He’s Two Hundred and Not In A Hurry

Do you have a full plate of activities today, a long to-do list? Are you focused on accomplishments? Then this guy’s approach to life might seem a bit odd:   I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements.   This proud wanderer just turned 200 a week ago; … Read More

Emily Dickinson Returns, with a Rocker’s Mom

It’s Mother’s Day, but this will not a Mother’s Day blog; or at least, not one exactly. The culture that surrounds us spews out more than enough material on this tired theme. The person I have most on my mind never was a mother in the regular sense, although she left almost 1800 offspring that live on and on. She also spent a fair amount of time thinking about death, not a very celebratory subject, in the Hallmark sense anyway. … Read More

Shameless Shout Out For My Valentine

Since I don’t happen to work for any local, state or national government but am just a lowly blogger, do you think I’ll be in hot water with any official ethics organization if I choose to use this space to promote a family member’s creative work? And it’s pretty far from being a line of clothing, too. Since Valentine’s Day is all about expressing our love, and I’m due to make a new post, it makes pretty good sense for … Read More

One Curious Clergyman

Life can get exciting when we burst through the restrictions of our expected identities, especially if it’s in the hot pursuit of truth, justice and the general illumination of the human soul. You and I might do this kind of thing once in a while, but it’s risky. To watch heroes boldly striving in adventures that play out in a neat hour or two, we turn to the screen. And, in the most interesting of these, the heroes themselves can … Read More

Moments of Plenty– in Ground, Water, Air, and Human Contact

On New Year’s Eve, I watched fireworks from the dock in my hometown’s harbor. They were bright and beautiful, and the air had just enough chill to make us believe that we were on the other end of the year from 4th of July. Colorful explosions in a dark sky are wonderful mostly because they happen rarely. They are not the normal humdrum. Watching them in the right frame of mind, we can even feel our souls take flight. Or least … Read More

Out on the Dance Floor

The Pope has come and gone, with countless people either seeing him for real –including two of my very best friends –or wondering what’s he’s about; we’ve watched the moon get enveloped in a red shadow and then learned that there’s likely water on Mars. Meanwhile, I just keep trying to make sense out of, on the one hand, organized religion and the way different people depict God; and on the other hand, the vast universe and what we actually … Read More

What the Rockies Have Done For Me Lately

“Look at that…just miles and miles of emptiness!” “But Mom, what we’re seeing is not empty at all…it’s full-up with Nature.” This is, more or less, how a bit of conversation between my older son and me went as we were driving through the vastness of Wyoming last week. Conversations were few in that car, actually, as we all just tried to drink in the dry spaciousness of what we were seeing, mile after mile. Small talk seemed, well, particularly … Read More

Ah, Marriage: In Any Form, It’s A Mystery

Just when you think, after about 25 years in the marriage pond, you might be getting the hang of it, you realize there might be a whole other way of swimming than the one you learned—the one you’re still learning, actually. That’s kind of how it feels when you have a burgeoning anthropologist in the family who is studying how polygamy has worked, over generations, in peaceful communities on a distant continent. In this country, we’ve been widening our definitions … Read More

From My Own Book of Revelation: All Pastors’ Wives are not Alike

Not long after I started this blog three and a half years ago, some people questioned the title. They said, “Why identify yourself as a ‘pastor’s wife’ when you’re obviously more than that? It’s so limiting.” This is true to an extent. In a way, I guess, I was poking some fun—right from the beginning—at the label. Show me a stereotype, almost any kind, and I’ll try hard to show the exception. In this case, I didn’t have to try … Read More

Robert Frost State of Mind

Here we are again, in the middle of October, a time of year that always seems like a kind of precipice between the living and the dying, when we are at once basking in the sun-filled richness that Nature is offering us everywhere and at the same time wondering how we will cope with the inevitable darkness and sense of loss that await us right around the corner. Not to be too dramatic or anything. We got a newsletter from … Read More

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