prayer to together, and i said: what if we get fat and old and boring. and he said: i am just so excited to read books together.

so i have not blogged a blog in a moon or two for several reasons, one being: i have nine siblings and one computer at home meaning someone is always ALWAYS playing on disney.com, another being: i am getting nuptialed and i think only about nicholas floyd cottrell and how excited i am to lay face down in the sands of hawaii and giggle and giggle and sleep and then have adventures together forever and eat spaghetti with butter because we both think the kitchen is just another place to chit chat and have never owned our own utensils, another being, i am turning into one of those annoying fianceed people that only want to talk about how bomb.com their fiancee is and how beautiful life is and how good the sun looks in the morning and how even though things are rough and tumble and dreary that there is always happiness and wisdom and love and good feelings in the world and that sometimes it all just makes my heart so full its going to explode. so im sorry, these are the things weighing most heavily on my mind currently and i have nothing of interest to say to you, except that i just love love and i know im just an annoying giddy little girl, but i think secretly inside we all are and im glad of that. and i guess today i just want to tell you: i love that when i have panic attacks about becoming a real person and doing hard things and making big commitments, nicholas tells me: shannon, im just excited to read books together. because for whatever reason, that is just the right answer to everything and calms my anxiety ridden heart.

so i guess this post is a prayer to all those men and women out there that are part of a together, or hope to one day be together, or have been part of a together, or have seen a together that is so so beautiful, or are who they are because their parents were a together or their grandparents or whoever. its a prayer to togetherness. reading books together. walks together. bike rides together. crying together. laughing together. eating together. eating spaghetti with butter together. eating grilled cheese together. failing together. succeeding together. being mad together, and then making up together. the beautiful beautiful thing that is together.

a while ago my mom died, and the light in my dads eyes went away for a while. he is one tough little cookie that kicks a whole lot of a in the world and someone im proud to call papa bear, but he was just plain sad. half of him was gone. all of a sudden he laughed alone. ate alone. failed alone. succeeded alone. he had his kids and his church and his friends and so many people loving him and rooting for him, but he didnt have his teammate. his together person. his heart had a big hole. and then tiffany came along whos husband had died of a heart attack, and he had a together. the hole didnt go away, but they shared their holes together. they laughed together. cried together. fought together. grieved together. played together. and their togetherness was just so happy. his eyes lit up again. i dont know how to explain it. he was just part of a together, a team. and even though that pain will always be there for both of them and the agony of losing a spouse will always be a great big wound, an enormous gaping ugly scar that will never go away, they share the pain together. its one big scar now. and i think more than anything, that is the best part of together. struggling together. pain together. letting someone else hold a bit of the load. crying together, and hurting together, but always knowing that when you feel sadness, you have your together to share it with you.

this thanksgiving i create my together. what a thing to give thanks for. and though i am thankful for everything about nuptials and nicholas and my upcoming life, right now, thinking about my dad and tiffany and the wounds they carry together, i am grateful that when i cry, i do it with someone else. i am grateful for together. i am grateful for all the togethers that have come before, for my mom and dad, for my dad and tiffany, for my grammy and grandpa who have been married for 57 years of together and have seen wars, death and more than you can imagine, together. i give thanks for a boy that wipes my tears and sheds his own, tears that are no longer his or mine, but ours. so i know its mushy and i know im an annoying in love person, but i just am grateful for together, and this is a hallelujah to togethers around the world through the centuries and to come.

prayer to the tazmanian devil named brooke marie mehner slabbert, also known as my big sister.

one time brooke marie mehner slabbert and i decided to go running down a trail behind my backyard that i have dubbed "the pocahontas run." it is long, 12 miles to be exact. it involves running through four rivers, through forest brush, through mountain lion territory, and through some pretty snake-infested landscape. it has been the site of several embarrassing instances for me, including a time involving widsom teeth pulling, laxatives, and an ill-timed run. it is a brutal run, it can be a scary run, and also one of my favorites. i love to take one of my sisters along for the ride, all 12 miles of muddyness. this particular time brooke and i set off, with me promising we'd only go for a little while and then come back, banking on the foot in the door phenomenon i am well known for using every day of my life to get people to do what i want them to do.

so brooke and i set off. i was training, she was not. i thought i was bomb.com for outrunning her the entire way, not even breathing hard. she feared the mountain lions, i was queen of the forest. she was feeling hurt in her calves, my body was a temple. for someone who spent the majority of her life being asked why she was so much bigger-boned than her older sister, it was heaven.

finally we neared the end of the run, at which time there is an enormous hill. im pretty sure ive never run it. as we got there i slowed to a trot, then to a walk. i was dying. i couldnt breathe. i needed water and air and love and a foot massage. i pretended i was doing it for brooke: "ok we can slow down a bit brooke, i know you're tired."

