in a world where:

thousands upon thousands of people have just died as victims of the most tumultuously catastrophic natural disaster of our time...

others have died in the ongoing war on terrorism that continues to be what i suspected it was when it began -- a no-win situation...

millions of hearts are breaking and eroding everyday as the sin'dustries (sinful industries like pornography and drug trafficking) steal, kill, and destroy us bit by bit in legally sanctioned moral decay...

millions of dollars that could be helping to heal our world are needlessly and obliviously squandered on "entertainment", like celebrity salaries and lifestyle expenses, as degradingly gross (grossly poor values, grossly poor quality, and/or both) movies and music that have no business in our cultural consciousness is continually being intravenously injected into our psychic databases for the sake of godless greed...

in a world where all these situations and more are begging for my attention and action:

i'm freaking out about what candle will be on what table in what spot on the platform for my little wedding this saturday.

perspective is the saving grace
of savage weeks like this
where truth is at risk of theft
by my petty distress

thank God i'm marrying a man
who leads me to this grace
and lifts me kicking and screaming
to perspective's higher place

i'm going to blog one more time before the big day...let's hope it's still with a voice of grace in the face of 55 million micro demands staring me down, well maybe a little less than that. slow down and love, slow down and love, slow down and love, clear your mind, clear your soul, let peace gently take control...of me, of my amazing new marriage, of all my loved ones, of this broken but beautiful world.

surreal...this time next week i will be a wife...i will have a husband...surreal...in the best of ways!

merry christmas, happy holidays, and craaaaazy kwanzaa!

mistakes and miracles overlap
upon my rainbow psychic map
and as transition waves and pleads
i need to follow where hope leads
into the strong tender arms of
my sexy godly precious love
who radiates pure holy grace
in each simple smile on his face

happy wedding to me, happy wedding to me, i will try to blog one more time before the big day!

it is so not convenient
to be a powderkeg princess
at this age and stage of the tinalife
age?
probably a little over my halfway point
but still possessing a few giggly wiggly
sweetbirds of youth
stage?
about to be wed united joined
in creatively non-traditional matrimony
to the absolute sweetest birdman of youth
but i must repeat
it is so not convenient
to be a powderkeg princess
at this transformational fork in the road

so she says 'what happens now?'
as she pingpongs between joy and sorrow
all through those sloppy drops
of involuntary emotion
in the powderkeg moments
where she looks to the sky
and in that bittersweet radiance
briefly tastes the hope

so she says 'what happens now?'
as she finally realizes
powderpuffdom is gone for good
as powderkegdom plants
its big butt on her heart's big throne
not very romantic or resourceful
or soulshiny or sugareelike
but still she looks to the sky
waiting with bono for the dawn
briefly tasting the hope

she slowly shyly shakes herself awake
and look what the sassy soul cat dragged in
a strategic little visit from an old friend
quasimodo shmasimodo
i thought you'd forgotten me
she thought he'd forgotten her
but he reached out his hand
and he touched her lips
and he preached a two second sermon

slow down and love

how do you settle a frazzled soul
how do you dismantle an annoying powderkeg
or even an atomic bomb?
you really don't even need eleven songs
although they're awesome
especially numbers four and eleven
all you need is a two second sermon
not just any but the right one
at the right time
by the right person
in the right way

slow down and love

are you nuts?

