Seeing grace and sifting through clutter

Seeing grace and sifting through clutter

Saturday morning in early June. Sunshine streaming through lilac bushes. Birds singing from underneath leaves that seem to have grown overnight. And tables full of things we hope other people will like well enough to take home when we open up the garage door. There...
Trusting what is to take us where we need to go

Trusting what is to take us where we need to go

Photo Credit: Marc Perrault Trust wasn’t the lesson I was expecting when my partner planned a surprise anniversary weekend away. Seventeen years later, we returned to the Cypress Hills where we stayed as newlyweds. The lodgepole pines appear not to have changed as...
Resurrection practice in the wake of surviving suffering

Resurrection practice in the wake of surviving suffering

Photo Credit: Becky Stevenson When I think about the long list of things I need to practice, resurrection has never made the list. But I have been returning to the theme year after year in my writing. In 2017, I wrote about not being ready to rise. The next year, I...
A prayer for hope in the wreckage

A prayer for hope in the wreckage

Photo Credit: Sarah Tosh Manafo As the world feels like it might give way into dust, I’m clinging to a promise of hope. I can still feel the faint dry spot on my forehead where it was marked with ashes. We haven’t been promised permanence, and that pisses me off. The...
Embracing complexity to find a simple peace

Embracing complexity to find a simple peace

Photo Credit: Darcy Donovan Complexity is piling up like snowbanks on my lawn. We just get one wet snowfall shoveled in time for the next one to blow into a bank around the door.  The piles started out neatly enough. But it is late winter now and the ice threatens to...