as i plodded my way up the hill, i saw something in my peripheral vision. a tazmanian devil. a tornado of dirt smoke. nothing more than a blur, as it passed up me and whizzed up the hill like the little engine that could on speed. as i watched brooke's back retreat farther and farther up the hill, i was humbled. i was reminded that though i am the bigger sister height wise weight wise shoe size wise and fit into a kids size 16 when she was still a 10 even though I was two years younger, she will always be my big sister. she looks at those giant hills at the end of the pocahontas run, even after she has been wearied for miles, even after shes been running and running, and she dominates them. she kicks their trash. she tells them "i am a tazmanian devil, and i will defeat you." and she does.

when mountains come her way, she climbs them. when trials come pounding at her door, she pounds them back. she inspires me to stop walking, and keep running. she is the one who has paved the way for the rest of the clan of women that makes up my family. she went to high school first. she went to college first. she figured out who n sync was first, and called dibs on lance bass first. she discovered trl first. she got married first. now she is the best mother to elsie jane first, teaching the rest of us how to be, and how to keep on climbing. im glad i have her cloud of dust to follow, her 5'2'' frame pumping up those mountains like it aint no thing. shes always been there, running ahead of me, showing me the way, watching out for snakes and showing me how to give it your all to the very end, the faster woman, my big sister, my tazmanian devil.

happy birthday brookie, thanks for showing me who carson daly is, for showing me how to love those around me, for showing me how to face my fears and conquer them, and for continuing the legacy of beautiful mothers in our family.

prayer to the puppies. im sorry ive neglected you.

we mehners suffer from a disease known as perfectionism. it would not seem this way because i am most often seen in sweatpants living out of my car, my writing looks like hieroglyphics, and showering is an optional activity in my life. but underneath the dirty fingernails and careless persona lies a person that frets over A minuses, cries over b pluses, and will stand in payless shoe source for three and one half hours picking out a pair of fifteen dollar shoes until the lady says "you spent all this time in here and you only picked out one pair of shoes?" and after purchasing the shoes considers three times returning the shoes and getting the other pair and loses multiple minutes of sleep that night wondering if the 15 dollars was spent correctly. its a disease given to me by my perfectionist father glen bron, who irons his sheets and gave me a franklin planner at the age of 6 and gets a haircut approximately once a week even though he is 100 percent bald.

to sum up: i 1. think parting with money is like losing an eyeball unless it is being spent on taking me to india or education or a book or life-saving medication 2. i second guess every decision i have ever made and 3. i must know every single option available to me before i decide on one, which explains why i had 13 serious boyfriends and 7 not so serious boyfriends prior to deciding on an eternal boyfriend.

im sure you are wondering what this has to do with anything pertinent to your life, and it probably is not necessary to post on the internet. but let me tell you what perfectionist mehner personality adds up to: the worst wedding planner of all time. and this from a girl who never even thought about her wedding until she got engaged, at which time she was informed she should have been keeping a folder her whole life of wedding tidbits she liked so she could just refer back to it and think: my whole life i've wanted yellow and blue paisely bridesmaid dresses and a red velvet cake with white icing! no, i am in fact the exact opposite, the girl who never noticed what the bride's dress looked like, didn't even attend most people's weddings, and did not know that linens were an essential part of wedding decor. but all of a sudden i have been thrown into a universe of decision making from websites and vendors that tell you: we want to help make the MOST IMPORTANT day of your life EXACTLY WHAT YOU WANT! like that is so helpful mr. vendor. thanks for informing me this is going to be the most important day out of the 7 billion days of life i live. no pressure. and thank you for letting me know you can give me exactly what i want, like its so easy to know what you want. and thank you for doing it all for the low low price of more money than i have spent the rest of my life combined, including college tuition and trips to the hospital.

anyway, the point of this post is not to vent, or disclose that i have spent the last 7 hours of my life looking at wedding blogs on the internet, an activity i never thought i would ever be engaged in. the point of this point is to say: its great to know that it doesnt matter. if i pick the wrong colors, if i see a cuter wedding later, if my dress doesnt fit me, if the food is gross, if my legs fall off so i cant dance the night away which is the only thing i know for definite i want at my reception, if everyone talks behind my back that my wedding sucked, it wont even matter, not even a little bit. and even though every caterer and vendor and dj in the entire world wants to pressure me into thinking this is the most important day of my life, i will not be pressured.

