Finding Tenderness in the Fog

Finding Tenderness in the Fog

Photo Credit: Julie Graham There’s a strange tenderness in harsh prairie winters. In the midst of deep fog, the temperature swings slowly, visibility declines, ice and frost coat the roads and the windows, and the hoar frost wraps the power lines and the trees. We can...
When the light shifts: sitting here alone with you…

When the light shifts: sitting here alone with you…

Photo Credit: Darryl Millette For more than eight hundred days, the earth has been spinning its way around the sun, shining in spite of Abbie’s death, but I struggle to see it. The sun and moon come and go. I fight to feel anything other than the sting of injustice at...
Joy is actually dangerous, and I need to do it anyway

Joy is actually dangerous, and I need to do it anyway

Joy is an Easter feeling and a virtue in my faith tradition. For reasons fairly obvious to me, it is not the leading line in any description anyone would ever write about me. After all the fasting and sacrifice of Lent, I am worn out before the fifty days of Easter...
Birthing barefoot, and finding God at the bottom

Birthing barefoot, and finding God at the bottom

I love giving birth. It’s a strange thing to love, given the pain it brings. I, however, am a recovering perfectionist, a doer of all things, and a prayer easily distracted. Birth takes me over, and I go, willing and resisting, barefoot, into the heart of it....
Tending to the wounds of a broken heart

Tending to the wounds of a broken heart

Wounds are strange teachers. Ten days ago, I sliced through the tip of my left ring finger trying to pry leftover ice cream cake off the cardboard. (Don’t worry; I assured my inquiring brother-in-law that the cake was unharmed.) The sting was worse than the blood. And...