After a 4+ Year Hiatus

All Saints' Day 💓. What perfect day to return to this corner.

Honestly, I noticed this blog was (still) listed on my Instagram page and I felt a bit embarrassed that I hadn't touched it in years and this is why I am back.

I love the old posts,  some over 10 years old, because it is a time-capsule of the young woman I was and where I came before my current self. What privilege to watch part of your own constant "becoming" and birth. What privilege to learn about the dead and saints in their own labor pains towards more fullness of self. 

Science is darn beautiful but rarely it is poetic and personal-not in the technical articles that are the bread and butter of my life for the past few years. I know that is why my poetry collection has grown so much in the last 2-3 years-a quick fix of the sacred and beautiful within words and language. 

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So here is quick recap of the past 4 years.

-I left my spot at the PhD program back in 2017-the one written about July 2017.  I left the golden ticket, the prize of 6 years of work of undergrad and two countries completing that degree. I left because brokenness entered my life in a new way through a season debilitating depression-the good potent season where I learned, in the flesh, how people can become "shells" of themselves through the disease-where pleasures become unbearable tasks and where the guilt of the stigma eats you alive. Honest time? I was there less than 2 months, although the unbearable season had begun weeks before moving and peaked a month or so in. 

-I found a wonderous lad, online, in 2018 and traveled to northen Iowa more times than I care to remember! Long-distance is no joke all you hopefully lovers 💨💨. This long distance ended exactly a year ago and well, thanks be to God!

-I entered a PhD, after > 90% rejection rate in my applications, in Ohio in 2020. I am resolved to study the brain and diseases which caused me to let go of the "better" PhD program in 2017.  I also moved during a global pandemic and moved by myself. I'll spare you the mental anguish narrative there 😷

-Spiritually, I've been entering a season of "blessed are the mourning", Lady of Sorrows thing and I feel like I am in the Catholic emo phase. Although I think that's going to be a forever thing 😅😅

Impatient and Imperfect Pilgrim

I tend to be impatient. I am impatient with time, with God and I am most impatient with myself. Impatience may be a bittersweet gift of my youth, a gift I often toy with. 

A small vignette of this summer could very well look like a young woman (me) flipping endlessly through her calendar, sitting a bit stiffly and sighing often. The irony? While this woman waits for August to arrive for graduate school, a larger part of her fears it.

Weeks before graduation I anticipated a summer full of science, family and some needed therapeutic work on my anxiety. However, as so painfully evident by this blog, my plans rarely seem to come to full fruition so here I stand trying to be grateful for the mixed bag given to me. 

I have between 10-20 hours weekly as your local barista and cashier. I keep reminding myself, through the great example of my parents' own life worth ethic, that I am deeply blessed for having a job at all. Mind you, your local barista (in training) is still the young woman in that vignette. 

In the greater point of things, I am starting to realize that it is okay to be in the shoes of the scared young woman once more. It is okay to think I am a little nuts to move across the country when just a few years back I was able to reunite with my family. Truman State was only a three hour drive, University of North Carolina is a 2 hour flight.

After The Storm...

It has been a long time since I have written anything via blog world. For those years I'd read back through old posts and thought that God taken away any shred of creative ability. I quite literally felt I could not create anything. The spirit, hope and pursuit I saw in those words, in that woman, was lost. And I mean not dormant nor out for holiday, but dead. How could I have ever believed I could create beauty and reflect truth?

I am starting to be open to the idea that maybe I was wrong. I am starting to slowly come back to believe I am a creator, or at least a co-creator. So here I am. Twenty-four but feeling none the wiser than that perky, enthusiastic and hopeful 20-year old that wrote a few years back. So dear friends, forgive if this gal in her mid-twenties is a tiny more cynical about the world but know she is trying. With God's grace I can re-discover that creative beauty within me and outside of me.

September Poem

On this September afternoon, I ask myself who am I?

Many times in life I felt I have been anxiety; I have been fear and burden.

I have been littleness with a margin that decorates itself with maybe too little dignity.

I have been attacker, I have been inflictor of evil.

I have been wound opener, a graceless speaker.

I have been frigid and cold. I have been a dark storm.

I have been a much too small tower, with a beacon of hope.

I have been tears, both loud and silent. I have been silence in anger and joy.

I have been arrogance humbled by sobering reality in the highest moments of glory.

I have been child seeking for fame, only discovering its ugly face.

I have been isolation, when silence was lacking.

Truth is, I do not know who I have been, or if anything of it has ever been seen. And here I see what the problem is, the seen or unseen, the “has been”, has still been me. I have decorated myself with guilt, just and unjust, dressed in softness of newness beyond, never giving up the futile hope that by attention all will be won. 

