Marita Miller

Hi. I’m Marita. Pronounced with a “t”, not a “d”. I’m told it means a Living Fragrance. I try to live up to that. I think the world needs to be able to breath in a little more of the smell of life.

I love to be outside, barefoot in the grass and digging my hands in the dirt, breathing in the songs of birds and the breath of flowers, staring at endless green. It feeds this quiet mystic soul of mine.

I also love to be alone in my kitchen, creating spicy curries, sourdough bread or sweet gooey cinnamon rolls to share with those I love. Worries and tensions lessen when my hands are deep in dough and the scents of spices dance through the air.

I am quiet and gentle, and notice when people are struggling. I don’t always know what to say but I am a good listener. I am a feeler and tend to take people’s pain into my lap and try to help them hold it until they are strong enough to let it go. People who are in the margins are important to me, maybe because I spent much of my life feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere.

I am mom to 3 wild boys who are grown up and come to visit me from time to time.

This blog began when I was married to a bi guy. We had moved back and forth across the ocean more times than I care to count. We hiked the Himalayas, climbed a volcano in Bali, took our kids to Ankor Wat in Cambodia, made sand angels on the beach in Malaysia, discovered watermelon shakes in Thailand and created a home in the bustling city of Dhaka, Bangladesh. We learned so much from the people of Southeast Asia and, quite honestly, feel more at home there than here in the US.

Austin came out to me as Bi-sexual about 11 years into our marriage. It was another decade until he came out publicly, a decade of being in a cocoon for me. A place of not being seen, of not being able to tell this story because it wasn’t mine to tell. A decade of much silence and transformation. As he was struggling to figure out what this meant, I found that my own self was being slowly re-made.

Now that I am beyond the cocoon, I want to share the journey with you. I feel like a baby butterfly, still working to pump the blood into her wings, not exactly sure how to voice the transformative work that has happened, just certain it has. And because words are my thing, I will struggle to weave them together until my truth can be spelled out on a page so that your eyes can read them and find hope and strength to face whatever transformative work is in front of you.