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All this week (wait--it’s only Tuesday!) I have been reading different takes on resolutions for the year ahead. A couple of them stood out to me. One was this picture of Woody Guthrie’s “New Year’s Rulin’s” from 1943. My favorites were 17-20: 17. don’t get
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I planned for a couple of hours of driving late this afternoon. I had not had much reason to get out of the house today and driving a few people around New Haven felt like a good idea. Around 2:30 I drove into town, thinking I would start at
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One of the people I got to meet, or at least talk to, while I was working as an editor is Debie Thomas, who is minister of lifelong formation at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Palo Alto, California, and author of Into the Mess and Other Jesus Stories. About
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Seventeen years ago tonight I wrote my first post for don’t eat alone. It was titled “working with what I have.” The first paragraph I wrote said: I’ve been staring at the “posting” screen for several days now trying to figure out how to join the world of
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We were in the kitchen this morning kind of goofing around and Ginger said, “Hey, Siri, play sad songs.” A couple of seconds passed and the voice from our HomePod said, “Okay, now playing sad songs.” Two or three tunes played and Ginger smiled and said, “This sounds like what
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November begins with two anniversaries in our household: on the first day of the month, seven years ago, we said goodbye to Durham, North Carolina, and then on the second we said hello to Guilford, Connecticut, arriving in town on the fiftieth anniversary of the day Ginger and her parents
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I learned a new word today: concatenation. --the act of linking together in a chain; concatenating; --the state of being concatenated; connection, as in a chain; --a series of interconnected or interdependent things or events. I read the word in Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald, who was writing about her
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This has been a rollercoaster of a week. It started, for me, with finishing up my nine-month bridge pastorate in Westbrook and sending out the inaugural issue of my newsletter, mixing metaphors. On Wednesday morning, Ginger and I went to Athens, Georgia to celebrate the opening of Puma Yu’s,
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Monday did not begin as I had hoped. What I pictured was getting up, doing my morning pages, reading (I’m almost finished with Braiding Sweetgrass), and then putting some finishing touches on the first issue of the newsletter. What happened was I got up, poured myself a glass of
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Over the past several weeks I have been contemplating what life might look like in the days ahead. My recent reading in quantum theology and cosmology has given me a deeper sense of the interconnectedness of the universe, and the things happening in my little life in the middle of
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I realized again today that I keep an informal list in my head of movie scenes that help my understand the world. I’m sure I am not alone in that practice. Off the top of my head I can think of scenes from Miss Firecracker, Big Night, Moonstruck, Fast
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One of the surprises of our Ireland trip for me was to learn that C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast and grew up there. I realized my knowledge of him was as a professor in England and I had never considered an Irish connection. The City of Belfast created