Looking and listening for Mystery
Life has taught me that I rarely know how my choices will turn out. Sometimes there are remarkable discoveries and sometimes nothing. Little by little, year after year, and under the thrall of many talented teachers, I began to learn to understand paradox, the language of the spiritual journey. One of the “rules of the …
There I was, perched on a stool at the Genius Bar, Alderwood, contemplating my dark (dead?) iPhone, praying for it, for a tech to rescue me. Misery came in threes this week. First, the Prius was undriveable due to loose bearings in the left rear wheel—garaged while we drove Ardene’s FIT to Oregon last week. …
I scan the front section of the Seattle Times at breakfast to see the trash at a homeless camp in Montlake, saddened by both the need for such a “shelter” and the lack of support that results in such a mess. I read that the Dems “fumed” at the White House balking to supply …
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 …