Sometimes a place draws a person in. Perhaps an essence of calm seems to welcome you from beyond exterior doors and beckons you farther into an interior chamber. That’s the feeling I remember about the old adobe mission church in the Barrio de Analco district of Santa Fe that is considered the oldest church in the continental United States. It’s been a couple of years since that visit, but I remember with affection and mystery … Read more

I’ve been stitching thread to cloth lately instead of words to paper. It’s a diversion, a distraction, in the middle of what weighs heavy. A summer dress fashioned to get my mind off the pandemic, power outages, ice storms, unemployment, isolation. . . . On the coldest day in Denver this year, I walked into a small health food grocery to purchase a rotisserie chicken, the kind of cookery that’s been seasoned and rotated perfectly … Read more

As January nears completion, I am struck by the timbre and tone of emotions shared by so many, including myself, who struggle to navigate our unsettling times. There’s a yearning for some basic frivolity, a longing for a brightness to alight the heart. Sometimes the just right words seem to float into the just right spaces at the just right times, and that’s what happened this month as I celebrated the glorious words of two … Read more

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