Speaker. Storyteller. Coach.
All four wheels have fallen off my car. In the last 19 weeks, I have written only 6 blogs, after nearly two years of regularly weekly postings. How did this happen? Because I have gotten so consumed in my book project that I have abandoned important creative, domestic, and spiritual routines that help keep my world in balance. If Jesus himself had come into my studio a couple of weeks ago, I’m certain I would have said “Sorry, buddy, can’t talk. On a deadline.”
I spent this past week in bed recovering from root canal from hell (just so you know, gritting your teeth is VERY bad for you). Blog post to follow at some point, using said root canal as metaphor. In the meantime, a blog rewind — one of my favorites. Here’s to your good dental health and a relaxed lower jaw!
[Read more…] about Blog Rewind: Shooting My Way Out of My Comfort Zone
If you have not yet seen this video on starling murmurations (which I think is my new favorite word), you are in for an amazing 4 minutes. Birdwatching husband Eric had shown me similar images, but my friend Ted just sent me this link saying, “…you will be blown away. I think you will be particularly uplifted by the soul-based exuberance of the narrator.” He was right. Enjoy!
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It’s Lent. And whether you are religiously inclined or not, it’s always a good thing to do a little emotional and mental spring cleaning this time of year. Weak-willed and perpetually distracted, I always need some help along the way. This Lent, I thought I’d return to a book my dear friend Sarah gave me years ago, Listening to Your Life: Daily Meditations with Frederick Buechner.
If you don’t know much about Frederick Buechner, suffice it to say Maya Angelou, Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, and The New York Times are big fans. He’s written more than 30 books, is an ordained Presbyterian minister, and inspires people to see grace in their daily lives. He can also be very funny.
So, I thought I’d share with you his thoughts on Lent, taken from his Feb. 26 entry in Listening to Your Life. It got me thinking (again). Hope it does the same for you.
In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year’s income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the forty days of Lent is to do the same thing with roughly a tenth of each year’s days. After being baptized by John in the river Jordan, Jesus went off alone in the wilderness where he spent forty days asking himself the question what it meant to be Jesus. During Lent, Christians are supposed to ask one way or another what it means to be themselves.
If you have to bet everything you have on whether there is a God or whether there isn’t, which side would get your money and why?
When you look at your face in the mirror, what do you see in it that you most like and what do you see in it that you most deplore?
If you had only one last message to leave to the handful of people who are most important to you, what would it be in twenty-five words or less?
Of all the things you have done in your life, which is the one you would most like to undo? Which is the one that makes you the happiest to remember?
Is there any person in the world, or any cause, that, if circumstances called for it, you would be willing to die for?
If this were the last day of your life, what would you do with it?
To hear yourself try to answer questions like these is to begin to hear something not only of who you are but of what you are becoming and what you are failing to become. It can be a pretty depressing business all in all, but if sack-cloth and ashes are at the start of it, something like Easter may be at the end.
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I woke up this morning to -8 degrees. AGAIN. As everyone knows, this winter has been brutal, particularly for this displaced Florida girl whose thermostat, as my dear friend Carroll says, is set to orchid. Here, alone in my studio in the NH woods, I knew I was in trouble when I started to relate to Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, where he types over and over “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” except mine would say, “All cold and no warm makes Tricia very, very hostile.”