writing

Voiceless

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Last Sunday I was leading worship, as I am asked to do now and then, and I had an embarrassing lapse. It was not the worst thing that has happened to me as a worship leader—I once tripped and fell on the steps up to the pulpit—and it was not even the lapse that I was expecting and trying to avoid, but I’m wondering about it now.

Tripping and falling, in fact, was very much on my mind because I had done that the day before, at the farmers market, right in front of the Salvation Army Santa, who picked me up and fussed over me until I was sure I could limp to my car. But I had sprained my ankle. Continue reading →

Silence meets the worm

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I am going through a long writing silence. It started halfway through the pandemic and the inspiration never really came back when things started getting back to more or less normal. I felt that I had nothing to say at the level that I wanted to say it. I’ve been waiting, perhaps, for profundity.

Lack of profundity never bothered me before. But what DO you say when global warming is coming true, criminal charges against a politician increase his popularity, racism and book bans are all the rage, Putin and Ukraine, and on and on.

Yes, I am a despairing, snowflake liberal, firmly on THAT side of the divide that seems to get deeper and more recalcitrant.

I don’t know what to DO about any of this. Enough doom and gloom is being written. Reporting on living a good life despite everything can sound pollyannaish if I write it down. Hence, I feel like I have nothing to say.

A friend urged me to write about the silence.

The silence starts with a dim sky and the faintest whiff of smoke from wildfires hundreds of miles away.

The silence moves into the hottest week ever in the world.

The silence meets a bee, visiting a bouquet of wildflowers from my backyard.

The bee meets a tiny green worm who’s been hiding on the campanula.

The green worm waves at the bee but the bee ignores it.

The silence waves at the green worm

Inspiration, please

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IMG_3650The four months of not writing this blog were an accidental experiment. It started when I didn’t feel like writing because of all the body stuff going on. My suffering was never acute and it is not as bad as it seems to sound when I write about it. What I was doing in that last post was exposing the little complaints that linger under the surface of the good front that we all present to the world. Mine are no worse than most people’s. But laying it all out there has attracted a lot of sympathy and advice that seem to be out of proportion to my degree of suffering. Maybe that is because, for fear of seeming like hypochondriacs or complainers, we don’t usually expose our discomforts to each other. Our facebook posts are smiles and celebrations.

When I write anything longer than a facebook post, however, I am usually trying to get under the surface of things, and what has been there for the last four silent months has been physical discomfort. I didn’t find that an interesting topic to write about. And so I moved into this inadvertent experiment: What would happen if I just stopped writing? Continue reading →

Follow your bliss and get your hands dirty

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I dreamed recently that I was giving career advice to young people, but they weren’t listening to me because I hadn’t had a successful career.

I couldn’t blame them because, although I don’t feel like a professional failure, it has been hard for me to describe my so-called career.

I really tried for a while, beginning in about 2004, when I began going to writing retreats, to think of myself as a writer. Continue reading →

What I don’t write about

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I haven’t posted for a while and I don’t really know why. Sometimes I think it’s because my life is very miscellaneous right now, too many different things going on, no one thing predominant.

Accompanying a close friend in a serious health crisis.

Preparing for another trip to Congo.

Helping plan and lead Lenten worship services. Continue reading →

First Monday

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IMG_3032Fresh coat of snow, clean slate, new start. Where shall we start? So many things to take up, resume, complete, and carry on that I am hit by the former Monday morning panic before I even get out of bed. I say former because I am retired and Mondays shouldn’t do that to me any more. But this is the first Monday of a new year and I am coming out of an even-less-productive-than-usual couple of weeks. I think my left brain is getting antsy. Continue reading →

My father’s daughter

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IMG_0304In a few days I will pick up the Thanksgiving turkey and pies at the South Bend Farmers Market. I have a personal connection with that market. My father sold his family’s poultry there when he was a teenager, helping support his family during the Depression.

It’s one of those circles that close when you move back to home territory after a lifetime of living elsewhere. I like that connection but other echoes of my father’s life in my own sometimes trouble me. Continue reading →