(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
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
Welcome to the year 2019 my friends! If you are reading this, together we’ve been given the grace of arriving to a new day. It is enough to be alive. We’re ready. I’m glad to be here with you. Some time ago my dear friend and teacher, Keren Hannah Pryor, began to write about liminal spaces, those in-between places, when we are not in one specific place or another, but find.. Read More
It occurred to me this week the way the river can have a similar illusion as an airplane does when you look at it from the opposing direction. If we didn’t know better it could seem as though both were moving in slow motion. How similar this is to family, to life. Sometimes from certain angles, we can look at our lives and buy into an illusion that it’s going.. Read More
How is heaven to come down to earth? Often in the prayers of the early church God is referred to as Eternal One. In some records of the prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray, it ends with these words: Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. God is the forever One—an idea we both cannot comprehend and that the strangest things bear light upon it… Read More
In the Pacific Northwestern United States there are four distinct seasons, two with incredible contrasting “glory”, that is, presence—summer and winter. It strikes me as something to behold because it is new to me that the marked difference is not hot and cold as I have been accustomed to in the Midwest, but rather dry and wet. This year from the late Spring and throughout Summer to early Fall we.. Read More