“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...
January 9, 2025 I’m sorry this is late. It is Thanksgiving. Recovering from the Thanksgiving holiday. Preparing for Christmas. Christmas. Recovering from Christmas. New Year. Kids at home for days etc. etc. Back to school chaos. Snow days. Sick days. Unfortunately, I suspect we may all be running out of excuses reasons for whatever it is we’ve been putting off, though the clever amongst us can...
January 5, 2025 Among the things we are grateful for this past year, my husband added this: those times when at least one child eats my cooking. Pleasing a single child is not so hard. Our eight year old son meets the dinner table with surprising flexibility. I ask which cross-section of the options I compile on an ordinary weeknight he would like on his plate, and he often replies, “Chef’s...
December 21, 2024 This is the season where Christians worldwide commemorate a birth. But before the birth comes the waiting, the in-between season of Advent, a space for holding contradictions. Christ is coming, Christ has come. I love the contradictions. They don’t force a choice, don’t foreclose possibility. Is the world desperately broken or is there redemption? Am I hopeful or afraid? Is it...
April 19, 2024 “I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the things you enjoy—and all of those things not being there. We call that absence “wanting.” So, to ‘not want,’...