DIVINE INTOXICATION
SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE
The architecture looks jerry-rigged, unplumbed, and held together with spackling compound, as if the crumbling arches and angel-bedecked stone overhangs might collapse at any minute.
SPRING FEVER
Then, in late June, I’ll be a week in Detroit! That’s right. The Motown Museum, the Piet Oudolf Garden, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Riverwalk or Riverfront or whatever it’s called.
SING THE HOURS
Rose’s enthusiasm is contagious. His conviction that God had a plan for his dark night of the soul is a consolation. That he took the resources at hand—his musical talents, his energy, his faithful heart—and molded them into an ongoing daily labor of love is a lesson and an inspiration to all of us.
BLESSED ARE THE POOR IN SPIRIT
I brought up the Gospel reading where the waves were threatening to overwhelm the boat the disciples were in, and Jesus’s response was to curl up and take a nap.
THE ORCHARDS OF PERSEVERANCE
In the silence and solitude, stripped of their previous lives, many of the men underwent a kind of disintegration of personality. The realization that they weren’t who they thought they were could be profoundly unsettling.
LET’S BUILD A BOOTH
And in giving my all—the giving itself at the urge and under the aegis of a power infinitely greater than myself—I entered for a time into that cloud that covered Jesus on Mount Tabor.
MONICA AISSA MARTINEZ: NOTHING IN STATIS
Her women are sturdy, strong, questing, joyful. Of “Portrait of Sara, Head in Profile, Arms Akimbo” (2017), she observes: “Leonardo da Vinci says: The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.”
THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL
St. Paul fell off his horse, but Christ comes in the form of a lamb, a dove, a heron. That’s not to say he’s always gentle.
THE SPIRITUAL CASE FOR A DAILY WALK
In “A Philosophy of Walking,” Frédéric Gros reflects upon some of the many thinkers and writers throughout history who have also considered walking essential to their work: Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thoreau.
NEW CAMALDOLI HERMITAGE
Back in my room, I gazed out at the stars. The older I get, the more keenly aware I am that our time on earth is finite. I’d stayed once before at New Camaldoli, many years before: would I pass this way again?
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
We Catholics keep our decorations up till Epiphany (January 9th this year), I’ve learned (or depending on whom you consult, is it The Baptism, which this year falls the day after Epiphany (Jan. 10th), or is it January 5th which, counting December 25th, is the twelfth day of Christmas, or is it January 6, which is the day the three wise men are supposed to have arrived in Bethlehem)?
In short, just leave them up for now.
THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY
Then I settled down to one of my favorite kind of afternoons: I started reading “Heavy Light: A Journey through Madness, Mania & Healing” by Horatio Clare. H, as his friends (and now, I) call him, wrote a stellar memoir about growing up on a Wales sheep farm called “Running for the Hills”, and has written a bunch of travel and landscape type books since. He’s also possibly an alcoholic, and possibly bipolar, and suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder, and really, really should not smoke pot.