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 …
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 …
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 …
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. …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 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 …
A couple of days ago, when I started writing this, if I had stepped outside, I would have been standing up to my armpits in snow with more falling by the minute (I am in Massachusetts, not Colorado)…so the idea of preparing the ground for planting literal seeds from which I expect to reap kale …