May 7, 2025 From the chair where I sit most mornings to pray and write, I can see out a window to an expanse of sky draped lavishly over a spread of trees, a break in the city-scape afforded by a sliver of a national park that follows a through road in a stream valley several stories down from the second floor of my house, where I perch. The sky is often inky gray when I first come, early, to...
April 30, 2025 The peony plant is in its third year. By now it should be developing deep roots, eyes forming along the original tuber as it spreads underground to form multiple stalks, shooting up into an abundance of blooms. This plant is a dark red color I adore, the deep maroon that formed the backdrop of our wedding colors, the perfect foil for the swoonworthy fluffy pale pink Sarah Bernhardt...
April 28, 2025 I was supposed to run a Ragnar Relay this past weekend, something I’ve always wanted to do. These are the long-distance races that often cover enough ground could see the distance on a globe, from a coastal range peak to the ocean, for example. Two hundred+ miles. Absent divine intervention, there is no way I could run to hundred miles. But in the race I was meant to take part in...
April 10, 2025 All my life I’ve wanted to publish books. When I went on a mission trip to Haiti as a youth, I filled a small spiral notebook with a line by line of the entire experience, the intended first draft of the book I planned to publish about it. On family trips to the beach, I’d skip sandcastles and hole up with a laptop overlooking the ocean, pecking out paragraphs. I’ve started...
“I meditate on what is great” – the opening lines of a song I’ve been taken by the past few weeks. The end of a long work day, a frantic push to get something done on an impossibly tight timeline, the baton momentarily passed out of my hand. My son, the only child at home. A sun-kissed early spring evening, not-cold for the first time in memory, spring bulbs emerging in force. I could get more...
March 14, 2025 I arrive at my four-day spiritual director training and retreat, intended as an interlude of learning and refreshment, with a backpack of things to get done. Stack of books I want to read, both ones I haven’t finished from the most recent assigned readings and—why not?—one more for personal growth—my fun reading. My laptop so I can get some paid work done—having been out for a week...
March 11, 2025 One of my stated goals of the sabbatical I took between April-December 2024 was spend more time reading for the joy of it. Do you love to read? I do, in theory. But in ordinary life, it seems I love less the reading, and more self-improvement. I’m mildly embarrassed at the designation of ‘self help’ that accompany many of the titles gracing my shelves. Each individual book has its...
February 21, 2025 Four women on the subway platform, chatting animatedly, discussing the evening’s plan—a show and meeting someone later if I’m overhearing correctly. Which is the stop to get off at, and is that other co-worker going to be joining? one of them asks, I think wistfully, with the standard New York night out hope that this will be the one you find a spark. These women look nothing...
January 21, 2025 On any given day, our kids’ room is littered with dirty clothes. Their trail of discarded attire reveals distracted wandering over the course of the seemingly simple act of getting dressed: pants inside out on the carpet, underwear tossed in a corner, dress nestled in next to a pillow on the bed. My kids appear about as bothered by it as a snake whose shed its skin. Meanwhile...
January 27, 2025 I don’t know about you or your community, but my community has been shaken over the past few weeks. Not in order of importance, and not exhaustive: The intense local grief for a neighbor who died in a house fire the other night, several others made homeless. The mundane challenge, for federal worker friends and neighbors, of the need to abruptly reorient to fully in-person work...