“You prayed for his coming, but you were wise not to let your longing, your loneliness interfere with living, with what had to be done from moment to moment. You kept giving even when you felt nothing in return.”
THE CREATIVE LIFE
THE FRIENDS OF GRIFFITH PARK NEWSLETTER
What I love most about the park is the smell of sage, plus the array of people: elderly ladies power-walking with their visors, tanned buff guys running shirtless, young people talking about their screenplays and restaurant jobs.
EMPTINESS
“The hardest cross to bear in life is the thought that we are wasting our time, that we are useless, that the world is rushing along and we, apparently, have not yet found our feet. For the missioner the monotony of merely marking time, of facing petty tasks, or even manufacturing small jobs to kill […]
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.
GREETINGS FROM SAN MIGUEL DE ALLENDE
The gimcrack sounvenirs are adding to the landfill, the churches will one day crumble to dust, I am forver part of the darkness of the world–but also, I hope, of its light.
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.
FIBER SCULPTOR JUDITH SCOTT
Did those straitjacketed, swaddled structures represent the trauma of 35 years of institutionalization? Were they meant to telegraph that no matter how deeply the world tries to bury the human spirit, it will rise triumphant and exuberant?
TRAVELS WITH MYSELF
April I have booked four nights at the Holy Cross Retreat Center Hermitage, Las Cruces, New Mexico. Here I plan to map out THE REST OF MY LIFE ONCE AND FOR ALL.
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.
METANOIA
“Metanoia is a response to an invitation that focuses on God’s promise that something new is in the offing. It is an invitation to a conversion of mindset. It is so radical that we don’t have an English word capable of communicating it.”
“DRESS CODES” AT THE AUTRY
As Yves St. Laurent said, “I wish I had invented blue jeans. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity—all I hope for in my clothes.”
SUMMON THE WHEAT
It’s good to give–but why is it so fiendishly difficult for some of us to receive: to impose, to “bother,” to make a pest of ourselves (or so we tell ourselves?)