Kathleen Norris (Photo by Gregory Yamamoto from the Barclay Agency) Telling a poet not to look for connections is like telling a farmer not to look at the rain gauge after a storm. –page 171, “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,” by Kathleen Norris (my lineation for emphasis) Click here to read a marvelous interview between Homiletics…
“Don’t come over here to see me,” my father’s voice boomed out from my telephone answering machine. “The roads are horrible and getting worse. Stay where you are. Don’t risk it.” I did what he bade, and stayed in my neck of the woods on this slushy-sleety Saturday, temperature at that tricky freeze/no-freeze point. My…
This set of holidays I turned the pages of my seasonal calendar by the decor in the Denver airport. On the way out West…Thanksgiving and then two weeks later, all reindeer, pine trees, red balls, and poinsettas. We don’t have peace wrapped with a bow under our trees for Christmas, honorable or otherwise, but we…
I asked my father, who in the Second World War was Sergeant Erwin A. Thompson, “I” Company, 36th Armored Infantry Regiment, First Army to write a post honoring Pearl Harbor Day. My father is a man who served in that war and still has scars around his scrapnel wounds to prove it. I know, because…
My father and our long-time neighbor Jim Weeks (one of the three guitar players who, my father jokes “makes me sound good” when he plays fiddle) sang this quite movingly on the TV profile of my father. I always love watching and listening to this on tape. My father is a combat veteran of World…
Pop says, “And here is a song from the First World War that still lives in my memory as one of the most beautiful pieces of music that I know.” Folks ask what kind of music we play during our Sunday musical open houses. This is one of the pieces…and I agree with my Pop…
Sankofa can mean either the word in the Akan language of Ghana that translates in English to “go back and take” (Sanko- go back, fa- take) or the Asante Adinkra symbol. A cloth supporting Adinkra symbols is termed an “Adinkra cloth” and has its own particular uses and meanings. As a young woman in the…
“It almost killed me to do so, but I kept my mouth shut….” Tell us about a situation in which you found you had to just shut up, or you’d be in really big trouble, one way or another, or just a big bore, or unkind. For John Flinn, it was that no place is…
Yesterday the main retreat ended as Sogyal Rinpoche urged us to integrate the beautiful teachings on Wisdom and Compassion into our lives and the three-day extension begins as the weather turns nippier, darker, and a tad stormy with clouds over the vast expanse of Clear Lake. Yesterday, too, I slipped away to visit a dear…
Janet Riehl with her book “Sightlines: A Poet’s Diary” (see sidebar) This aphorism is something I said at a book evening at Left Bank Books in the Central West End, St. Louis…when the conversation turned to writing. The author of the evening urged me to write it down, so I did. (One of the foundational…