slow down and love

maybe i'm the one who's nuts

slow down and love

there's no maybe about it

slow down and love

OK

thanksgiving is my absolute favorite holiday. shame on those evil marketing villains for attempting to snuff it out. let's face it...it isn't as easy to exploit because 1) it is a truly spiritual day about gratitude without nearly as much of the hoopla (except the food and football of course), and 2) it's an "uglier" holiday in comparison to the garishly bright overkill of the october and december occasions. personally, i think the earthy harvest tones of thanksgiving provide an excellent respite from the consumeristic colors of mega-stimulation. and the sentiment is one which i continually fall back on as a major ongoing strategy of reprogramming for my soul. in the face of all the good, the bad, and the ugly of the tumult that is my existence, simply pausing to simply say thanks to the simply amazing grace giver is what life is all about. i am nothing, i have nothing, i know nothing, i look forward to nothing, without the inundation of blessings i've received from the one and only true and living God, over the course of my 39-year labyrinthine lifetime. yet since i have been so incredibly blessed, and will continue to be for the rest of my days spent gallivanting in this miry clay, i must respond with gratitude every chance i get. it's been like breath to me in these months of hungry humbleness and humble hunger. gratitude has been the wind beneath these fragile demented, tormented wings. gratitude has been the magic carpet upon which this tortured, fractured soul has continually been joyriding. finally, gratitude has been the wonderful watery wave carrying me over the falls, as in job falls, money falls, relationship falls, integrity falls, disillusionment falls, depression falls, suicidal impulse falls. and it's a wave i'm going to keep right on riding...the healing breath, the refreshing wind, the enlivening wave, the saving grace of gratitude. happy thanksgiving not just this week but every blessing-filled day.

LYRICALERT

an ocean of every other man i ever knew
pales in comparison to an ounce of you...

all right, if that isn't love, then i'm marilyn monroe. (actually, she and i probably have more than a few things in common; such as playful flirtation mixed with insecurity and joie de vivre mixed with self-sabotage). but back to my lyric...last blog said LOVE IS HARD, and yes we know it's true. but it's worth it, especially with a pure beautiful knight at my side like the subject of these 2 lines. he continually lavishes me with everything i need at precisely the moment it is needed, like compassion for my stupidity, clarity for my confusion, comfort for my sadness, and calmness for my chaotically frenzied not-accustomed-to-happiness heart. i wish for everyone the splendid companionship i am so blessed to have, and i pray that we will overwhelm all our loved ones, romantic and non-romantic, with extravagant truth-telling faith-building soul-healing love.

love is hard. truth is hard. selfishness and lies are easy. no, i guess they're kinda hard, too. gee, if we're looking for easy lives with ripple-less homogenous mediocre cocooning, we need to think again. every instant of existence has the power to heal with love and truth, or harm with selfishness and lies. i am finding this out in bigger ways than ever before as an enormous magnifying glass called love gently yet urgently descends upon me. it sucks to discover the presence of absurdly foolish bizarre mental spiritual and emotional atrocity in my soul (AKA gunk!). this gunk has clogged up the flow of love in my life for way way way too long, love for myself, love for my daughter, love for my best friend, love for other friends, love for family, love for strangers, love for God---whose kindness and grace to me are an everpresent reminder that his sustaining, soothing force throughout my entire 39 years of life is far more than just Good Orderly Direction. but back to love and the gunk. now the gunk is clogging up an amazing new love experience in my life and it is hard. it's terrifying to see love and truth being poured like Drano down my soul drain. sick parts of me have actually enjoyed the stopped-up state. but each day i face the choice of two difficult paths, the lie path or the love path. the love path is terrifyingly transformational. the lie path is too. in my life it already has been, in ways that have stolen, killed, and destroyed my joy and freedom for way way way too long. so today i choose the love path, the journey of precious pain that is slowly reclaiming, reviving, and renewing this girl, through daily de-programming and de-clogging. love and truth are hard, but i'll be damned if i allow gunk to ruin what is meant to be an utterly amazing experience. so bring on the Drano, i am rising up and moving on to true love and lovely truth.

