A Summer of Old Friends

JOE BOOT!

And his lovely/hilarious/wonderful wife, Jenny.
I met them in Colorado last November, so it was good to see them again last week. Currently my favorite people.



McGinness!
An old friend from '03. This was also last week.

The Lisabean!
Came to Maryland a couple weeks ago. Flew in for a visit after being apart for 5 years. They call us "Lisa Squared."



The Frost.
My little dog of 11 years.



And little Sarabeth...
We were housekeepers together in 2003. Came for a visit in May after 4 years. Like the chihuahua?




You can find the complete collection on FACEBOOK. Get thee thence. And add me if you haven't already, slacker.

Call me a biased RZIM intern, but...

I'm of the opinion that Joe Boot is pretty darned swell.

The Depth of Identity

Catherine Marshall, To Live Again:


. . . Our most sensitive awareness of ourselves as a person has come through our relationship with one man. Soon after we met him, we found that in his presence we were aware of our feminity as never before.

With a new awareness, we understood that men and women were meant to be different.

But life dealt us a blow . . . We who had known completeness only in our relationship with a man who loved us, were now asked to be complete within ourselves. In order to survive, we have had to do a hundred things we had never done before.

We managed all this by summoning up latent masculine qualities we did not know we possessed--the necessity of accepting responsibility, aggressiveness, competitiveness, drive, a partial submerging of feeling in favor of reason.

But a woman's need is to be loved for herself, not for any accomplishment. A true woman finds her reassurance, her reason for living, by looking into the eyes of a man who loves her. And when that is withdrawn from her--well--then what? She may achieve something that society recognizes as fine, only to find herself unable to accept society's new estimate of her.

I had performed a certain mission. The world said that it had helped many. But as a woman I was not impressed with any accomplishment of mine. As a woman I felt drained, empty.

I stood looking back over the way I had traveled since Peter's death and knew that my personal answer to whether or not a woman can replace marriage with a career and find it satisfying was--no, definitely not.

The career left the woman still wanting to be--only a woman.