We embark on the journey exhausted. Increasingly, a gazillion details interrupt our sleep, and we need this vacation the way an overstimulated toddler needs sleep after a day with too many birthday parties.

I am pondering the idea of public image. Not for the famous paparazzi-hunted few, but for us regular people, for whom the constantly emerging social media seem a necessary connection to our world. Technically challenged and philosophically old, I resisted Facebook and even e-mail for a long time.

The browning Christmas tree awaits its final fate at the curb. It’s the kind of grey January day that signals the return to schedules, alarm clocks, routine. I like it. I find beauty in the constants. But after weeks of family sleeping everywhere and tripping in line outside our one bathroom, an aching emptiness throbs in my throat.

Wild horses, manes flowing in the wind, thundering hooves. Isn’t that what we associate with freedom? Beholding its savage majesty from a distance, don’t we ache to be swept up in their speed – to ride or be part of the herd? But we cannot get close. From our vantage point, we behold the idyllic illusion, rarely considering how vulnerable these beauties are. They are completely subject to the elements, much more exposed than their strength and size would suggest.

Confidential cries cross the boundary of silence to my inbox in response to a survey of relationships. Humbled by their trust, I recognize my own struggles in many of these e-mails. There are nuts and bolts to be learned in long-term interactions -decoding of male / female languages and lessons passed from the seasoned to the less experienced.

Do you have any idea how much tenderness you evoke? As you grapple with loneliness, friendships, and the conflict between permanence and transience, the fresh glow of childhood trust still peers through your eyes, even as maturity’s firmness is settling into your face.

This is a story of courage, perseverance, and victory. A shy six-year-old little Hunter first came to me, his teacher at children’s church, with a depth of soul that squeezed my heart. He climbed my lab and searched me eyes for something only he knew. We became friends, and I sensed it was a precious honor.

“Is it cheating if I pray to God now after so many years away, ignoring Him?” My precious friend had lived her life in pursuit of men’s love and theater’s success, sporadically but never permanently achieving both, and usually feeling more battered and confused than satisfied by it.

I just turned 47. After more than two decades in America, I still haven’t grasped why it’s considered impolite to ask a woman her age. I am so relieved not to be 17! The world was spinning then, as an Alice-in -Wonderland concoction of disconnected experiments, and I didn’t know where to find solid ground.

In retrospect, it was impatience and discontentment mixed with illusions of an easy income that drove us into the business that became our nightmare. Then a young pastor of a fragile church plant and new father, my man sought the solution to our struggle for sufficient time and money for both, in what appeared to have worked for others.

I am furiously typing away because I woke up to a quiet house this morning and grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down to read the first chapter. Then I ran to the computer and here I am. And oh my sister! I don’t even know how to express to you what I am feeling or thinking. I felt like, something happened. Someone else gets it. I am not crazy.

What would be left of you if your faith was subtracted? What parts of your emotions, relationships, ethics would remain? Would your physical life change? Your finances? Granted that we are body, soul, and spirit, does that mean two-thirds would remain if that one, troublesome part, the politically incorrect faith, was amputated?

I wish I could grow a garden. Lush landscapes of exotic, flowering plants, pomegranates, and fragrant herbs in terra-cotta pots, discretely lit by torches decorate my daydreams. In real life, I can’t even keep the basil plant from Publix alive beyond its first week’s residual strength – it’s pathetic. The only exception to this are plants given to me by people I love. I don’t know why, but Annisette’s lime and Humberto’s flower trees flourish, while the orange tree we ourselves bought is a sorry sight.

Must we constantly pick sides? Must we be labeled either Republican or Democrat, for or against every issue of life or the public square? Don’t get me wrong; there are causes I would fight for, die for, live for. But how easily I become what I fight against!

My son, my firstborn graduated high school yesterday. The awareness of letting go spent all our tears – probably a necessary catharsis. Yes, the little feisty boy who scaled every doorway and then pounced on us like a ninja is gone. Yes, I miss holding him on my lap and for a moment believing I was everything he needed.