Sit in the light

Seattle sunrise, late 2016

It's Christmas Eve morning. Hanukkah begins at sundown. And as of a few days ago, the nights are getting shorter.

The light is coming back.

I've started a few posts here over the past six weeks, only to leave them as drafts. So much is unsettled and upsetting in our world. There's not a lot I might write to change that, and even acknowledging our collective uncertainty and angst seems empty.

But I do know this is a time to choose light.

Light is the opposite of dark. When we are pushed to assume the worst of another, can we choose instead to affirm each other's humanity?

Light is an alternative to burden. When we are implored to weigh ourselves down with possessions and debt and guilt, can we choose another path?

A new year starts a week from now. For 2017, may I choose lightness as a state of mind and a way of being in the world.

A small nod to the elephant

I'm voting today. After several sessions spent filling out my ballot in the leisurely, considered manner afforded us here in enlightened Washington state (where we got our ballots in the mail two weeks ago), I'll walk to the drop box outside my library later this morning and officially exercise my franchise. Then as best I can, I hope and plan to tune out this election until sometime late Tuesday night, or maybe even Wednesday morning.

Isn't it ironic that the already-protracted, hyper-agitated 2016 election will fall on the latest possible date it can? (It needs to be on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November.) If I could, I'd be in New York City to see Hamilton, one of the only shows-that-must-go-on Tuesday since it's sold out (and seriously, what better way would there be to spend Election Night 2016?).

But that's not an option, so here are three ways I've been avoiding the elephant in the room. Perhaps you'd like to try them, too.

1) I've been limiting my media consumption, traditional and social alike. A little NPR in the morning goes a long way. Social media at night is an especially bad idea for restful sleep. Set a timer. Walk away.

2) I'm listening to music. Really listening. Music as meditation. Nine minutes and 23 seconds of So What is both soul balm and mental floss.



But if you need something more topical, try this on for size.



3) I'll watch a movie or two on Tuesday night. In 2012, I was one of about a half-dozen people who watched Argo at the Grand Lake Theater in Oakland, CA, as an effective means of avoiding election returns for as long as possible. This year, I'd recommend Dr. Strange, which my sweetie and I saw on its opening day Friday. This marvelous mind-warp isn't any weirder than anything we've seen in the news this year, and it's far more more fun.

May the force be with us, America.

Autumn is sending you invitations

This was one of the first fallen autumn leaves I saw this year, on September 17, by itself on a sidewalk in my neighborhood. I took its picture and posted it on Instagram and Facebook with the caption, "This seems to happen earlier these days. #fleeting #cultivatecalm." About two dozen of my Facebook friends and acquaintances liked the post, and one added a comment:

Autumn is sending you invitations!

Sometimes I'm tempted to give up social media, but it's moments like this I know I probably never will. I've been meditating on Sara's five words ever since that day, thinking about why the falling leaves are astonishing and poignant and meaningful, and why they become more so every year we spend on this planet.

This has been a year full of reflection for me. On the nature of work, as always. On the importance of love, and the balance between solitude and companionship. These matters merit my attention, and they help direct my attention to the handful of people who need me most (and from whom I am learning the most, too).

This blog takes its name from something Henry David Thoreau wrote, something I first read on a bumper sticker at the Walden Pond gift shop, "Surely joy is the condition of life." I bought three or four stickers and gave them to friends over the years. At long last, during my Wellspring travels and our study of the writer's work earlier this year, I was compelled to finally read this phrase in its context.

In his 1842 essay Natural History of Massachusetts, Thoreau wrote of growing weary of politics and even "the din of religion, literature, and philosophy," then he describes how his spirit is continually refreshed and renewed by nature, by

the young fry that leap in ponds, the myriads of insects ushered into being on a summer evening, the incessant note of the hyla with which the woods ring in the spring, the nonchalance of the butterfly carrying accident and change painted in a thousand hues upon its wings, or the brook minnow stoutly stemming the current, the lustre of whose scales worn bright by the attrition is reflected upon the bank.

And so it is for me. The first big windstorm of the fall is due tonight. It's raining now, and rain is forecast for the next week and probably for the next month, since this is October and it is Seattle. Yet I feel fortified for any darkness and uncertainty ahead by many walks in beautiful places this fall. I've been recording my impressions less in words and more in memories and photos, because that's where I am in my life.

