Without a weekly newspaper deadline, I’ve had little desire to sit at my computer and write these past two months. The sun is shining. The grass is green. The lake is warm. And we’ve been doing what people do when all those stars align.
No, I haven’t missed writing. Continue reading “Sweet Sucker Punch”
There are only a handful of dreams that impacted me enough that I clearly remember them now years later.
In one such dream during my time working at Microsoft, I needed to meet my manager on the other side of a small pond. One route around the pond was wooded and the other side was an open meadow. Continue reading “The Hard Way”
After the miscarriage of Celia Rose last fall, I confided in a friend who had experienced the same kind of loss. She told me that through her grief, the words that rang the loudest came from her husband, who told her simply, “Focus on love.”
I wrote those words down and put them by my front door. They are now the last thing I read when I walk out of my house and the first thing when I walk in. Still, I forget sometimes. I get lost in my own fear and anxiety about any old topic, and it can turn into negativity, then grumpiness, then despondency, then anger, then rage. Continue reading “Focus on Love”
We put our tired bodies to bed slowly, almost gingerly after the busy Angle Days weekend. “I’m so glad it’s over,” I sighed, almost falling onto the mattress.
“Yes,” he agreed. “It can be fall now.”
I went to sleep with those words on my every nerve ending that night, dreaming of cooler winds and peaceful transitions. Continue reading “It Can Be Fall Now”
(Published in the July 10th issue of the Warroad Pioneer)
I’m reading the most perfect book for the current events of my life at the moment. It always seems to happen that way.
Timely quote: “You take a giant step toward psychological maturity when you refuse to angrily defend yourself against unjust slander. For one thing, resistance disturbs your own peace of mind.” Continue reading “God’s Perfect Timing”
The warm nights and warmer days seem to have everything on a fast track this summer. June is most often cold and rainy, but not this year. Fans are going night and day. Water temperatures are where they usually are in late July. The algae bloom has started in force. One wonders if fall is going to start in mid-August at this rate.
I would much rather tune in to nature’s news station than that of we humans lately. The lack of compassion and kindness evident in our political and business arenas is heart sickening. Continue reading “Kindness is Wisdom”
Dreams and memories have been hitting me with a rushing force lately. Wounded animals, babies, difficult physical feats like mountain climbing and surviving barrages of gun fire. I wake with every sleep cycle, adjust my pillow and press-on, back into my dark world of wonder.
But every few weeks something calls me up and out of bed, and I’ll wander the house until I realize the moon is full and my eyes needed to rest in it, my shoulders needed to square-off with it, the soul batteries needed its quiet recharge. Continue reading “On Rabbit Holes and Doing Hard Things”
My resistance to an external, male-imaged God is ultimately what led me back to God, back to the divine Mother Father God within.
Last fall, before the snow flew and the days were still warm enough to wear only a light jacket, I was out washing windows on our new rental home with one of those long-handled squeegee tools. I’d already cleaned the inside of the glass, but I’d wager it was nearing on a decade since anyone had tackled the outside chore. One afternoon that cloudy view, that nary a fisherman would notice, had suddenly become very visible to me. I couldn’t spend another day, let alone a whole frozen winter, staring out through a hazy lense at our beautiful woods, the visiting deer or the full moon’s path across our own private sky. Continue reading “God is Not Other”
The pelicans are long gone. The caterpillars are crossing the roads, and the snakes, when it’s sunny, are sunning. The Northern flickers are caucusing and the ravens are ever talkative, chortling every chance they get at their fair-weathered friends who fly south for the winter.
Even in these fall winds and crazy rains everything feels, well, right as rain…even as we move the mortally wounded snakes to perish somewhat peacefully in the grass, and shoo the uninitiated babies back to the sidelines of the gravel roads. Nature so gently and unassumingly reminds me that everything is as it should be, always.
Then I read the news. Continue reading “The Roughing-Up of Fall”
Kellie Knight’s “Angle Full of Grace” 