Category: Miscellaneous

After the 50th reunion with my former Port Clinton students, I went back to my motel room, looked at myself in the mirror, and said, “Linda, I think you need to start looking at yourself differently.” I arrived a little…

After my fabulous weekend in mid-September, I began reading Sharon O’Brien’s memoir, The Family Silver. To my surprise, she shed light on my Irish relative’s puzzling behavior.  On page 34, O’Brien writes: “I come from a people for whom abrupt and…

After I posted my last blog entry, “Bearing My Cross,” Cindi, my friend and one of my biggest cheerleaders, called. She, too, is serving as a caregiver for a family member. She overflowed with enthusiasm for what I had written….

Those of you who know me well know that my favorite symbol of new life and transformation is the butterfly. I was named Emerging Butterfly when I was in seminary. After graduation, the butterfly became the symbol for my retreat and…

For the past seven years, I have participated in a contemplative writing group. The six of us choose a topic and all write on that for our next meeting. It is amazing the different ways we all approach the same topic….

As the world around me swirled (I awoke with vertigo this morning), I began listening to Chapter 2 of Krista Tippett’s new book, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. I had barely begun listening when words of…

When I was a teenager and for many years thereafter, I had a recurring dream. I was moving into an old house. Whoever lived there before me had left a lot of stuff behind, especially in the attic. I rummaged…

“The body remembers, the bones remember, the joints remember, even the little finger remembers. Memory is lodged in pictures and feelings in the cells themselves. Like a sponge filled with water, anywhere the flesh is pressed, wrung, even touched lightly,…

“Most of Jesus’ teachings are completely incomprehensible from a first-half-of-life perspective.”   Richard Rohr In the first half of my life, I bristled whenever I heard The Serenity Prayer. Rohr points out that in the first-half-of-life, we have other developmental…

“If we follow the path of evolutionary mysticism, we will discover that everything happens as part of a singular process of cosmic unfolding.”    Jeff Carreira, author of The Soul of the New Self When my former student called to…