I don't write here much, and I don't post much on social media. I take comfort (and, yes, joy) in what Thoreau says about "the inexpressible privacy of a life -- how silent and unambitious it is."

Autumn's invitation to me, especially in this season of din and angst, is to dare to be unambitious, to dwell in the present moment, to recognize and gratefully acknowledge gifts as they're revealed to me, and to share when I am moved to do so.

Thanks, Sara, and HDT, too.

How may I help you?

The 2016 Seattle International Film Festival is winding down. Among several good films Tom and I caught this year was Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You. This new documentary had a big take-away for me beyond its entertaining look at Lear's genius as a pop culture provocateur. The a-ha moment came as Lear described why, in 1981, he pivoted from his focus on producing hit TV shows to founding a political advocacy organization, People for the American Way. As he tells filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, it was simply time to exercise some different muscles.

I can relate. As I near the midpoint of my 50s, I'm close to the age Lear was when he felt that pull. After three-plus decades of work in communications, I find myself wanting to stretch different muscles, all while I keep my writing and editing mojo working, too.

My customer service muscle is the main one I'm working like never before. When I decided to leave my magazine editing job, I timed the departure for late winter for one big reason: I wanted to work at the ballpark this season. I left my job on Feb. 26 and successfully interviewed with the team on Feb. 29 (leap year, baby!), and now I'm a seating host in one of the most beautiful yards in Major League Baseball.

But wait, it gets better: I work the sections right behind home plate and my home team's dugout. A fan said to me last night, "You must have a lot of seniority to get to work where you do." No, I told her; I'm actually a rookie this year, and I'm just lucky.

Yes, I do get to actually watch much of each game. Mainly, though, our job as seating hosts is to be sure that all our guests have a great experience. We lost last night, as we've done quite a bit at home (despite having one of the best road records in baseball). People were naturally disappointed, but as I said farewell to folks on their way up the aisle, most had smiles on their faces. Our star had just struck out with two men on base, true, but he'd clobbered two homers earlier in the game. We win some, we lose some, and there's never a truly awful day at the ballpark.

I got to tie a baby's shoe. I got to talk with a proud dad whose son is playing college ball. And while it's true that I'm making way, way less money than I did as an editor in chief, I'm having a blast. I like customer service so much, in fact, that I've taken a second part-time job at a bookstore that also sells travel gear. Nearly everyone who comes in is excited about a trip they have planned, so it's a fun, energetic place to be.

Of course, these jobs are also giving me a renewed appreciation for how hard people are working at or near the minimum wage, and how many people work multiple jobs to make ends meet. That's another post, perhaps for around Labor Day, but I'll put in a plug here for the book a college classmate of mine wrote about her detour from journalism into the floral department at Kroger. Best $6 you'll spend this year. 

I've also been stretching my inner artist muscle. I'll write about that next post, or the one after that. Meanwhile, thanks for reading, and keep seeing the bright side.

A few more words on being and doing

Sometimes, I think I am the world's laziest blogger. Or maybe I'm the smartest; I'm trying to reserve most of my writing for occasions I'll get paid for it. But no one's going to pay me for this list of what I've done so far today, in no special order, so here goes:


I woke up, made coffee, and read another chunk of yesterday's extensive New York Times article on one woman's voyage with dementia. Later, I sent a few emails and did a bit of research for an article I'm writing on a similar topic.


While making and eating some oatmeal, I listened to sports talk radio to get some perspective on the Mariners' season so far. (I have a part-time job at the ballpark now, but with the team on the road this week, I have even less scheduled time than usual.)

I took a walk. My first stop was my neighborhood city park, where I like to play something that looks and sounds like this, installed in the newly renovated playground last year. My tax dollars at work! I love it.

After that, I continued on down the residential street and saw a half-dozen other folks out enjoying a mid-day walk in the sun, many with their doggies. I made my way to our neighborhood's small commercial district, where I stopped at the library to pick up a book on hold; at the thrift store, in search of something I want for my Wellspring art project; then passed through the leafy grounds of Lake City Court, a green public housing project I love to traverse whenever I get a chance.

