Good Evening, Kind Reader
Welcome to my new blog. If you know me, thanks for returning to read and perhaps participate in my new endeavor. Kind Former Readers will notice a significant departure from my previous efforts at blogging as I am coming to you now from a place of faith, hope, and a wee bit of fearful knee knocking.
For those of you who have no idea who I am, I can tell you I have written on blogs earlier in this century, both on my own and in community with other bloggers.
About my previous efforts at blogging, I will be honest in my reflections - those posts of old originated from bravado rather than bravery. I published gut reactions. I thought I was bold, mostly because I cussed as often as I could get away with it. I was also a little angrier than I am now.
Not all of my endeavors were flamboyant and fierce. I did some good, creating a blog to call for supplies for hurricane victims. Another good thing was opening up my ultimate Pandora's Box (we all have one or two knocking around. I have several dusty ones in my storage, opened and unopened), revealing that I was abused by my parents as a child and teenager. This act seemed to help others and I will always be humbled by the courage required for my fellow adult abuse survivors to come forth with their own stories, whether in anonymous emails or on their blogs.
The good stuff made me a little bit "Internet Famous". Though it was a minor, fleeting fame, it was scary and provoked big self doubts and even bigger concerns that I was a fraud.
Feeling fradulent makes me depressed, so I quit blogging. My old blog urls gather the online version of dust and tumbleweeds - Viagra ads and comments in Russian litter their landscapes.
In the meantime, I lived quietly offline with the exception of posting on my little gated neighborhood that is my Facebook wall. Just me and 300 or so friends, chatting, posting pics and updating my wall with the F Word, especially when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011. More reflection - I feel badly that I called on my gut to write some scathing posts blaming the shooting on a certain governor from Alaska and those who follow this former politician, now reality show star.
In the quiet years since I shut down my last blog, I became a grandmother to several marvelous youngsters; my bio-daughter whose very existence provided the necessary creds to call myself a parenting blogger, graduated from high school and turned 21; I had to stop running due to a wonky hip and had those bones replaced with titanium parts; I went back to therapy with a very effective and gentle psychiatrist; and, most interestingly to those who know me as a Buddhist, I returned to Christianity in the form of the progressive and liturgically rich Episcopal Church.
In those quiet years, I continued my current lucky streak of being married to the best person in the planet. For both of us, this is our third marriage. The third time's truly the charm.
In the quiet, I found out that I am blessed. I know great fortune in love and health. I am, thusly and verily, "graced".
This is what I want to explore in this blog, being in grace in this life, with family and friends, and with the unwavering love of God. I will write about the hard but worthy work towards self worth and wholeness. My mission is, once again, to reveal and be truthful, but will do so without the snark and swagger.
Now, I come to you with humility and a kinder sense of humor. I have more questions than answers (as referenced in the header, the "way too many opportunities for growth"), and I hope you, my generous Kind Reader who is still with me here - Hello! Thanks! You're so awesome! - can help me understand the many, many issues and things that I simply don't get.
Further to being "graced", the play on my name, Grace Davis/GraceD may appear to be a cheap trick. Of course it is, but it's also an epiphany of sorts, one that I caught on to in the last two years. I am graced by the presence of my very own life which I discovered after a lot of work, tears and laughter, is not fraudlent. I am graced that I have reached 57 years old and my bio-daugher is now a young adult released into the big world. Graced in that I wandered into a church last year and revived my Christianity which never really went away but was supplemented with a good dose of Zen meditation. I am graced with cheerfully accepting my new hip and its many implications for change, and with that new hip, graced for getting started in the art of aging professionally.
Oh, and I am so very graced with the presence of our grandkids. The grandma thing is a very cool grace (may I conjugate that into a verb, "gracing"?) and blessing because it's true what others have been telling me forever - you have full permission to dote upon the grandkiddos, roll on the floor with them, and eat more ice cream. And, then, you give them back to your own kids! Especially when they're crying for a good nursing session and your milk ducts have long dried up.
(Hey, there. I may have ceased the snark, but the bodily TMI shall continue. I am allowing myself this one indulgence. I won't be at all offended should you need to avert your eyes from the monitor and turn your attention to a less visceral topic.)
May I say that I look forward to our interactions on this blog? Yes, I truly do. I want this to be a very social media. Indeed, your thoughts will grace me over and over, again and again. And then, in sharing, we will both be graced.
Onward with the new blog. I am a little scared, as I wrote above, knee-knockingly so. But, looking at that fear is another opportunity for growth.
In peace,
GraceD xo
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