(If you missed it, you can read part one here.) Speaking of light… The daytime hours so stark during the summer often make everything feel awash and lost in its blast of luminance, discernment becomes difficult. The mildness of evening and morning light, I think most of us are drawn to its gentleness. We’re drawn to what we can see by its kind flame. Yet here is all this learning again…gentle.. Read More
Overwhelm and stress and the painful places in life—that is the place of love. The space we get to love comes in the harshest and, even what is most easy to perceive as, the cruelest of ways. Love’s kingdom begins at the water’s edge. Sometimes we find the gradual sloping edge, the gentle entry, only to learn in time to take it as grace when it does come so—because Love’s.. Read More
Our little homeschool sat outside in and around the flower and herb gardens for an observation lesson recently, the entire time we sat there a nearby chickadee nest was all astir with tiny and continuous baby-bird chirping. I can still hear it even now as I write you, it’s like a river of a different kind, a river of little cries, rolling on and on. And I wonder if that’s.. Read More
The morning is pregnant with the rain to come today, and also filled with a feathery lightness that whispers to me the way the sun will be peaking through like a faithful friend. The sky is blue grey filling with a little warmth on the horizon as I walk through the hour of morning twilight. The sun has already crested on the other side of the hills and I keep.. Read More
It’s been a deeply felt and personal blessing to write here the last couple of months about love. The practice has been holding me to a place of greater willingness to pursue love, its essence, its meat, its life inside of me—to keep myself at the fire of discovering what real love looks like worked out of my life. In the midst of our homeschool’s end-of-year testing and other stressful.. Read More
“Love does not…boast; it is not arrogant, or rude…” -1 Corinthians 13 In our searching for our belonging, there are days we trip over our boasting, arrogance, rudeness. But there is good news, even in this… I was walking high up on a river bank while the sun was sinking low. The tall un-mown grass was swaying in the evening breeze, transporting me in my imagination to a slow motion.. Read More
Our family had an opportunity to partake in an event recently that I felt deeply moved by, yet as it moved closer I recognized an old drive within me peaking its head out, one that was afraid of missing out (FOMO); me—on the look-out for the next-great thing. The anticipation that brings joy is not wrong, but sometimes I have let it blind me to the participation in the present.. Read More
I recently traveled for six days without my family and have been home for a little over two weeks. It has taken every bit of that, now home—holding, listening, playing, going for walks, and generally just being together—to restore us back into our rhythms, heal us, to one another. It is a wild, and intensely privileged, position to get to be loved. We pick up where we leave off, but.. Read More
I want to write that it’s taken me twenty years of marriage to become something close to the wife I want to be to my husband. It’s taken all sorts of letting-go-of-old to make space for the now. I simply have not always done this well, often because I was not aware I needed to, other times because I mistook running away from myself for truth-telling, truth-bearing, truth-living. That thing.. Read More
I was with a grieving friend and her words fell off into I don’t knows, “I just don’t know”. We sat in silence, but what I knew from all the words that preceded the self-doubting “I don’t know” was actually she did know. She had proved it to me by all her other words. Because here’s what I know, words take time to form. Even if they don’t all fall.. Read More