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 …
A few days ago I picked up an intriguing book at the library called Who Are You? 101 Ways of Seeing Yourself by Malcolm Godwin. Godwin taps all kinds of different cultures to look through familiar and unfamiliar lenses at our physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual being. My beloved husband took one look at the …
Backstory, Part 1: On Sunday, the minister invited us to think of the difference between ‘God-shaped’ as an adjective and ‘God-shaped’ as a verb. This is a differentiation well worth pursuing. Backstory, Part 2: I was absolutely enchanted the first time I saw a word cloud and discovered how they work; they can unfold the …
Today is the Feast of St Francis, that delightfully eccentric saint whose scandalous conversion is the stuff of legend. From a distance, it is easy to love and admire him…although he drove many of those who knew him in person to total distraction. This is true of a lot of loose cannons; in fact, it …
My apologies for the broken link in my last blog mailing. There was an error in copying the URL. Six days ago, I set out from Denver by car to visit my daughter in St Paul. Our schedules have been such that we have not seen one another in person for several months and …
The feast that begins Lughnasadh (pronounced loo-NA-sah) is Lammas – the word is an elision of Loaf-Mass – when the first loaves of bread from the first harvest of the new grain are baked, blessed and eaten. Lammas is one of the four fire festivals of the ancient Irish year. It honors the self-sacrifice …
In early 1986, as I tried to make sense of the shattered remains of an almost 10-year marriage, my father said to me, “You know, my dear, not everything in life can be neatly wrapped with a well-tied bow. Sometimes it just gets put on the shelf in pieces.” I was 34. In the intervening …
When I was visiting my father recently, we uncovered a box full of cards and letters I had exchanged with my mother in the two years after her cancer diagnosis and before her death. It was an unbelievable treasure trove that brought smiles and tears and a strange sense of awe in the re-reading. In …
In my first reflection for Beltane, I mentioned some of its characteristic foci, the aspects of the season that invite us to take note of particular areas of our own lives. I reminded us that it is a time of honoring earth and the fecundity of earth and the blessings she pours out abundantly …
As we come to the end of one season (the spring quarter) and prepare to enter a new one, long practice invites us to release the old energy and acknowledge the lessons learned. It is an opportunity to empty ourselves in gratitude for all we have received, pouring back into the universe the blessings that …