my memories of love aren’t confined
within my brain
aren’t held within the walls of cerebellum,
cerebrum, and brainstem,
tissue and goo,
my memories of love are part of eternity –
hid safe in the collective consciousness
of Soul
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
We created this home together –
my love and I –
and filled it with warmth and joy
and now I sit in our “green room”
and gather my memories
around me like a soft blanket
this is where Dad sat
on his 98th birthday
and reminisced with his old friends
and there is his painting of Rainier
and Mom sang and danced over there,
and lived and died under this roof
that last day,
and over there is where the sons
played the piano and laughed together
and, later, their loves joined us
under this roof and joined in the laughter
while the pandemic made of our home
a safe island and refuge
I feel all the love with me still
Dad’s love and Mom’s
and the sons’ and their partners’
and the love of the man
who helped make this home
with me
I feel the wholeness
and fulness
of my life
and am grateful
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
I have a whole universe in my thoughts.
And I decide what happens in there.
I am the boss of me.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
“Hold steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts.”
– Mary Baker Eddy
driving to the comforts of home
imagining a warm fire in the woodstove
a cat curled in my lap
and a pie in the oven
I know there is love
waiting for me in my home
and then I feel a grin come to my face
as I realize that I don’t have to wait
to get to a house to feel a home
like a turtle carries his home on his back
I carry my home in my thoughts
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
“Home is the consciousness of good
That holds us in its wide embrace
The steady light that comforts us
In every path our footsteps trace.”
– Rosemary C. Cobham, Christian Science Hymnal #497
There’s a new review on Amazon for my book Cosmic Connections: Sharing the Joy!
SB writes:
“I often feel like I’m right there with the author in her small town travels and happenings. The writing is fluid, poignant, and personal, yet universal – easy to translate to any place. It got me thinking about life, love, and the smallness of this big world.”
I so appreciate when someone takes the time to write a review for one of my books. It means so much to me when I read a review like this because it helps me feel I’ve connected to someone else in a positive way.
This morning I finished reading Joanna Nell’s new book, Mrs. Winterbottom Takes a Gap Year. I love Joanna Nell’s books. Here’s the review I wrote for the one I finished this morning:
I so enjoy Joanna Nell’s stories. Joanna Nell gives dignity and respect to her aging characters. Her characters are full of life and humor, wanting to make use of every moment left to them. Her books inspire me. She makes growing old fun.
My father lived to be 101 and, even as he was losing his memory, he wanted to get out and go on drives and have adventures with me. As I read Joanna Nell’s books, I can see him as the hero in one of her stories. That makes me smile.
“Rise in the strength of Spirit to resist all that is unlike good. God has made man capable of this, and nothing can vitiate the ability and power divinely bestowed on man.”
-Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (p. 393)
I finally gathered my courage and watched Leave the World Behind on Netflix. I’d been reluctant to watch this movie because I’ve been feeling fragile lately – bombarded on the internet and television with images of disease and death, destruction and war and inhumanity – and I didn’t feel like I was ready for any more emotional breakage right now. But as I’ve been processing the movie in the last couple days, I’ve felt myself gathering courage, building a sort of steely resolve. If the people with financial and political power want us to isolate ourselves from each other, want us to be fearful and distrustful of each other, want us to cower in paranoia so that they can control and manipulate us – then, hell no! I am not going to isolate myself, or be scared or cowering.
I am going to be part of the resistance movement.
Wikipedia says this about “resistance movements“: “Resistance movements can include any irregular armed force that rises up against an enforced or established authority, government, or administration. This frequently includes groups that consider themselves to be resisting tyranny or dictatorship.”
In the textbook for Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes (on p. 29): “Christians must take up arms against error at home and abroad.They must grapple with sin in themselves and in others, and continue this warfare until they have finished their course.”
Note that Mrs. Eddy isn’t saying we should arm ourselves with assault weapons or bazookas. She’s talking about another kind of warfare all together. She writes in Science and Health (p. 225): “A few immortal sentences, breathing the omnipotence of divine justice, have been potent to break despotic fetters and abolish the whipping post and slave market; but oppression neither went down in blood, nor did the breath of freedom come from the cannon’s mouth. Love is the liberator.”
