Somewhere Between Water and Sky {A Book Launch + Giveaway!}

I heard it said once that every human is a story with skin.

If this is true, paragraphs would be etched in the scars on my wrists.

Whole chapters could be written about the way my heart pounds when I startle awake.

And every single one of my tears could fill a book.

But stories, with all their promise, only leave room for disappointment. I don’t have room for that anymore. I left it all—the hope, the love, the promise—back in my old life with the ghosts I’d rather forget: Jude. Emma. Pacey.

Kevin.

This is how I dare to move forward and to believe in a new beginning. I let go of the old. I just grab the new and run. I don’t wait around anymore. I can’t.

Waiting leaves room for the voices.

Somewhere between water and sky, I'll find a way to burn these voices to the ground.


Writing a book is really hard.  Like, really hard.  The combination of blind hope, precision, and sheer guts that it takes to not only write but release a book is insane, and awesome, and calls up all sorts of exhilaration and terror (the good kind) within me.

So when someone I know does it, launches a book out into this wide world, I'm going to say something.  And today, Elora Ramirez releases her latest book, Somewhere Between Water and Sky (that's what the above gorgeous words are from).  This is the sequel to her premiere novel which came out last year, which I also highly recommend.  I haven't gotten to read SBWaS yet, but I'm looking forward to it.  I know Elora from her online writing community, The Story Unfolding, and without her and the wonderful women I met there, my own book would never have happened.  So . . . thank you, and congrats, Elora!

And -- Elora is giving away a coaching session and an Amazon giftcard!  You can enter here, and following are links to where you can purchase a copy (psst: it's $0.99 on Kindle!), and to more of Elora's creations.

Grab a copy:

Amazon | Goodreads

Elora Ramirez lives in Austin, Texas with her chef-husband. At the age of four, she taught herself how to read and write, cutting her teeth on books like Dr. Seuss and writing anywhere she could find the space--including her Fisher Price kitchen set, the pages of picture books and Highlights Magazine. Since then, she's grown to love the way words feel as they swell within her bones. Writing holy and broken is her calling, and pushing back the darkness and pursuing beauty through story is her purpose. She embraces the power of story and teaches women from all parts of the world how to embrace theirs. She has a knack of calling things out , the truth and the detail, the subversive threads that make a life a story. She loves hip-hop, wishes she lived by the beach and cannot write without copious amounts of coffee, chocolate, music, and her husband's lavender liqueur. 

Blog | Facebook | Twitter | Author Goodreads

Love, Unqualified -- Part 2

(find part 1 here.)

We love.
We love.
We love, without condition, without a "but you," without excuse. 

We respect.  We preserve dignity.  We look for the value of each other.  We can do these things, wisely.

But how?

For the longest time, I thought that loving someone, especially someone who is "other" than me for whatever reason (gender, race, income, culture, location, etc.) meant doing something really big.  Like joining the Peace Corps, or making buckets of money so I could donate more, or making like Mother Theresa and moving to Calcutta. 

But it doesn't have to look like that.  It could look like that and be valuable, of course, but smaller lovings are equally important and just as valuable.

Loving, the kind that lasts, starts in the mind.  Or maybe the heart.  Or maybe both.  Regardless, it begins within.  That's the spark.

So what it looks like for me is challenging myself and the stereotypes and prejudices I find entrenched within me.  Do I really believe that a person is less worthy of my respect and valuing of her because she is a lesbian, for example?  If so, why?  And I don't know if this is always the case for everyone, but for me, each time I challenge my prejudices, they crumble. 

I realize that I received a certain amount of cultural, social, and religious grooming that helped gestate some of those broken ways of thinking, and I begin to dismantle them.  

I discover, for example, that I can find no valid reason to believe that God loves homosexuals less, or that women are less capable as leaders than men, or that poor people are always responsible for and able to escape from their own poverty.

That is a good beginning.  The self investigation, the seeing, the rooting out.

And then I go further.  I question deeper.   

For example: What is life really like for the Black men and women of Ferguson?  Is the mainstream news accurately reporting events there?  What are their goals in not reporting the full story?  And what do, say, crime and prison statistics reveal about the reality that the Black American community lives in versus the White American community, or the Native American community, etc? 

I question -- myself and the status quo.  And I try to learn empathy.  I learn to forgive myself and others for not getting it right, and I attempt reparations where appropriate.  And I try to teach my son to do the same.  That, I believe, is both the spark for and the answer to loving, period.

Is this over-simplified?  Pie-in-the-sky thinking?  I don't know.  Maybe. 

But I do think that love, period, starts with really seeing each other, and really seeing ourselves.


What do you think?  How can we better love each other without qualification?

Love, Unqualified

The lines are drawn, "in" versus "out" made excruciatingly clear, and we dare to call this love.

We have forgotten how to love one another without lines, without boundaries, without exception.

Instead, we have made enemies of the "other" -- which is really just another way of saying that we have made enemies of each other.

We all can recognize the pick-up lines, the ones that say that none is unlovable, none is without value -- and then we turn around and refuse to love, refuse to value:

You are respected -- unless you are poor.
You are trustworthy -- unless you are Black.
You are wanted -- unless you are gay.
You are valued -- unless you are female.
You are our brothers and sisters -- unless you are not Christian.
You are a beloved part of our global community -- unless you are not Western.

"We love because [God] first loved us" -- unless we don't like you or we fear you or we feel uncomfortable to any degree for any reason when we are forced to breathe the same air as you.

This is the kind of "love" I see pouring out across the lands, the kind that [religious] leaders not only either ignore or allow but often promote. In versus out. Us versus them. We call it spiritual, Biblical, righteousness, but it is justified hate: hate that is justified by the majority in protection of the majority.

We have the audacity to say that God meant it to be this way. This, this qualification above all else, this turning of injustice into divine decree, is a horror to me. But then I remember that there are scriptures like this one and this one, and I wonder that maybe it's not so much of a stretch after all to learn to think that God wanted it this way, and I shudder.

For so long, I thought that the world was made more beautiful by a diversity of faith, but now . . . now the blind dualism of some of these faiths makes me ill. The gross acts perpetuated and excused and ignored by some faiths are so heinous that I'd rather just see organized religion removed from the earth.

We love because God first loved us?

How about: we love, period.

We love.
We love.
We love.

This is your challenge. This is my challenge. This is our challenge.
The world depends on it.

We love.

Coming next: Part 2 -- a few thoughts on the how of "we love."