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This week included my most favorite holy days—days recognized in various ways across different cultures and religious practices as days in which the veil between this world and a world beyond thins and our access to ancestors increases. Through the wind, sudden shocks of cold alternating with strange warmth, shortening days, and angle of the…
“Make your choice every day, and your choice chooses you.” It was improvised advice, given in response to a friend who asked how to be married. (It was two days before his wedding.) I try not to say things I don’t believe, so when those words came out of my mouth, they got my attention.…
I’m not much of a gossip, so this will not be THAT kind of post—no secret affairs or forbidden romance. Also, I’m not referring in a saccharine way to love for work, as in, “Do what you love; love what you do.” Instead, I want to engage love as wanting another to be—not only to…
I’m in the second decade of life with a mom who has Alzheimer’s. It has been called “the long goodbye,” which conveys much of the prolonged sadness and grief involved in this season of love. It’s not all sad. Sometimes it’s beautiful or funny. There are gifts in the forgetting and creativity in the remembering. One huge…
A recurring metaphor for spiritual life is open hands, often held together and slightly cupped. When in distress, I experience my spirit as clenched fists, holding tightly to my own worries and expectations. “Loosen your grip,” I say to myself and to others on occasion. Another way to say this is, “Hold gently.” This is…
I’d be breezy, in a way that accompanies sun and makes the shadows dance on walls and ground— the kind of weather in which many things are possible, yet the primary demand is being: this step, this breath, this thought a lovely day to appreciate and let go
Today is a little anniversary in my life that celebrates two anniversaries. It is the sixth month anniversary of my commitment to publish a blogpost every Friday, a commitment that I began on December 16, 2022, which would have been my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. When we were growing up it was *very* important to…
alone at the edge of a crashing ocean, or immersed in a sea of singing voices; in awe under a canopy of an ancient tree, or mesmerized by human achievement; I become small in the best possible way– not anonymous or insignificant– called by name and just the right size, finding meaning in the immensity…
Among the hardest parts of being human is saying, “goodbye.” Goodbyes come in many forms—leaving town, sending children here or there or where-you’re-not-so-sure, grieving loved ones, moving on. Goodbyes are often precipitated by provocation and argument, as though conflict will give the courage to say goodbye and try new things. Courage generated by conflict is…
Several years ago I gave a talk titled, “Waitfulness.” I’m not sure what exactly occasioned it, except for that I had been reading a taxonomy of boredom.[1] Boredom is the ultimate in waiting: there’s nothing to do. In German the word for boredom is langeweile, which means “long while” or “long time.” When you’re bored…
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