leaping again

This coming weekend I will be leaping into life. This leap has been a long time coming. Mosaic woman needs the credit. To get into a recent craft fair she had to get a state tax ID or some such thing, so with that bit of legal nonsense completed she decided it was time to create a business. I grabbed her shirt said I am going with you, and as her spouse it is relatively easy to free fall with her.

Friday we will be driving north to a craft fair at the Palisades Middle School for a show that goes from 3-7pm if you trust the info they sent us and 4-8pm if you trust their website (I guess we need to check on that). Then we will drive a bit farther north to see my sister who is flying in from California this week.

Saturday and Sunday we will be at the Oak Lane Day School for a craft fair being run by the acppa . Well, I won't be there on Sunday, that is strudelfest 2007.


That is usually an event that happens in October, but it was put off so my sister who has been quite ill could participate this year. I will get some assistance from the family. Mosaic woman's role of helping me roll the strudels will be given to someone else as she will be at the craft fair. I make apple, potato, grape and cabbage strudel as my Mom Mom taught me over ten years ago since she died I have taken on the role as strudel maker. It takes hours and we end up with enough strudel to feed us for a few days and I will take a bunch to work.

I have been making and giving way art for eons. This weekend I dive into the waters of selling. I made this dive once before, nearly 20 years ago. I failed and never tried again. Thanks to Mosaic woman I am giving myself a second chance.

Oh, so I decided to make some stained glass.

leaping

Enjoyable reading came home one day with M. She brought A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby. Now I have seen three movies based on his writing but have not touched one of his books, so I went for it. The premise is this--- that on New Year's Eve four people head to a favorite spot in England for suicidal leapers. They unexpectedly meet each other on the roof top and leave the roof together. Hope that they will survive to the end of the book comes from the fact that all four take turns narrating the story.

I used to have a fantasy and once wrote a short story about getting a fatal disease and just hiking into wilderness to die. Times have changed and the internal angst that led to such thoughts have faded. I am glad that I was not a leaper out of life.

But am I a leaper into life? into faith?

I go slowly and how I entered a swimming pool for the first time in years this past summer is a good example. It took some hot days before I got there. Then I showed up not prepared to swim, but did immerse my feet. Eventually steps were used to enter the pool, but by the last day at the retreat center I did leap into the deep end with the desire to touch bottom.

This week when talking about following Christ with my spiritual director, I said how if I chose to stay back something inside of me would die. Imagining this I sense a void of hope and faith that would leave me empty. But I also said that if I followed Christ something inside of me would die. Writing that now I think of what I just wrote above. A desire to be dead has died.

I want to know why things come together like this when I am blogging.

I see choosing a life with Christ as a leap into a mystery. Like I said, I am not good at leaping. Even so, in the past ten years I have gotten wet.