Jane Pettibone

A corner cobweb shimmers slightly in the light from the window overhead. I look at that hazy tangle of dusty threads and pause. Perhaps there is something of value in that discarded spider weaving, in the clouded silk remnants of age. A spider’s silk after all is stronger than steel or Kevlar, with the ability to stretch far beyond its length. It is lightweight and impervious to cold. To my eyes, the fine filaments of … Read more

  It’s always a saving grace in my life when I long for light. Light illuminates what I cannot see. What I cannot see, I often misunderstand. And I’m not referring only to visual sight but sight of the heart. I long for the celestial sparkles in the night sky, the rise of brilliant sun every morning, and the deep heart-vision of Advent. As we inch into the darkening of day toward winter in the … Read more

A little bit of grace goes a long way in America. Take baseball and poetry, the World Series and the Nobel Prize for Literature. I venture to say there is definitely poetry in baseball and yes, there’s baseball in poetry. These two things I love…a good baseball game and a good poem. Congratulations to poet Louise Glück, winner of the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature and to the Los Angeles Dodgers, winner of the 2020 … Read more

I’ve been taking prayer walks lately to reconnect my soul with the Creator of all that is good. My walks are a pause to fill the spaces, empty spaces perhaps, which have become apparent to me in this time of the pandemic crisis throughout the world. I no longer flit here and there without a moment’s consideration. Indeed, during this break from the predictability of routine, I have found a loneliness that seems to be … Read more

It’s been a rough summer. Worldwide Pandemic. Racial & Social Injustice. Wildfires. Storms. Drought. Poverty. Environmental Decimation. Isolation. Where to go from here? We wear masks. We keep our distance. We isolate into spaces of non-contaminated breath. We speak out. We weep. We hope. We pray. Oh, for the grace of healing to our fractured states: mind, body, soul. I have to think our current situations are bigger and also smaller than what we perceive. … Read more

In a mountain park outside of Denver, there’s a secluded cave hollowed out of granite rock. The July heat in Colorado sometimes soars to triple digits and this cave, hidden in the shelter of ponderosa pine and aspen, offers a cool refuge from the blistering sun at high altitude. Look what sauntered inside that cave to cool off. Can you see it? (Hint: look to the corner) There’s a pair of something sticking up! Those … Read more

I recently finished reading the novel “Blood Meridian Or the Evening Redness in the West” by Cormac McCarthy and closed the back cover with a sense of great sadness. Odd that my eyes and heart would be traveling through a story fraught with so much violence as our nation reels with the latest tragedies of the past weeks. This book is an eloquently written portrayal of conquest in its most bestial forms as it pertains … Read more

The bluebells are here! The bluebells are here! I always get this sense of nature’s endearing beauty and reassurance when the bluebells emerge in spring after the snow. The month of May has moistened the earth. The sun has coaxed the bulbs to sprout out of the dark recesses of the soil. Up from the ground, the bluebells sway in the breeze. In the forest, the bells vibrate. On the path, they lower their shy, … Read more

Sometimes winged things are an asset. Think angels that hover on the sides of buildings, robins that flutter in the dark before dawn. Hover? Flutter? What is it, I mutter? A Byzantine masterpiece Of quarantined galleries On brick-sided buildings With paint-inscribed winged things? Well, yes, you could say that. Earlier this month, I opened the newspaper to a feature article about a mural that graced the side of a building downtown. The mural appeared on … Read more

It’s like looking through a clouded lens of soot-gray residue. The coronavirus shadows our vision and our lives. Sickness, loss, fear, chaos, death. By what shall we be defined? Here in Colorado, springtime is just beginning to emerge. Supple leaves are folded like prayers within the swollen buds of the new season. A bluebird wings a neon splash of color in the air. Blades of grass punctuate the brown remains of winter with bright green … Read more