Ready to Make Friends with Poetry? ⟶
“A book begins with falling in love. You lose your heart to a place, a house, an avenue of trees, or with a character who walks in and takes sudden and complete possession of you. Imagination glows, and there is the seed of your book.” -Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow, 1974 Squeezed into…
Where have you been? Out of town like those who flee our chilled clime and metallic skies? Elsewhere, warming up your voice to herald today’s sunrise with your song? I welcome your morning melody making its way to my ears, stirring memories of other songs on sullen, silver days when your music was my only…
Every year at Christmas our kids get my husband and I a jigsaw puzzle. This year Santa pitched in and we actually ended up with three puzzles–birds, the beach and kites–our three favorite things. A great Friday night date for my husband and I is to build a fire, turn on the music and puzzle away….a simple, quiet joy…
“So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body, let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.” Romans 12:5, The Message Bible…
“…the resolving of the conflict between sacred and the secular (or, better said, the repairing of the damage done by divorcing them) has been billed as the major problem of modern theology.” -Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb, 1967 ///// The writer of those words penned his thoughts 50 years ago, and while…
I met a friend recently for lunch at a park near my home, desperate for her company and encouragement. Nerves were frayed, emotions out of whack, reserve tanks anything but reserved. I apologized in advance for my undone condition. As I attempted to articulate my very frail feelings, blaming my 4 am wake-up call after…
Lower Yosemite Falls, 2015 jlc “We’ll know we’re living gratefully by seeing how our love multiplies itself in the lives of the people around us. People don’t follow vision; they follow availability.” -Bob Goff, founder of lovedoes.org Last week I rewarded myself for five days straight of computer-gnashing a.k.a. book writing, by getting a pedicure. I…
There is no statute of limitations on vision. My old eyes register a darting messenger ofGod’s blatant, creative joy. Watch the wingedcreation hover in a web of air.Spy a sleuthing intrudersnap-tapping its wayacross the wood, tunnelingaway and down the outside stairs. No expiration (yet) for hearing,cataloguing birdvoice and thechipclacking of breakfastat the feeder, the squeakinginsistence…
No matter where I live, I recognize the song of a red-winged blackbird. In rushes near the shore’s edge of a California beach, along the canals and waterways in the San Joaquin Valley, the tall grasses along a Louisiana bayou or deep in marshes along Washington’s coast, the voice of the songbird is the same….
Some of the most delicious morsels we consume are not the meals we partake of but rather the nourishment of words which speak to our souls. When you are the oldest of five children with alcoholic parents, life is tenuous and uncertain, to say the least. Rocky around the edges and loosely glued together by…