No season is one flavor through and through. Every season partakes of the whole of life, from seed-birth through leaf and blossom and fruit, to ripening and harvest and death. I met Lori Rosenkvist when I was asked to work on a project for Logos Productions over 20 years ago. At the time she was …
One of the most beloved books of my middle-school years was Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, written by Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimborough about the hilarious (at least in retrospect) trip they made to Europe following their graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1920. Which, if you have never read it, is still quite …
As we get closer to the actual possibility of planting seeds that will germinate and produce grain and fruit, I have been pondering the reality that we rarely grow anything alone. Life (both inward and outward) is quite literally co-operation, a collaboration that stretches back through generations of DNA and natural selection and family …
On a recent Southwest flight across country, I noticed that the man in the window seat in my row and the man diagonally across from me, got briskly onto the plane, put their suitcases and briefcases and coats in the overhead bin [In spite of repeated requests from the flight attendants that people store their …
Water, water everywhere: The snow is finally melting faster than it is accumulating in New England – for which my family is deeply grateful as my father moves today from the home that holds forty years of history to the home that holds a future full of surprises and new stories and unfolding friendships. Water, …
By a series of choices and chances reaching all the way back into my childhood, my husband and I do not own a television. Well, that isn’t strictly true – we have a beautiful flat-screen TV for watching movies – but we do not have a television on which we can watch the 617 available …
Several years ago, I saw a coffee mug imprinted with the words, What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? For months, I offered those words to people I knew who were frightened, unsettled, stressed, unhappy…but gradually, in the way of such things, they drifted out of my consciousness. Then, …
In the autumn of 1986, I was given one of the most important gifts of my life. By a strange confluence of events in the lives of several other people, I was invited to serve on an international ecumenical consultation that changed the heart of ecumenical dialogue around the world…and that changed the whole structure and …
In the Christian church, Lent began on Ash Wednesday (February 18). Although penitence and penance (words most of us have come to hate without really understanding what they mean) have long been associated with Lent, it would be less emotionally laden to describe this season as one of intentional metanoia: a season about turning toward …
I have been saved from sinking beneath a rising tsunami of meaningful mementos, and (seemingly) important papers, and from terminal despair at the impossibility of ever being organized, by a delightful and challenging little book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by a young Japanese woman, Marie Kondo. Before you stop reading this to …