LYRICALERT

people reach out for love in different ways
we grab at straws to fill our days
we miss what love is all about
thank God i've finally found out
heaven to me is to rest in the arms of my soulfully lovely man...

yes, snoopy noses, that's about a relationship i am in right now. but more to the point, that's about discovering and embracing the simple things in life. i cannot adequately convey how liberating it is to release my fingers from their irrationally immature grasp on soulless fluff cleverly disguised as necessity. the less i rely on the beastly adorable addictive impulse to squeeze everything so tightly, like i am so able to control it with my bottomless inner fountain of wisdom, the more i am happy, the more i am content, the more i laugh, the more i enjoy joy, the more i truly taste heaven, and i like it very much. for all you clingy controllers and controlling clingers, me and jerry maguire's mentor dickey fox would like to wish you our kind of success.

how would you like to be born again, again?
how would you like to touch the genesis drain
and bewitch the sabotage dragons at long last
into melting like wicked witches of the west?

how would you like to have a resurgence,
a prosperity-blessed party of emergence,
with all the guests who've patiently been knocking,
seated at the table of honor where they belong?

how would you like to smile a real smile?
i mean a big toothy mary tyler moore
turn the world on kind of smile?
this, my dears, would make your soul come.

how would you like to be free
in a state of ever-growing radiance
and ever-glowing transformation
saying a continuous goodbye to crap?

after all these years and tears and fears
and rains and pains and chains
and obsession and oppression and depression...
how would you like to be born again, again?

she says she feels the hope
slipping silently away
she says she feels the help
fading like sky blue to gray
she says she feels the hunger
begging in autumn dismay
she says she feels the hell
hugging her each loveless day

i hear the hope spiraling as
a heart strives for release
i hear the help come screeching to
a halt just short of peace
i hear the hunger as it makes
an art of sick torment
i hear the hell sing and dance
with her disillusionment

i say that all i know about hope
is that it's still there
i say that all i know about help
is in my next prayer
i say that all i know about hunger
is in what i feed me
i say that all i know about hell
is when i don't need me

much more to be said, no more to be revealed, this time i'll be discreet, and let my lips stay sealed. bye invisible friends.

today i feel like using burgers as a metaphor of how intense life can get sometimes. let's face it, we generally stay in cheeseburger mode, representing the ordinary hassles and annoyances of the semi-happy meal we call life. then there are those double cheeseburger days where it's called exponentially escalating aggravation. and then my friends, brace yourself for this greasily toxic reality...there are the WHOPPERS. yes, those moments where you need more than two big grizzly adams hands to handle them. the catalytic catastophes, the dreadful strokes of sabotage, the times of turbulence and terrorism within the world and my own crazy world of wonder, wealth, and woe. whoppers...how does one deal with these signposts of complexity, bewilderment, and desire? in this ragamuffin girl's crazy whopper-infested world, i'm grateful that God has tattooed a certain passage on my brain that gets triggered at the onset of whopper warning signs. it is isaiah 6:1-8, and i highly recommend it for much needed perspective in times of whopper hopelessness. basically here's how i will break it down: i am crazy, this world and all it contains is crazy, and the sanity i seek from the source of true love and loving truth seems way too unattainable and unrealistic. so my whoppers present me with the ongoing choice: heal or hell? wow, good preaching, tina...that little phrase bears repeating, so here goes. heal or hell? number one--me crazy: heal or hell? number two--world crazy: heal or hell? number three--believing in sanity is crazy: heal or hell? i pray that in all these moments of wistful whopper wackiness, our choices will be what they need to be, channeled toward the healing touches and tastes of grace.

after a drought, rain
after a death, resurrection
after a pleasure, pain
after a pain, perfection

long space of silence
long flatline of fear
long interlude of brokenness
long clog becoming clear

rising in alien hope
rising in perfect flaws
rising with the startling dawn
rising to affect the cause

not over till it's over
not futile till it's cold
not hopeless till i say so
not dead while i'm still gold

hi blog world. here's my re entry into the bleach. raging aging seized my pen, but praise God i'm free again. read between each silly line, and embrace the angst that's mine. welcome back to me, i must keep on keeping on in this blog universe, for the brain drain sublime. i feel better already. it's so nice to have me back where i belong.