I got home and brewed some ice tea, and noticed one of my favorite phrases (and one germane to this topic) on one of the tea bags, so I took a photo and 
made an Instagram post about it.

Then I wrote this post. 
Next, I am going to have a late lunch ... or perhaps it is an early dinner ... read some more ... and listen to the ballgame while I putter around the house a bit.


Last week, I met with my Wellspring spiritual companion. She mentioned my last real blog post of more than a month ago -- I told you I've been a lazy blogger! -- and how she especially liked the part about the shift from doing mode to being mode. I agreed and said that very idea has been ringing in my ears ever since, too. To recap author David Levy distilling the words of psychologists Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale:


Being mode "is characterized by a sense of freedom, freshness, and unfolding of experience in new ways. It is responsive to the richness and complexity of the unique patterns that each moment presents." In doing mode, on the other hand, "the multidimensional nature of experience is reduced primarily to a unidimensional analysis of its standing in relation to a goal state."


It's been two months since I left the professional-grind track. Being mode is how I am these days. I'm getting stuff done, but my random acts of productivity seem much more incidental than central to my existence.


Some days, this way of life still feels weird. Other days, especially on a summer-vacationy-day like today, it feels like one glorious Calvin and Hobbes cartoon. It's sure as heck a more healthy way than I've lived much of my adult life. I'm eager to find ways to keep at it.

Spring fancy free

Blossoms, baseball, and warm sun all signal that spring is here. It is time to be in the world.

I'll post again soon, but for now, here's a William Blake quote I've been turning over in my head and my heart.



He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise
(Wikisource)

(Thanks to Nathan Schneider, who mentioned this passage in his On Being interview with Krista Tippett.)

Mindful busyness

I've read two good books this month: Mindful Tech: How to Bring Balance to Our Digital Lives by David M. Levy and The One Who Is Not Busy: Connecting with Work in a Deeply Satisfying Way by Darlene Cohen.

On the surface of things, I live a simplified, streamlined life. But when it comes to mental clutter, I have plenty. Yes, I take refuge in the idea that creative people have messy minds, but I also know that mess creates stress. So I'm open to ideas, tools, and practices that can help me declutter my brain and work style as successfully as I've decluttered my life. Mindful Tech has already helped me.

Levy has spent a career in the information sciences, but he also has studied calligraphy and bookbinding. Since 2001, he's been a professor at the University of Washington's Information School, where, as he writes on the UW website, "I have mainly been investigating the challenge of achieving contemplative balance–how as individuals and as a society we might live healthy, reflective, and productive (lives) while participating in an accelerating, information-saturated culture."

In other words, Levy doesn't advocate that we unplug from our devices. He suggests that we pay more attention to how we are when we're online: whether the sight of a full email inbox makes us hyperventilate, whether we get into a pleasant state of flow or an anxious fear of missing out when we surf around social media, whether our muscles tense when an alert tone sounds on our phone, whether I ignore the bell that nudges me to stand up, stretch, and breathe.

The passage of the book that spoke most deeply to me is one in which Levy quotes a trio of psychologists (Zindel Segal, Mark Williams, and John Teasdale) on a shift from "doing mode" to "being mode."

Here's the difference: Being mode "is characterized by a sense of freedom, freshness, and unfolding of experience in new ways. It is responsive to the richness and complexity of the unique patterns that each moment presents." In doing mode, on the other hand, "the multidimensional nature of experience is reduced primarily to a unidimensional analysis of its standing in relation to a goal state."

Bingo! As a journalist, I've been dwelling in doing mode for my entire professional life. Deadlines are the "goal state," and I'm comfortable there, when I need to be. However, when I add ceaseless heaps of administrative work to the mix, it's really hard to be in "being mode" for any length of time.

That's why a mention of Darlene Cohen's book in Levy's work was intriguing to me. The One Who Is Not Busy seems less a title than a mirage. Is such a state really possible to achieve in today's work world? Indeed, Cohen -- who passed away in 2011 -- published this book in 2004: pre-Great Recession, pre-widespread disruption, pre-Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. A dozen years later, companies are expecting ever more of their employees, and we're more distracted than ever.

