Art really is contemplation

Art is contemplation.
-Auguste Rodin
I love art. I just do. I’m one of those strange, bookish people who could spend their whole day in an art museum, wandering the galleries and staring for long, uninterrupted moments at time worn paintings. Throw in some coffee and moments for thought jottings and you have one of my [...]

First snow and other small but generally delightful happenings…

Well here I finally am again; it’s been a good few days since I last wrote. Since then, the Indian summer days of our lingering warmth have given way to the sudden bluster of the first snow. We woke to a world cloaked in white. Something in the blue and grey enchantment of the snow [...]

My Irish Prayer

May you treasure wisely this jeweled, gilded time,
And cherish each day as an extra grace,
Whose heedless waste would be a tragic crime,
In today’s tasks may you find God’s tender face,
May you know that to miss love’s smallest chance,
Is a lost opportunity, a senseless waste.
May you see need in every anxious glance,
May you sort out of [...]

Thirsty

Over the mountains and up through the pine woods I’ve been… to my church’s autumn retreat for my college/twenty-somethings. And now I’m back… sorry it’s been so long! I had much time though for contemplation and rambles through brooding mountain meadows so I have plenty to write about in the coming weeks. I’d been looking [...]

Why, thank you!

I feel downright glad and humble all at once. Brenda, at her lovely blog Coffee, Tea, Books and Me, has passed on the Mathetes blogging award to me, originated over at the Management By God blog. It is for “excellence in discipleship”, and it is a deep grace to me because it both reminds and [...]

I will be autumn

If I could choose a season to represent my soul, I would without a doubt choose autumn. There is an inherent passion in this season of color, an earthy beauty that is startling in its intensity. It is the season of paradox, when a riot of color signals death, when halcyon days herald the grey [...]

October

There is something in the autumn that is native to my blood,
Touch of manner, hint of mood,
And my heart is like a rhyme,
With the yellow and the purple and the crimson keeping time.
The scarlet of the maples can shake me like a cry,
Of bugles going by,
And my lonely spirit thrills,
To see the frosty asters like [...]

Small graces

These are the small graces,
The little moments when the miracles come…
I always loved the Bob Bennett song, Small Graces. I hear it as a philosophy of life; the choice to collect pennies and crimson leaves and birdsong like treasure. I suppose if I were to look at the world like that, I would find myself [...]

An ode to ocean waves…

Well, at least a half-poetic tribute. There is something stark and frightening to me in the ocean, in the pounding grasp of dark water, in the crash of surf as it climbs the sand. I stood on the edge of a sunset shore two nights ago and turned my face  to watch the sun fall [...]

Ocean day

Well, I have a long weaving of thoughts about oceans and God’s love to tap out at some point, but today is the last day out in sunny CA so we’re off to a little breakfast cafe in Laguna Beach for some writing. We had a day of rest yesterday, a day of quiet and [...]