first words

I have planned to revamp my blog for a long time -- move on from where I’d been planted for a long time.  Starting LEND and Quest in the fall of 2012, and taking on smaller projects, I wanted to write about my experiences in academia and exploring spirit separate from my writing about Julia and my thoughts about healing and new living.  Such a reorganization has been on my task list for months.  I played with it now and again and I've allowed myself to become stuck.  

I have been finished with Spicy Dragons and Dinosaurs for awhile.  That title has seen me though more than 1600 posts about adoption, Julia’s tough days and David’s heart transplant and death.  It has seen me through the long dark tunnel of grieving and my first tentative steps towards some right livelihood.  It is a wonderful name but I want to begin with something fresh and unburdened.  

A few nights ago I wrote: "How lucky we were!  How fortunate to have loved so well, so completely.  Not perfectly, but then we were not about perfection, we were rough edged stones smoothing our edges.”  Smoothed stones. That is what Julia and I are now.  Stones whose pointy edges have been worn away by water and sand, whose faces have been shined, and whose beauty is most apparent when they lay just under the surface of clear water.  For us, it is not water and sand but journeys that have brought us together and make us shine, it is the roads that hone the soul.   

This is how and where I want to begin again.  Recherchez. (Fr. second person plural present indicative to look for again).  Now, it is a task at hand.

If this is working as I intend, this is the home page and below are links to blogs and pages.  I will be writing about Julia and myself under the title of smoothed stones - the blog and about my current academic adventures under LEND 2.  I'll post pictures on photo.