In a chapter titled "Living Seamlessly," Cohen plays a similar chord to the one that most struck me in Mindful Tech. If we can give each activity our full attention, she writes, life becomes more than ticking off tasks on a list. Usually, she adds, we're preoccupied with the goal, "the 'why' of our activity. If we can soften the exclusively goal-specific focus that we usually bring to our work concerns and start to pay attention not just to what furthers our goals but to everything inside us and around us, we have vastly enlarged our own playing field." And I sense that play really is an operative word here. Many of us take our work far too seriously.

Cohen offers a menu of complicated exercises that would probably work better via an audiobook (and I plan to record a few as voice memos to give them a try), yet her advice essentially boils down to "one thing at a time" and staying in the present moment. We may be super busy, but she says that if we can practice two core skills -- 1) the ability to narrow or widen the mind's focus at will and 2) the ability to shift focus from one thing to another (from "narrow" to "narrow" to "narrow"), we can improve the quality of our work lives, no matter how manic or mundane they may be.

Levy's aim is more straightforward: to help readers pay attention and be more intentional about our tech use. Since his book is brand new, he's more mindful of the increased demands on our time and mental bandwidth.

Paying attention and being more intentional are things we can all do. Even those tasks are huge and take practice, but the alternative is sleepwalking through life.

Successful failure

Today's #UULent word is failure. A joke about UUs is that we read ahead in the hymnal to make sure we agree with the words we're about to sing. Well, I've been reading ahead on the list of words we've been asked to ponder, and today's is one I'd rather skip. (Especially coming a mere five days after mistakes last Friday. But we learn from our mistakes. Failure seems less noble, somehow. And isn't this a blog about joy?)

Still, I know it's spiritually useful to face the things we'd rather ignore. So this morning, as I consider failure, I'm thinking about two things: baseball and politics. Spring training opened yesterday, and my team won 7-0. Exciting! Success! Being an 18th-century Brit, Alexander Pope surely didn't have baseball in mind when he penned the phrase "hope springs eternal," yet it's perfect for a pastime that makes its annual debut in sync with this sublime season of newness.

I know that my team will lose 80 games or so this year. Everyone wants to win the World Series, but honestly, finishing over .500 is a more attainable goal. Along the way, the best hitters will succeed only a third of the time, and the best pitchers will lose at least a handful of games. But it's OK. Even the worst team in baseball will delight its fans 60 times or so before the boys of summer head home this fall. In sports, even amid failure, there's plenty of success. (Take it from Michael Jordan.)

Ten years ago, I was working as one of the nation's first paid Congressional campaign bloggers. On Election Night 2006, my candidate lost, as Democrats almost always do in Idaho -- but we had fun along the way, as this button attests. (I also remember walking in many small-town parades that summer as part of the Grant for Congress Clean-Up Crew, with our mops and brooms.)

From the candidate on down, we were a team of talented amateurs who'd suddenly turned pro. We really didn't know how to play the game, so we made a lot of mistakes. Yet on Election Night, we came within 5 percent of winning (in a district where the Dem is routinely beaten by 20 percent or more), and we helped pave the way for another, better-funded candidate with more Machiavellian management to win the next cycle.

I worked in politics for another six years, and it usually wasn't so fun. I experienced moral failure even amid victory, and many failures of imagination. I got out of the political game for good three years ago, blessed with an opportunity to return to journalism, and I won't be going back because I know that (for me, anyway), it is not soulful work.

Today, as I think about failure, I'm also thinking about a podcast I heard a few months ago with Elizabeth Gilbert and Brene Brown in which they tackled the topic at length. Brown mentions how her question used to be "What would I do if I knew I couldn't fail?" but it had evolved to "What's worth doing even if I fail?" Gilbert agrees and says we ought to let go of the idea of "it worked or it didn't work; it was a success or it wasn't a success." Of the creative life -- which of course is all of life -- Gilbert also suggests that it's better to be a trickster than a martyr. (That's another post ... or five.)

I know this baseball season will be a success because we'll all have fun along the way. I feel the same way about my return to independent writing.

