In mid-March, I flew from Colorado to Massachusetts to spend three weeks with my father. This is a trip I make twice a year, staying for two or three weeks of concentrated time talking, doing small errands or chores, seeing my sister — the only sibling who lives close to our father — and sharing …
Paying attention takes mental and psychological energy. It is much easier to make habitual choices. In fact, we humans are internally wired to put things in categories and to apply old lessons to new situations so that we don’t need to stop and think – which can be a dangerous activity when one is being …
Since my last Musings, I’ve continued to think about success, about accumulation, about consumption, about letting go — and I have come to the conclusion that I am really asking myself about identity. What constitutes identity? Is there some kernel of being that is uniquely me, separate from the family in which I grew up, …
In Lent – the Christian community is observing Lent at the moment – one of the tasks of the faithful is to realign themselves with G-d, with the sacred within, with the sacred in the earth, and the sacred in creatures of other species. One of the essential tasks is to realign our eyes to …
I’ve been pondering success lately. As friends and colleagues move into retirement or pre-retirement planning (indeed, as my husband and I begin to consider the shift in life stages), I’ve been pondering how those I know, those I love, measure success. I was talking with my father recently about what he and my mother taught …
In the west, the issue of water runs just beneath the surface of our lives. Or, increasingly, is being drained away, insuring that much of Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, and northern Mexico will be a wasteland in two or three more generations. Already the Colorado River ends miles north of where it flowed only …
In Part One, I was reflecting on how important, but how hard, it is to keep our truths from being painted over by our fears, our anxieties, our griefs, our shames, the world’s expectations and our collusion with the world’s expectations. But it seems to me that pentimento can also be life-giving and truth-enhancing in …
Life is a journey. It can be a plodding journey undertaken in inattention. It can be a scattered journey as our attention is constantly pulled from one thing to another. It can be a tunnel journey focused on a single goal to the exclusion of all else. Or it can be a journey of continual …
Although the preacher never used the term, pentimento, I heard a sermon this morning that used the concept of pentimento to encourage us to be more honest, healthier, less fearful, about revealing our mistakes rather than engaging in elaborate cover-ups. It was not until this evening, however, that I learned that the term actually comes …
Henri Nouwen (the wonderful priest, author, and theologian, who died unexpectedly in 1996), lived the last part of his life in the L’Arche communities in companionship with those who have developmental disabilities. In a lecture given at the Scarritt-Bennett Center, reflecting on the experience of living with those the world considers “broken,” he said, “The …