I’m going to take up arms of love and joy and hope against the would-be tyranny of hate and fear and despair. I’m going to consciously reach out with joy and kindness and patience to my fellow earthlings. I’m not going to let the images of war and hate we’re constantly bombarded with on television and in social medial deter me from my mission of kindness. I’m not going to let the advertisements and commercials filled with images of disease keep me shackled in fear and isolated from others. “Hell no! We won’t go!” there.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
***
P.S. As I was pondering “resistance” the climactic scene from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle came into my thoughts. In this scene the protagonist, Meg, is resisting the hate and tyranny of IT. She’s been told she can fight IT with something she has that IT doesn’t have – and she’s trying to figure out what that is. IT is trying to get control of her thoughts, and she’s starting to lose the battle:
“…as she became lost in hatred she also began to be lost in IT…
“With the last vestige of consciousness she jerked her mind and body. Hate was nothing that IT didn’t have. IT knew all about hate…
“‘Mrs. Whatsit hates you,’ Charles Wallace said.
“And that was where IT made ITs fatal mistake, for as Meg said, automatically, ‘Mrs. Whatsit loves me; that’s what she told me, that she loves me,’ suddenly she knew.
“She knew!
“That was what she had that IT did not have.
“She had Mrs. Whatsit’s love, and her father’s, and her mother’s, and the real Charles Wallace’s love, and the twins’, and Aunt Beast’s.
“And she had her love for them…”
“She could love Charles Wallace. Charles. Charles, I love you. My baby brother who always takes care of me. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. I love you, Charles. Oh, Charles Wallace, I love you. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, but she was unaware of them…
“I love you. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart. I love you. I love you. I love you.
“Slowly his mouth closed. Slowly his eyes stopped their twirling. The tic in the forehead ceased its revolting twitch. Slowly he advanced toward her.
“‘I love you!’ she cried. “I love you, Charles! I love you!’ Then suddenly he was running, pelting, he was in her arms, he was shrieking with sobs. ‘Meg! Meg! Meg!’
“‘I love you, Charles!’ she cried again, her sobs almost as loud as his, her tears mingling with his. ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’”
– Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
If I
stop loving because others are at war
will that help the world?
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
T’was the day after Christmas and all o’er the earth
people were waking to find there still seemed a dearth
of peace on our earth and to all good will
– we wondered if the promises would ever be fulfilled.
And then a someone shouted, “Hey! I have a thought!
Let’s celebrate Christmas every day – let’s celebrate a lot!
Let’s keep kindness and sharing alive in our hearts –
not just at Christmas, but in all the year’s parts!”
And we thought this was wise, and we thought this was good,
so we celebrated kindness all over our earth’s ‘hood.
-Karen Molenaar Terrell
I’m deep in sleep
and suddenly there’s a voice
right outside my window,
insistent. “Hello? Hellooo?!”
And I wake.
But I’m on the second floor
and, unless someone’s on a ladder,
no one is right outside my window.
Someone was calling for help
in my dreams.
I’m groggy, but waking now.
The world is calling for help.
“Hello? Hellooo?!”
– Karen Molenaar Terrell
It’s a humble holiday, tucked in between
Christmas and New Year’s, but it’s really keen.
Things look a little bedraggled, it’s true
The tree’s a little droopy and no longer new
The movies and music of the Christmas season
Are getting on our nerves now, and we’re seeing no reason
To eat even one more sugary oversweet sweet
It’s time for broccoli and carrots (maybe hold on the beets)
The pressure for perfection comes off on this day,
the toys have been opened, and it’s come time to play.
And if before we were wearing faux holiday cheer
to blend in with the others and not Scroogey appear
It’s time now to be genuine, and honest and real.
The food banks are empty, people still need a warm meal.
The homeless and hungry and jobless and alone
still need love and care, still need a home.
So maybe we can celebrate the day after Christmas
by keeping the spirit of hope alive,
we might make that our business.
– Karen Molenaar Terrell, from *A Poem Lives on My Windowsill*
Adventures of the Madcap Christian Scientist 