Imbolc will end on Thursday at sunset and Beltane will begin with moonrise as the calendar passes from April 30 to May 1. This year – perhaps a coincidence, perhaps not – I will be bidding farewell to Imbolc in Wales on April 30 and bidding welcome to Beltane on May 1 in Ireland, making …
Planning a trip to a familiar part of the world is always a challenge for me. Do I return to places I have seen before, places I have loved for their beauty or their power or their mystery? Or do I seek out new places, new perspectives, new opportunities to fall in love, new experiences …
Our sabbatical is beginning with three short stays in England as we head to Ireland for our first house exchange. We started with eight days in London at a friend’s flat. We are currently partway through seven days with friends in southwest England, and on Saturday we leave for a week traveling across the south …
London has the oldest and most extensive public transportation system in the world – which (in my admittedly biased opinion) is still a delight to use almost 125 years after its inception. However, because of the way earth settles and rises, rivers change course, and soil composition alters over time, not every platform lines up …
I remind myself it is Imbolc and Imbolc is the season of new beginnings and new ideas, new perspectives, new awareness. Imbolc is a renewing opportunity to learn the spiritual, emotional, psychological, basics all over again. This is a good thing, because… …it’s a trick and a half to walk around in England at the …
After an uneventful flight – except for the peculiar, but now familiar, experience of being folded like strange origami figurines in order to fit in coach seats for nine hours – we arrived in London right on time. It always takes a week or so to get used to new signage (as in, what a …
When our plane lifts off from Denver International Airport on its way to London tomorrow night, I will be journeying into an unfamiliar emotional, psychological, and spiritual space as alien as a voyage to Mars. Although the pattern of my husband’s days and weeks will be similar to previous sabbaticals, my own will not. My …
Please see the note about my Etsy shop at the conclusion of this blog. Although my entire vocation as an adult has been rooted in a geography of faith, I am not a religious scholar by any stretch of the imagination. I cannot speak with more than superficial knowledge about Islam, much less the finely …
We live both in the reality that our world does not have clear lines in the sands of space or time, and in the fiction that it does. A season starts on a particular day and we welcome it ritually as if we have crossed that threshold completely and cleanly. But, of course, we haven’t. …
My life has thrummed with choice recently. In among the more mundane choices of daily life (cereal for breakfast, or eggs; chicken sausage for supper, or curry) have been the less daily, but increasingly urgent, choices around the sabbatical (what to pack, which ferry to get from here to there, airbnb or hotel for this …