stories

National Write Down Your Story Day!

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It’s late, but it’s not too late to share your stories with yourself, your families, your friends, and/or with the world!

This website is filled with my own stories that I have loved sharing with you, my readers, and I plan on sharing more with you.

Take a few minutes and jot down your story.

Choose one of your stories, and add to it. Embellish it even.

We’re having a snow day here in the Northeast and I’ve been sitting at this keyboard, clickity-clacking for today and tomorrow, classes, planners.

I have given myself a six week goal to put a dent in my Labyrinth prayer book. I plan to share one or two excerpts after Easter.

What goals can you give yourself to get your story going? What motivation do you need?

Let me know – I want to help.

Happy Snow Day.

Now write your story!

*Feel free to link in the comments!

Choices

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As Lin-Manuel [Miranda] said in his commencement address at UPenn this past weekend, “we choose the stories we tell.” That is wholly true, but those stories are shaped by what we choose to do in our lives.

I will tell you about my life this week. It is a ridiculously busy week. Even the calendar is cluttered.  I made a list of everything on my calendar from Sunday the 15th until Saturday the 21st.  Assuming I wrote everything down, that’s twenty-five things. Although I forgot to  include the Target run for household goods and grocery shopping plus two trips this week to The Fresh Market for their specials that are only available on certain days. I also didn’t include my son’s girlfriend visiting us this weekend for the first time. Oh crap! What are we going to make for dinner?!

All but one of the television shows on that list are for the entire family’s viewing. It’s season finales for many of them this week and next. Not listed are writing group assignments, three greeting cards that need to be written out and sent and my journal submission for one class. I also need to clean my house.

So I guess that makes it thirty-four in actuality.

As of this writing, I’ve accomplished the first nine, skipped three and will complete two more tonight plus start another one. I’ve crossed five out as conflicts with more important things that either need to be done or that I would rather do. [Watch my son get a scholarship award at his college and meet a friend of my husband’s visiting from Amsterdam for instance. My daughter also has a concert with her school’s chorus.] All on Thursday.

We will postpone Thursday’s TV until Friday, on demand, or on the CW app.

We will be late to my daughter’s concert and I kind of invited my son’s girlfriend over this weekend without telling anyone, thinking that my son would postpone it until next week. As I said earlier, it’s happening this week.

The Yartzeit for my Dad was a day late, and I didn’t go to mass this morning.

Did I forget to list that I need a couple (or more) of showers on that list?

So, we choose.

And we choose and we adjust our lives and whether through facebook or writing class or the stories we tell our friends, we are constantly making choices.

To pick the best one; the funniest one, the one with the lesson learned or the embarrassing one that we finally find funny.

Whichever one we choose they are our stories; your stories.

Choose them well.

Reminders

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Hail to you, our King, obedient to the Father; you were led to your crucifixion like a gentle lamb to the slaughter.

Today’s Gospel acclamation reminded me of something that often strikes me as funny. As someone who did not grow up with the New Testament, on occasion I will hear something in the church readings and I will remember it from the secular world.

Lambs to the slaughter is one of those phrases.

Another one is when Mary Magdalene asks where Jesus has gone after his burial in the tomb. Her words are: They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him (within John 20: 1-9).

The way this was intoned the first time I heard this, it came out in a rhythm, and reminded me of Little Bo Peep: Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep and doesn’t know where to find them.

There are many times I wonder how many fables, how many familiar sayings come from the stories of Jesus, original reminders for the less than literate as his Death and Resurrection are repeated and told as more and more believers each find Him in their own time.

Kind of like me.