Getting Back Into Recording the Journey

It's been nearly five months since my return to the States and it has now become an undeserved commodity to sit at my old room, at my (new) desk in the house that saw and witnessed the range of family ups and downs within high school and middle school, in the town that witnessed most of my childhood. Have you ever felt like you're middle of so much bliss and things longed for that you know the grave abuse not savoring it anymore? In rare occasions I give myself the time to notice my ingratitude and the most selfish attitude of vanity and selfishness I allow myself to easily nest and feed of. How easily do I ask myself,  mainly bitterly, of the pain and brokenness of the world and its affect on my own cross but forget to be utterly repulsed at my direct contribution to it all- and how often is not rhetorical here, every day I do this and perhaps ever more frequently since the return of this young pilgrim.


But this is no woe post of course, but rather a necessary acknowledgement in the records for myself. Blessings experienced in the past 5 months have been sweetly held in my memory and now ever more eager to continue its recordings. A beautiful chapter of my life has been closed and despite my daily ungratefulness God gives me enough sanity (ah, praise for Mercy!) to see what I must do for a holy journeying in the years to follow, even if my will strongly battles with it at the moment.

The Desert

I've been on the border city of Cuidad Juarez, a few meters (or an inch like in the above picture) from El Paso, TX for about 3 days. The quality of my phone camera is really VERY poor so I was not able to capture in an image the painfully DEEP and stinging contrast between the two cities meters away from each other. Both cities lie in a desert and yet Cuidad Juarez is the only one that shows this for when I looked over the fence to glance at el Paso all I could see the very characteristic American highways, big trucks, huge hospitals, hotels and the whole infrastructure rising above its neighbor, a city filled with dust, graffiti and slums (the bordering part of Cuidad Juarez is the oldest part of the city, and hence in worst conditions than other places, for example, the U.S. consulate near my hotel) where one wonders if for its residents in Juarez (or likewise in El Paso) do not wonder how this can be, and silently feel some sort of desperation or remorse. For myself I couldn't help but wonder how I could have grown up in Juarez near its slums, WATCHING with my own eyes a life and place SO different from mine and know for whatever reason I was born a few meters south of a city that I could see but never enjoy. I still can't fully grasp the image I saw a few hours ago I must confess. No, my God, I still cannot grasp why in the above picture you'll find pieces of trash, stray dogs and houses in the desert in Juarez while El Paso you see Border Security vans protecting with guns and a fence anything resembling Juarez.

The desert is a beautiful place, desolate and full of false promises and yet come and see like I did this place, on Juarez, and don't tell me why you don't understand why a 12-year old boy risked his life to cross the desert, he knew El Paso, he had been watching the city his whole life. 

Today I was able to experience something QUITE wonderful, all praise and thanks to God! I gathered with a group of students from St. Joe's University to talk right across the fence, to ask about and listen to the immigration dilema. I shared my story, which in Juarez was coming to its end. I heard others, who in God's great Mercy and Love had traveled much longer and painful journeys. I saw the desert, and saw border patrol too, right across the fence, worried about me, about us, worrying that the U.S. was threatened by a few older women and a young woman. I saw my friend after nearly two years, but the fence impeded me from hugging her, the best we could do was pass our fingers through the fence and touch, even if barely. I heard students wishing me luck, desiring to show me New York when I return, excited to consider St. Joe's. It was touching, I felt unworthy to have that hope...most there did not. And so we prayed, in a circle, on the fence, touching hands, everyone still on their respective countries despite our inches in distance..... and I thank God DEEPLY for it!

The desert IS a beautiful place, in fact, I think it's the VERY first time I've been able to see one, but ever more beautiful was the experience that occurred there this Friday morning......

Oh The Weather Outside is... wonderful!

Oh the weather is... frightful? Nah, why you're in Mexico, sunshine ALL year long! :)

As the weeks pass I can hardly believe in almost 10 days little Ms. Gonzalez will be HERE!
I don't know how much she'll remember the few weeks she will be here in Guadalajara but I know for me, as her older sister, it will be significant enough. She was a toddler when she left this city and now she is a big teenager visiting the place of her birth for the first time again! It's insane that her 10-year old cousin and her will finally meet for the first time!

A couple of months before leaving Mexico, little Ms. Gonzalez enjoys an uncle's family ranch and its animals :) 

And yet I realize that for some reason this is the life God has given me, the unique aspect of being "home" in two homes, of (God-willing) having the freedom to travel back and forth in these two unique beautiful places. I AM so blessed with this, or will be at least!

However I don't forget that really, this is a small victory, my brother will still be in another country because of details in the immigration law, my mom still has a longer wait and there's the reality that UNdesired immigration is still present and pushing Mexico. I believe that roughly 1 out of every 10 Mexican citizens are in the U.S. most as illegal immigrants, most having suffered through an awful ordeal of poverty. Minimum wage here continues to be 50 US cents the hour and I know full well food prices are about the same in both countries. It's a beautiful place, with a beautifully deep inequality and much too well defined socio-economic groups.

Art thrives in this theater built in 1866 in Guadalajara, still VERY much in use to promote the arts in the city

The gorgeous hills in Veracruz

Slums in Guadajara