• When the Bough Breaks: A fallen limb in a friendship is not a dead tree.

    Its is the second worst storm I endured since I moved to Texas, making it the second worst storm of my life.  I had been praying, trying to center, and needing to be present.  The storm hit my house exactly within the first five minutes of sitting down with someone for spiritual direction.  The wind was rattling the windows and tossing bits of the back yard around.  The whole house chilled.    I considered ending our time together because I was able to give the moment only 99% of my attention.  I was being tugged away by one haunting thought.  Will the tree hold?

  • End of the Story: Most of the truths we live by are things we cannot prove. Beauty is just one of them. (Faith for Reasons)

    We live in a moment in history in which truth is only found in this fairly new thing we reinvented called a ‘fact.’    “This is a table,” we say.  It is a fact that the thing I just set my cup on is a “table.”   Ta-da!  End of story…    It is an idea that seems pretty hard to argue with until all of a sudden I take that same table  apart and plan to build a flower bed out of it.   Fairly quickly it becomes lumber.  So it is now not a table after all.   Er… right?  That is the case until I decide without making any changes to the pile,…

  • “Put a Sock-Puppet in It,” Ancient wisdom that it is better to make a sock puppet than to be one.

    This is a guest post of mine on an otherwise lovley and insightful blog, “Knitting Benedict: The Rule…by hand.”  This is one of my favorite blogs to regular.   There is hardly a better way, than I can imgaine, to glean wisdom an ancient book of instruction than by taking small bites of it and chewing slowly while working with your hands on small stuff.  “Work and pray,” says saint Benedict. I am in the middle of forging a batch of sock puppets. As I do I cannot help but see the contrasts between the kinds of toys I am fashioning and a stern bit of advice from Benedict’s rule:…