My life has been a lot more joyful when I've been a trickster -- and when I've understood and embraced the concept of successful failure -- than when I've taken things way too damn seriously. I wish the same for you.

Giving life the shape of justice

Spirit of Life, come unto me.
Sing in my heart all the stirrings of compassion
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
Move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice
Roots hold me close; wings set me free
Spirit of Life, come to me, come to me.  

-- Spirit of Life,  from Singing the Living Tradition
words and music by Carolyn McDade  

Today's #UULent word is justice. Life is pretty random, yet it has an arc, and sometimes we can see and feel that arc bend toward justice. The Civil Rights movement of the 1960s was one such time. We have at least two progressive epochs unfolding in our own era: the slow-then-rapid realization of marriage equality, and now the #BlackLivesMatter movement.

Who, or what, gives life the shape of justice? All weekend, I've been hearing passages from To Kill A Mockingbird read in tribute to Harper Lee, who passed away Friday. The reclusive Alabama author helped give shape to a burgeoning civil rights movement when her novel came out in 1960. Inspired by his white ally Bob Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind and snubbed at a Holiday Inn, Sam Cooke risked his career for the same cause with A Change is Gonna Come.

And the beat goes on: Macklemore, Ryan Lewis and Mary Lambert helped advance marriage equality with Same Love. Kendrick Lamar's Alright and Beyonce's Formation are high-profile musical manifestations of black pride circa 2015-2016. Lin-Manuel Miranda is the toast of Broadway with Hamilton, of which Miranda says, "Our cast looks like America looks now."

Black artists and topics were snubbed by the Oscars this year, but 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture in 2014. The mere nominations of Spotlight and The Big Short as Best Picture nominees for next week's Oscars are victories for justice, with the latter film an especially smart and gleeful blow against the empire, far more bracing than anything that's happening in our savagely dysfunctional politics.

Justice sometimes happens in the courtroom and the corridors of power. But first, it moves in the hands and the hearts and the heads of our artists, our writers, our musicians, and filmmakers -- and then it moves us: to laughter, tears and applause, and then to commitment and action.

Space of infinite possibility

Today's #UULent word was fear. As a professional writer for 30+ years, I have no fear of the blank page. But blank calendar pages? That's another story.

I'm leaving my current job a week from tomorrow. I gave notice back in November, and my last day is almost here. This photo is of my planner a month from now, the third week of March, a time of the month I've been in production as a magazine editor these past two years. But next month, I'll have no deadline to meet. My successor will be putting her first issue to bed, and I'll be three weeks into not having a paycheck.

My challenge will be this: Can I overcome my fear of having nothing to do ... of hitting up my savings account ... of sitting with the blessed but somewhat scary spaciousness of the independent life?


I had a dream last night. I dreamt I was doing one of those little plastic puzzles we used to get in birthday party goodie bags when I was a kid. You'd slide little tiles around to get the numbers in order, which meant there had to be an empty space so the tiles could slide. But in my dream, there was no empty space, so there was no room to maneuver.

I love my planners, and these past two years, I've used something called the Passion Planner. Its creator, Angelia, is an amazing, inspirational -- and very young -- success story. But I found myself writing "NO" next to her tip of the week last week: "This week, try to fill as many time slots as possible. Schedule out everything from sleep, to meals, to time for yourself." The idea, she continued, is to track where your time is going, "allowing you to assess your productivity and truly be present during each moment."

No.

I've been keeping lists and scheduling my time and and assessing my productivity for decades. I'm at a point in my life where I just want to live. These days, being truly present means putting aside my compulsions to make endless to-do lists and plan every last thing.

There's something else on each page of my 2016 planner, something that resonates much truer for me. It's the Space of Infinite Possibility. Angelia is speaking my language here.

I am confident that, a month from now, these pages won't be blank. But my wish today is that I not fear the open spaces ... that I embrace these spaces of infinite possibility and not be in a rush to fill every last spot on my agenda. Because I have a feeling that it's through sitting in the so-called empty spaces that I will find the work -- and the play and the leisure and the meaning -- that is most true for me.

Hearts full of soul

It's the first Sunday of #UULent. On my Instagram feed, I am posting a photo each day to represent the word of the day. On Sundays, we are called to reflect, embody and enact the word, too. And of course, today's word is love.

