Every two weeks or so, a friend organizes poets. She is living with cancer, and the poets were an idea to keep social during what can only be classed as difficult days. The poets used to be in the habit of meeting in person once a month for a reading and open mic session hosted…
Maybe it’s stepping out of line to head for Emmaus this early in the year. Most eyes are focused on Jerusalem with Easter still ahead. This should be a well-paced time of year, as we travel together through our continuing, life-giving story. We know this pattern: the fear and the hope, that evening meal, the…
In the midst of that chaos, they flew a flag. Jesus Saves. I felt ill to see it. How could that mob – those violent thugs – dare hold high his name? When Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington D.C., attempting a coup at the beginning of January, their Christian nationalism was flagrantly…
At the edge of the park, there is a line of trees with twisted branches. I remember cycling past them the first January we lived here, wondering about their strange branches. They looked sinister against a grey sky. Now we pass them every day, but they are different because we’ve seen them in springtime. Then,…
“Heap on more wood! The wind is chill;But let it whistle as it will,We’ll keep our Christmas merry still.”Sir Walter Scott When I was little, my mother quilted an advent calendar. It was a pre-printed fabric scene – chipmunks making popcorn chains, I believe – that she made three-dimensional with batting and stitches, and 24…
Happy Birthday, Christian Courier! Isn’t it lovely how this aligns with Thanksgiving? A very fitting coincidence. In these days of counting our blessings and holding on, it’s wonderful to have a real celebration like this to mark. We may be restricted when it comes to physically sitting down at extended family tables this Thanksgiving, but this…
Ten years ago, we were going through a huge family change. Job loss, relocation, back to school, small kids in tow – the whole shebang. Part madness, part adventure and a heap of faith in a pilgrim life. And with that upheaval, I picked up the knitting needles. I’d first learned to knit as a teenager and knit myself a huge blue shawl-collared cocoon to hide in, then moved on to smaller things like mittens for boyfriends.
There. It was just like that; the sky was a bowl above me, and its rim the horizon in every direction. I’d read that line in a book and which book I couldn’t remember, but I must have liked the image because it stuck in my mind and surfaced in that sudden 12-year-old moment when I saw it was true.
Just before the world shut down, the Spouse and I ran away to the library. Just the two of us and the library we chose was three hours away. I was finishing a writing project, the Spouse was starting a new work, and we both wanted time to concentrate. It would be a backwards Sabbath, maybe, but a rest and a refocus nonetheless.
Here they are, the waiting days. Worried days. Shut-down, locked-down, up-and-down days. We are stilled. We flare up. Fret. Rage. Are stilled again. At my house, we’re five all together at home, and we know that’s lucky. We have friends who live alone, and we know that must be hard. But this is hard, too. These days are hard for everyone. These virus days are different in different places, but it’s all one story because nothing is the same and everyone is waiting for normal to return.
A Sunday morning snapshot of our locked-down life. Three Sundays now away from church. This feels wrong. We see the spire when we go out for a walk, but the doors are locked and we know that, so we don’t go close. It’s strange to think of it sitting there empty without us, like a drydocked boat, waiting for things to begin again.
It was a family long weekend and we headed out of town. They say that in Cornwall, the toe tip of Britain, spring comes early. Maybe we’d find good weather. Sunshine. Warmth. Well, that was optimistic, and we did get soggy, but we also saw fields of daffodils, a church with a cross made of surf boards, and seas of every shade of blue there is. I’d assumed summer sun made the Cornish seas lovely, but it must be the stone instead because even in the rain, the water was incredibly blue.
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