“When I reach out in joy or in sorrow for the things of this world, grant that through them I may know and love You, their Maker and final home.”
TRAVEL
AND MY MOUTH SHALL PROCLAIM THY PRAISE: A PLUNGE INTO MEXICAN DENTISTRY
I have been reduced to driving to Mexico for dental care. That’s right. Things have come to that. I won’t bore you with the ongoing cross of my beloved, brave teeth which, over the course of my life, have undergone extractions, adult orthodontics, resorption (a supposedly incredibly rare occurence that has happened twice or maybe […]
VISITING THE MARYKNOLLERS
“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.”
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.
KATHERINE BOO’S BEHIND THE BEAUTIFUL FOREVERS
Boo is firmly enshrined in my personal communion of saints, a subset of which is “Writers Who Are Catholic Without Being Catholic.” Would that more of us wrote with her curiosity, excellence, intelligence, willingness to suffer, and heart.
CROWNED WITH THORNS
I may not look like I’m doing much, but believe me, the wheels are turning! My spirit is forming and firming up by the minute. And to top it all off, from walking around for hours every day in the blazing sun, I’m getting a tan!
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.
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.
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?
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?)
THE FOLKS I DIG
I wasn’t hallucinating but it was kind of like when I used to drop acid back in high school–an altered state except not dark, not delusional. If only I could see through those eyes and feel that way all the time!