most frivolous voice

[Warning: this is longer than many of my posts.] My world is now post-pandemic. Not post- in the sense of “pandemic all gone”; I suspect that’s Not A Thing for the next few years as we shuttle from steady loss of life in unvaccinated/less-vaccinated locations (like (sadly) the majority-world) to loss of life and risk-of-non-fatal […]

where does my heart live?

I’ve come around again to taking more steps in the day — the literal moving-feet kind. I’m impressively sedentary, so I have to intend if I’m not going to stay at rest, and as a biological entity a body at rest dissolves into decay (so I hear). ANYway. Long after everyone else had ‘gone’ to […]

it’s a solid education

Did I tell you I have a summer job? Only sort of, right. Well, it’s a Jill-of-all-academia job — and the first component of it is to continue the editorial assistant work I took on last August. Copy-editing, mostly… trueing each article up to the Horizons in Biblical Theology style guide, which is 90% the […]

how do you care well for someone you love?

I’ve briefly mentioned my hospice internship this past (spring) semester — I learned so much, and even offered good care to people (patients, families) who were undergoing profound stress. It was also a very busy time for me; only in my third (final) month did I realize it consumed 50% more time than did my […]

double-edged expanse

I brushed my teeth at 10am today. I arose from bed at 7:30am. So there was time to (in not-their-order): read all the parts of the newspaper I cared to; have breakfast; fold and put away the towels; consider the rose-petals floating in a bowl on the coffee table and decide they could become potpourri […]

i always take the toll road

Hello, everyone! This semester (Jan 2021 – Apr 2021 which is now) has been the most time-intensive stretch in my whole MDiv journey, and one of the more crunched times across my adult life. Which is why I haven’t blogged since Dec 2020… I haven’t had enough spare brain cells to make sentences out of […]

this is not silence

My Sweetie and I are taking advantage of the between-week at the bridge of the year to be Someplace Else for a few days. Come to think on it, we not infrequently travel during this window — a memorable post 9-11 trip to New York City pops brightly into mind…. I suppose it’s the moment […]

what I carry with me

More than having one experience among a host of others, our professor — whose instructional responsibility, from what I can tell, is to concretely equip us for post-academic life as Ministers of Word and Sacrament — wants us to come away from this semester with a template or a framework that we could repeat… and […]

what I left behind

In the movie The Way, the gendarme character hands Martin Sheen’s character a pocket-sized rock as Sheen sets out to walk his dead son’s pilgrimage. In one of the late-late scenes in the movie, the erstwhile group of pilgrims arrives at an impressive pile of pocket-sized rocks… larger than any ebenezer I’ve yet encountered. Each […]

a pilgrim at john knox ranch

I began my pilgrim-week in this place. Yes, I know I take a lot of botanical pix. Some of these were to feed into a new app I have on my phone, Seek by iNaturalist, but truthfully… I probably would have taken them anyway. It was a lot more wandering and not much “going,” pilgrimage-wise. […]