mid-life married women
KS: I mean, marriage — being, staying married — is a group project. KM: And we all know that not everybody is good at group projects!
Category: driving with daughters
Before 2016, much of my car-time involved taking a girl or two to an activity. For me relaxing in the car means talking about whatever’s on my mind. Or her mind, or whomever else’s mind. My nest is empty; no one’s in my car. But my musing doesn’t quit just because of that. So now you’re the one “Driving With Daughters!”
collapse
I’m far from the only one with this problem, and also it keeps cropping up for me — I wake in the morning (or pause) and make the mental move to orient myself in the day. And — unlike in other years or life-seasons or or or — my mind pulls in a day farther […]
going pro
I had the honor of preaching to a congregation this past weekend — the place where I was a pastor-intern, so it was a delightful homecoming made sweeter by being gathered, embodied. The last I was with them, you see, was in December 2020, before any of us had vaccines and thus well before we […]
peers collaborate
A while back (a long while back) I attended a speed version of the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. The full form is thirty days; there is a week-long form that time has hallowed; there also is a four-day form, which might have been shaped as a concession to the late twentieth century, or perhaps […]
everywhere is garden
My friend C is a member at the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower Center. And for the past… six weeks? two months?… we’ve met here on Wednesday mornings at next-door-to-8am in order to walk through whatever is jammed up in our hearts and heads. And for me to say out loud what faithful work I intend to […]
coffee and nerves
Here’s something I’ve been ‘doing’ but not writing about: waiting in hope to get into / start a PhD program in Fall 2022. My applications? Committed & sealed in mid-December and mid-January. My responses? Of 4 applications: one decline, one decline with a counteroffer of a ThM acceptance, two waitlists. The institutions let me know […]
coffee and contemplation
Back a while ago — when the girls were young, and I was in one of my desperate seasons — I consulted my first spiritual director. She was someone I was friendly with at church, who had recently decided to add this skill to her capacious repertoire. I was early on in my journey into […]
computing in a frictionless sphere
So I’m drinking my second cup of coffee and reading Twitter, as one does, and I wander into a thread on the morality of the death penalty. Not very far, just far enough to see some “teacher” qualities and some “Christian” qualities (go algorithms!) and to notice someone asking the original poster whether they think […]
by definition on time
“Nobody is born ahead of their time!” —Hannah Gadsby, from the one-person show Nanette Gadsby exclaims this at the crux of her thorough discussion of Vincent Van Gogh’s stylistic and thematic choices. She’s reacting to a commonly-repeated thought: that, during his life, Van Gogh’s work wasn’t collected widely or financially rewarded because his ideas (as […]
twice exiled
A little while ago my spiritual director asked me to cast my mind/heart across the Bible and tell her what ‘rhyme’ came to me as I considered myself in the moment. (She uses ‘rhyme’ here to refer to passages that strike one as similar, without needing to be a full match.) I thought: Second Isaiah’s […]