I woke up this morning with the famous 1st Corinthians:13 passage in my mind, "Love is patient, love is kind." There's more before and after that, as you've likely heard at many weddings, but really, the first two phrases of that fourth verse say it all.

Love is patient. 
Love is kind. 

The rest is commentary.

I've been in love a few times in my life. Today, my sweetheart, Tom, and I celebrate our third Valentine's Day together. For us, love is patient, kind, frequently passionate, rarely prickly.

Most of all, it's companionable.

This box arrived last year filled with chocolate-covered strawberries. When it was empty, I decided to fill it with memories. It's filled over the brim already, and we're just getting started.

Romantic love is wonderful, but today, I'm also feeling love for my daughter. When I arrived at church, the early service not quite done, I opened the door and saw a mother quietly nursing her baby, just the two of them alone.

"That's true love," I said to her. I mentioned having happy memories of that experience, then noted that my "baby" will be 22 this year.

"They sleep through the night by then, right?" We both laughed.

Maybe not, but it's not for me to know. My daughter is living her life. It's the life I gave her; it's now fully her own, but she'll always be part of me and vice versa.

And there is even more love somewhere. As people gathered for the service, I happened to see -- and talk with -- a half dozen or more people with whom I've shared a bond in our faith community, through a Covenant Group last church year and Wellspring in this one. Shining faces, smiles and waves of recognition. I've only been part of my current congregation for two years, but I feel the love growing there. As usual, the more you give, the more you get.

Love starts within, and it ripples outward. May it ever be so. Meanwhile, got a date ... have to run ... :^)

Own your story

I've been a fan of Austin Kleon since Steal Like an Artist, and I've been having a lot of fun with The Steal Like an Artist Journal, which he released last year. This month, Austin is posting a page a day of people using the journal on his Instagram, so this is my shot at glory, at least among fellow Austin Kleon acolytes.

This post says a lot about me:

I'm up crazy early today. Deadlines.
I'm procrastinating from the work I'm supposed to be doing.
I'm not afraid of much.
Life is good.
A leap is nigh.

Laughing all the way

Every once in a while, you meet someone who feels like a long-lost friend, even if you've never met before. It was like that for me and Caroline. We crossed paths at UU summer camp about five years ago when I sat next to her for a meal. We had some surface things in common, including being at the camp and being moms of teenage daughters. But over the course of our conversation, we learned that she'd grown up in the same small town clear across the country -- Salem, Ohio -- where I had my first newspaper job after college. She'd also lived a while after that in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. By the end of the week, we were doing the Time Warp together in a dining hall flash mob. "We're embarrassing our daughters!" Caroline said gleefully.

A few years later, when Caroline mentioned she'd become a certified laughter leader, I was not surprised. Today, at long last, I got to take her class. What a hoot! Caroline led our group of five in a litany of laughing exercises. (My favorites include the clam-shell laugh, the lawnmower laugh, the nervous lost-in-the-airport laugh and the laugh you do when tearing off those mattress and pillow labels that say, "DO NOT REMOVE THIS LABEL.")

There's lots of science that shows the many ways laughing is good for our health. It reduces stress and pain, promotes good sleep and gets the blood pumping. (Caroline's 45-minute class today felt like a good low-impact aerobic workout.) Plus it's just plain fun to goof off and giggle.

Caroline is affiliated with the World Laughter Tour, which has laughter leaders and laughter clubs, plus six daily practices for good-hearted living. A similar organization, Laughter Yoga International, has lots of great resources including laughter clubs held several times a day via Skype. Next on my list: Getting to the weekly laugh-in at Harborview Medical Center here in Seattle, where laughter is good medicine for people at the Northwest's major medical trauma hospital.

(A) few words about prayer

Since September, I've been part of a UU Wellspring class -- and a big point of this post is to say that if you are a Unitarian Universalist interested in spiritual deepening, you may want to consider Wellspring, too.

Last night's topic was prayer. I am not going to say much about the session because in Wellspring, we create circles of trust, and I will invoke that for myself as much as for my fellow Wellspring travelers. I'll say this much: I arrived at the session with a full and somewhat heavy heart, grateful that prayer was the topic.

