I’m not a mess but a deeply feeling person in a messy world. I explain that now, when someone asks me why I cry so often, I say, “For the same reason I laugh so often- because I’m paying attention.” I tell them that we can choose to be perfect and admired or to be real and loved. We must decide.   ~Glennon Doyle

did you ever forget how to be? how to love? how to live?

inquiry for today~   when the day feels weepy and drawn in, reach in and open to grace…..what does that feel like to you?

the subtle shift of light

When someone says or does something that I find either obnoxious or unattractive- anything that my ego uses to separate myself from others- if I’m aware of that then I’ll just soften my eyes and fall back into that “something else.” That something else is what…

Well here I am In the car on the way Georgia I’m going to be sitting here for six hours. We’re driving and driving and driving, I have my books the iPad my blanket and my family which includes a baby brother, dad, mom, And me. Six hours later we’re in Georgia and I see ice cream. So we get some ice cream and we go to our hotel and the first thing we did was go to the beach while dad was having a bike ride P. S. He is training for a triathlon. While we’re at the beach I climbed the beach rocks to get to the water I never got that far because as soon as I got to the wet rocks there were snails. Soon enough dad came to the beach to join us so we played in the sand. My little brother road on me…

Spirituality is foreign to us, because it is paradoxical and few of us have had training in grasping paradox. We’re faced with the challenge of choosing to lose so we can win and die so we can live. And that takes grace rather than logic, morals, or ethics.
Opening to grace requires admitting we need it. And that’s the leap of faith that jump starts our spiritual journey.
The following are my paraphrases of the Beatitudes. I have translated the word “blessed” as meaning “open to grace.”     The originals are in Matthew 5:3-11
The Beatitudes
Graced are the poor in spirit for they are not filled with self-righteousness, so they are able to be open to God.
Graced are those that accept the pain of loss for they will find the Comforter’s joy within instead of settling for  pleasure to escape pain.
Graced are those who do not…

I taught first and second grade in a four room rural Catholic School. The principal was an elegant sister in the traditional Dominican white habit, which she gathered close around her whenever she entered my classroom. I was into nature and had pretty much filled my room with birds’ nests, rocks, weeds, feathers, fossils, pet insect-eating plants, and other dust catchers. This left little room for art supplies, which sort of spilled out of my “Fibber Magee’s Closet,” whenever I opened the doors. There was a small glass window in our door to the central hall and whenever the fire inspector came by, Sister would stand with her squared off headdress blocking the window and the fire inspector’s view of my room and closet.
On Fridays the parish priest would come after lunch and teach my class religion. Halloween fell on a Friday my first year there and since we…

I think now and then

that it would be best
if all of us could fall into
amnesia,

tumbling to the ground
without our past knowledge
of walking, talking, sleeping,
shouting, killing.

It would not be
glorious renewal —
I’m no Utopian.

Instead I see it as
a fitting end to things:

all of us helpless, seeing 
every other one of us
from ground level,
lying there uneasily
as if new born, waiting
in complete equality
for an explanation
that will never come.

We’ve lived
for generations
terrorized by
by dark claims of 
mastery from those
utterly in thrall
to a lie called history.

It would be fitting, 
even at such cost, if
they were freed long enough
from that spell
to know how it felt not to be
empowered.

To see the world as it is,
from the ground up.

To squirm.