it is an important day. there will be other important ones. and it is not important because i will get the exact cake i want, or the exact bouquet, or whatever. it will be important because from this moment on i will get to have sleepovers with the boy that i love forever, and we will start our lives together, and make each other better and stronger and wipe away each others tears and hold each other up when life decides to beat us up. so social pressure, i laugh in your face. i will not be pressured into thinking every detail matters or that it "only happens once" so i should just go crazy and spend the budget of an entire third world country. i will also not have a panic attack every time i see the price tag. i will still fret over every decision and every dollar spent because its genetically engineered into my blood, but i will not let wedding advertisements trick me into thinking its all about me and wedding favors, and i will not let my guilty conscience manipulate me into thinking i am a bad person for spending money, and i will just let go. i will breathe. and my reception will be exactly what i want if it involves family and friends and dancing and smiles and happiness and love and good vibrations and all of the people who have helped me along this beaten path to this point in life, and most of all nicholas floyd cottrell and his little boy smile, because when i see that i wont even see the centerpieces or the chair covers. and there are millions of people all over the world dying of cancer and millions of children starving and hurting and puppies being kicked and they are a whole lot more important than what veil i wear, and im sorry that i have been thinking about that instead of the puppies, because i promise ive never been like this before. i hope they forgive me, because im going back to pre-wedding me starting here and now, the person who thought tulle was pronounced too-lay, and no amount of people telling me its "my day" and "all about me" can stop me, because im tired of feeling like a tornado inside and life is about being happy and good and not bridesmaid dresses.

sorry for rambling, but i had to remind myself.

hallelujah to your infinite worth. my momma told me im special, and i believe her.

Truman Madsen said it best:
My testimony to you is that you have come literally "trailing clouds of glory." If you only knew who you are and what you did and how you earned the privileges of mortality, and not just mortality but of this time, this place, this dispensation, and the associates that have been meant to cross and intertwine with your lives; if you knew now the vision you had then of what this trial, this probation, what in my bitter moments I call this spook alley of mortality, could produce, would produce; if you knew the latent infinite power that is locked up and hidden for your own good now--you would never again yield to any of the putdowns that are a dime a dozen in our culture today.

amen truman. i love to think of us all as embyros of greatness, with infinite potential locked up inside each of our tiny beating hearts and tiny sensitive souls. makes you think twice about teasing kids on the playground or getting mad or sad or down on yourself, because we are all little seeds of greatness. and i for one intend to use that greatness however i can and water my seed and try to grow into what God intended me for. divine potential baby, is a beautiful thing.

hallelujah for Love in all its shapes and sizes. especially for Love that comes in a 6'4'' variety.

so i recently decided to gain an eternal boy roommate and im feeling very stoked on the whole idea. he is very dope. he makes me giggle. he tells me im beautiful. but more important than any of the silly things like him massaging my feet and telling me i can do it and protecting my tender heart and letting me cry multiple times a day over silly things and not so silly things, he makes me good. it is amazing to me how the sun always comes out when you least expect it and how much you can love another person. it makes me believe in God. i dont know how that is correlated except for that sometimes when your soul feels like its ready to burst out of you and into someone else it makes you realize that something bigger than you exists. it makes you realize that you are not very important and that thinking about yourself all the time is boreeee-ing, because its much more fun to stop all that nonsense and care more about someone else than you do yourself. it makes you appreciate all of the rough roads and cloudy days and psychotic ex-boyfriends and tears that you cried and cancers that your family faced and months in the hospital and broken hearts because it was all worth it because it made you you, and if you weren't you you don't know if you could have found the kind of love that makes you forget about yourself and want to serve the whole entire world and love trees and God and the person next to you in the grocery store that would normally annoy you, but today you love because the world is so much happier when you are in love. and all of a sudden all those rough roads brought you to a sunny field with an incredible view, and it all makes a little more sense and the Future looks like something beautiful.

this whole engagement business has made me think real love, a little bit like an imperfect fragment of God's love for his little children, fills you with love for everyone. it makes the sky bluer and words sound more beautiful and your heart beat faster and you cry at songs like rascal flats broken road that normally just hurts your ears. but most of all i think it makes you good. gooder than you have ever been. it makes you want to help everyone feel a little bit of what you are feeling. it makes you want to pay for the man's taco bell behind you. it makes you want to sing. it makes you want to listen a little harder and try a little more and have a little more patience and give people a little bit of your happiness. it makes you forget that you spent your life feeling like a misfit and your own insecurities and the fact that a person hit your car and didn't stop. it makes you want to be a piece of happiness in the world. it makes you grateful for every hard thing and hard person and hard luck that has helped you to become more prepared to love. it makes you so grateful that you start wondering if its a little weird how grateful you are for cancer and broken hearts. it makes the world look a little softer.

