Looking and listening for Mystery
What accounts for our fear of seeing Notre Dame ablaze? For the French it is the national symbol of their lives in the past, not least, its surviving World War II, but also recent births, marriages, burials, anniversaries, and Holy Days. Do we fear losing the building itself? Its form through the last thousand years? …
Spirit Stones is alive and well, just undergoing a transformation. You’ve just found me on a redesigned website more easily searchable that will, one day soon, announce the emergence of my new book, Loving the Enemy: When the favorite parent dies first. You’ll find some of the ‘Stones lovingly cached within the book. And you will also get …
Once in a while I have to escape my familiar walls at home, even my cat, to get close to the wider, wilder world. When I do that, I am entranced by the small things: beach rocks and the tiny crab who flee when I turn them over, lichen, white, black and tan, tree bark, …
Welcome darkness? Not really. I turn on as many lights as possible trying to keep darkness at bay. I add candles, spotlights, twinkling garlands and bright lighted trees to assure myselfthat the dark is not disturbing. As a child I was more afraid. I called loudly for Mom or dad to come into the hall …
How I love this world. An elegant variety in a multitude of growing things: flowers, shrubs, annuals, perennials, and tall dogwood next to tiny purple eruptions from ground I never planted. Could the abundance entice us to bloom as well? To bloom into love for ourselves and others?
It may be only among strangers in airports or waiting rooms, planes or elevators, that I manage to suspend my well-honed biases. Oh, I know, we must always receive the stranger as a guest, lest we miss entertaining angels unawares. But it is only when I have read everything in sight or played enough Solitaire …
When I was a kid, my dad took our family out camping in a trailer he built out of plywood with a double bunk bed–the top for us three siblings, the bottom for my parents. Next was a “five-man” dark green umbrella tent. Campgrounds were full of treasures: silence under tall fir as cooking pots …
…how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me, what else should I have done? Mary Oliver knows what more of us must learn. Whatever we are …
Beneath this parable is a bedrock assumption of abundance that we too rarely trust. There is seed enough to lose, and the God who makes the sun to shine and rain to fall upon the righteous and unrighteous (Matt 5:45) is indiscriminate about sharing. Grace is flung and wasted everywhere. Brian Hiortdahl, The Christian Century06.29.2011 …
Soaring with purpose over my roof, a crow carried food in his beak. I walked to the back window to see him poised in the back yard over a deep patch of moss. He dropped his peanut and then poked it three or four times with his beak, pushing it deeper. He looked, then found …