I could make everything more loving and then people would stay put, relationships would stay intact, but nothing can make us into puppets because God created us to be free. That means we get to make decisions that may hurt one another. Free decisions.

Since I started this blog, I have uncovered many things in myself that were covered by my own ignorance. First there was the discovery of anxiety, and then the discovery of what lay behind that, autism. Then the awareness that this writing, this shaping and obsession with words and ideas, colors and lines and stories and poems, is a part of autism. A good part of autism. The other parts, the hard parts, are dogged and sometimes mean to me. That is okay. It is all just part of it.

Another thing I have uncovered is the complexity of being neurodiverse in a neurodiverse family. There is the dream, perhaps, and that dreamy dreaminess is real and true. And then there is the fact that all your obsessions and impulses and quirks and tapping and motions may just clash with one another at times. And those times will feel explosive. This is the most clearly I have written about this, I know. I don’t write about it a lot because it is a gentle and private place in our lives. But it bears saying here.

So this space is the same. Is it the same? How can it be the same after all this time? I feel both frustrated and encouraged by that.

Same old Rae. No toddlers, though.

Bear with me. I may have to do quite a lot of writing to piece myself back together.

:: part seven ::

You will find that you can do the same- you can move toward others in love, even knowing that you can’t always understand all of what they are going through or what they decide, knowing it is not your job to understand everything. That is the work that they do with God in their own souls.

But this is why it is particularly terrible to mock people in their pain. Pain can be such a hard river to cross, it is brave and difficult to find one another in our pain.

It is the work of the enemy of our souls to use the pain of others for mockery. It is the work of the enemy to use mockery of the hardest moments of others for our own gain.

Love moves carefully across rivers and walls. Greeting at the edges, allowing for places of unknowing and not understanding. We do not have to know perfectly to love, because we are not all the same shape. There will always be space in the middle, always be places where we have to leap.

***

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Here’s an easy link to All My Books.

But writing always helps. This blog always helps. Here I am again, friends. Life is a full-throated roar. It doesn’t pause for those of us who can’t quite move fast enough. But we wake up day after day, ready to meet what comes.

I’m back.

And I come with offerings.

I have the sixth book in the World Whisperer series for you. Here it is: 

Crown of Stars. 

The elders are missing. A strange power hovers. The resistance continues. 

After a great battle with the Desert King, Isika has returned to the Royal City of Maween to find that the elders have vanished without a trace. Ben is the only one with any sense of them at all. He embarks with the seekers on a quest to find the elders, but soon a foreign malevolent power makes itself known.

Six elders wake up in six unfamiliar places, flung out of their lives by a mysterious force. Disoriented and afraid, they must discover what has happened to them and survive in their new surroundings. Estranged from the source of power in Maween, will they have the strength to keep themselves safe and find their ways home? Or, like the queen before them, will they be lost forever?

I have loved writing this book, and it is one of my favorites so far. It’s got a lot of my heart in it. I hope you like it, too.

Here’s the book page and an excerpt.

Happy reading!

:: part 6 ::

This kind of knowing helps with the ongoing grief that comes from being a human creature in this world. Because sadness is so isolating isn’t it? People try to understand what is going on with you, but they don’t get the combination right and they can’t get past the locks and you find yourself trying to explain over and over, because maybe their understanding will give you permission to feel the way you feel.

But people don’t need to fully understand you to love you.

And when you know you don’t need their permission, you can see their efforts to move toward you, however misguided, as what they are: love.

And you can accept love, even clumsy love that doesn’t quite get all of who you are, because you are forming those bonds with God, those threads that weave you together, you look back for reassurance and God nods. You’re okay. You’re still here. The friend who is trying to understand and missing it a little is not your definition. He is just another human. You are knit together, no one needs to hold you together.

***

Support my work by becoming one of my Wild Seeds at Patreon. You’ll get poems in your inbox and other extras. 

Here’s an easy link to All My Books.