im not saying love is perfect, or even close to perfect, or that my newly found happiness is long lasting and unbreakable. im just saying that right now i feel like loving the whole world a whole lot, and i know why. and i hope that if you have not yet had the opportunity to experience that joyful golden field called finding a teammate, you dont give up hope but keep on fighting, because i think that all of the rough roads will lead you there eventually. and even then i think the road will still be bumpy, but at least there will be someone else in your canoe holding your hand. and it will make the fighting oh so worth it because all of a sudden it will become easier to see everyone around you like God sees them. it will expand your heart. it will feel like home. so i dont even know what the moral of this is, except for that i believe in love and i believe in hard things and i believe in you and i believe in loving the man behind you in line at taco bell and i believe one day we will all find eternal roommates and feel like dancing a lot in public areas. and i hope one day you all find people that make you love the world a little more, because it feels like a little piece of greatness and makes you believe that there is some sort of order to this chaos called life, and that one day all the puzzle pieces will come together and the eiffel tower puzzle you've been working on for 8 months will look more magnificent than you've ever dreamed.

prayer to the little train that could.

yesterday i drove from the great salt lake to south orange county in one solitary swoop. i stopped at mcdonalds, in n out, four gas stations, five restrooms, one alien jerky store, and contemplated stopping at the mad greek cafe because who doesnt want to dine surrounded by 494 statues of greek gods in a makeshift parthenon. you would think i was a family of six, not one solitary person. i listened to 2 cds the entire time and now have every single word memorized of michael jackson billie jean. i listened to 4 hours of talk radio and found out: barack obama is the devil incarnate, john mccain is the devil incarnate, barack obama kills babies, john mccain kills souls. all in all, a rockin experience.

although all of those things made the trip a real joy, perhaps my favorite moment was in the middle of a desert when the longest train i have ever seen passed by. the sun was setting, the mountains were looming, and a boxcar train chugged its way down the tracks as i drove by craning my neck to count. i lost count at 94. the number of boxcars is not important. what is important is that the chugging train, oblivious to its surroundings, going on with its business and gleaming in red yellow and blue, reminded me of how much i love trains. reminded me of when i found out my mom had cancer again, this time terminal, one of my friends bought me the book the little engine that could and told me i could do it. reminded me of at my moms funeral, when one of her best friends got up and said my mom was like the little engine that could, never giving up, always finding a way. reminded me of when one of my moms best friends bought us little glass trains and said to always remember that my mom never gave up. reminded me that even when obstacles arise and things get in our way, we are all little engines that could. we are all little trains in the desert. my mom never gave up. i will never give up.

whenever i see a train i am reminded of my moms dedication, her will to live, to never complain, to endure terminal cancer and endless pain with dignity and grace. yesterday, watching the long train run its track through the desert, one of hte most beautiful sights i have seen in a long time, i felt the little engine that could inside of me and i knew that no matter what life brings, and no matter how looming the mountains look, i can do it. and i will do it. and so will you my friends. so will you.

prayer to lovely people with beating hearts.

so i left dc and my wallet got stolen in the airport and i had 2 layovers until i got back to good ol salt lake city to see the boy i kind of like. i was in such a bootleg mood because who steals someones wallet and i had gotten 2 hours of sleep and i was reading breaking dawn, the latest in the twilight series, and it was giving me a headache. addicted to the pain. anyway, so im sitting in my middle seat on the airplane lamenting my awful station in life and complaining in my head when our plane lands. i look a mess. bags under my eyes. frazzled hair. awkward fitting jeans. airplane sick stomach. complaining heart. then a very large, greyhaired man in front of me turns around. kind eyes. i love kind eyes.

"maam?" he asks me. "are you the one that lost your wallet?" im still annoyed at this point and don't reply in the most chipper of tones. "yes," i reply. he proceeds to tell me about when his wallet got stolen at the gym and how annoying it was, and im still tuning him out because complaining in my head feels like a much more important activity. then he asks me if need money. "no sir, thank you, i'll be ok." im still in a bootleg mood. to which he replies, "no, youre going to need something to eat." and pulls out a 20 and slips it to me. the best part is what he says: "to remind you there are still more good people in the world than bad." then walks away, like a money distributing airplane frequenting santa clause.

thank you large greyhaired man with kind eyes, for reminding me how beautiful the world is, and how much one small act of service can mean. thank you large greyhaired man wtih kind eyes, for reminding me that life is not about what you get, or what happens to you, or how hard your life is, but about how much you give. thank you large greyhaired man with kind eyes, for not thinking twice about giving me 20 dollars, for realizing that the hope you gave me in humanity that day far outweighed whatever he could buy with that 20 dollars. thank you large greyhaired man with kind eyes, for teaching me that service is every day, every hour, and that there are bad people in the world, but there will always be more good than bad. thank you large grey haired man with kind eyes, im working on becoming like you.