I pray daily, never kneeling, sometimes with my eyes closed, but more often with them wide open in wonder. And because I spend so much of my life working with words, for me, words in prayer are often beside the point.

So it was harder than I'd have expected when we were asked to take a few minutes and write a prayer during our session. Still, because "I am who I am," I wrote three. The first:

I pray because
I pray because it helps me find the stillness
I pray because I am too much with myself
I pray because I am thankful
I pray because I want to pay attention 
I pray for strength
I pray for peace
I pray because

Looking at that, the poet in me liked the repetition, but the editor in me thought, "too many I's."

My next one:

Spirit of life
give me stillness
give me strength
give me reason
give me love

Then my editor went back and changed the gives to grants. You see how it can be terribly difficult to be an editor, to continually be getting in my own way ... even in prayer, for god's sake.

Here's what I finally came up with:

Prayer is something 
when words fail me
when I finally get out of
my head and into 
my heart.
It's an experience
of gratitude ... and longing
and love.
Sometimes it's my senses
working overtime.
Sometimes it's me sitting still. 
It is marvelous.
It is essential. 
It is enough. 

We took turns reading our prayers. One of the prayers was sung. One had exactly one word.

Wow. 

Exactly.

Amen.


UU Wellspring

https://twitter.com/MUTTScomics/status/668444536121786368

Hospitality

I've loved hummingbirds forever, but it was only a few years ago -- while living in Oakland, with this simple window feeder -- that I was able to successfully lure them. My first two years in Seattle, though, I lived above a noisy corner, with crows perched on streetlamps nearby and a confusing mass of sliding-door and balcony glass. It was a strict hummingbird no-fly zone.

When I moved to my new place in October, I figured I'd wait until spring to try again. But on a walk one chilly December morning in the Wedgwood neighborhood nearby, I saw hummingbirds thronging to a front-yard feeder and decided, what the heck? If it doesn't work, I'm just out a little bit of sugar. So I put up my feeder just before Christmas. To help keep the nectar liquid in the near-freezing temps and also help attract some birds, I topped it with a tie-dye sock in hummer-friendly colors.

My new place is still on a pretty busy street, so I didn't expect much. But on Christmas Eve morning, talking with my daughter as we rearranged some furniture for a gathering that night, I saw a hummer swoop in from around the corner of my building. They'd arrived, the best Christmas ornaments of all, flashing patches of green and magenta. And now, a few days after taking this picture, I'm ready to refill the feeder.

So thanks to the hummingbirds for your beauty and endless cheap entertainment. Thanks to Natalie for the sock. While I'm at it, thanks to Wilco for a great song. And thanks to my brother-in-law Kevin for the feeder. I sadly had to put it away for two whole years, but it's once again a gift that keeps on giving.

Make time for magic

At  the Cineplex Odeon theaters in Canada, they've been showing this short video before feature films. I caught it on a visit to Vancouver last weekend. Take 2 minutes to watch it. You might want to keep a few Kleenex handy.

Beautiful, yes? Thanks to everyone who made this little reminder to take time for things (and people) we love. Special thanks to vocalist Adaline for breathing new life into the classic Genesis song. (Here's a short "making of" clip.)

One of my life's greatest pleasures is going to the movies, and I especially love going with my sweetheart. Last year, we went to 42 movies together. I know because we kept track on a calendar. (Here's part of the page from August.) 

We like smart movies, movies that tell stories, movies where we recognize bits of our better selves, as well as the struggles and heartbreaks -- but mostly the joys -- of being alive.* And while watching movies at home is great, too, there's nothing like sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers and watching the magic unfold, larger than life. (I also love this clip for the Regal chain, even if it's selling Coke.) 

Here's to magic, and another great year at the movies.

*Some of my favorites from 2015, in alphabetical order: 

The Big Short, Brooklyn, Diary of a Teenage Girl, Dope, The End of the Tour, Grandma, I'll See You in My Dreams, Inside Out,  The Martian,  McFarland, Mistress America, Room, Seoul Searching, Seymour: An Introduction,  Shaun the Sheep, Spotlight, Steve Jobs

(We haven't seen The Force Awakens yet!)