The Waking
Nature Lover
It is difficult for me, and I imagine for many of my generation, to step outside and engage with the natural world in any way without worry. Is this the end? Will we lose it, all of it?
Sparrows, Breath, Memory: On Writing and Identity
I think, sometimes, that we are at every moment, poised between perspectives, and sometimes it is unbearable to have to choose, again, how to look at a thing, ourselves, and sometimes it is freeing and joyful to know we can choose.
Rooftops I + Fragments V
Seth Clark's visual art "Rooftops" and "Fragments" appears in Issue No. 53: Shelter.
Imperfection
My husband’s scant eight weeks in hospice were the best eight weeks of our marriage. We rediscovered our deep love for each other and I saw the meaninglessness of my striving. Suddenly, there was peace.
Broken
My sick body is still good. She is still me. She is still wise and strong. My female body—to which others believe they are entitled—is still my home. She is still my power. Our stressed and strained bodies are waiting for us to return to them.
God Didn't Save Me—You Did
Teaching has saved me some days. When I didn’t want to get up but had to because there was George Saunders or Sandra Cisneros to read and discuss, I was saved from the pit of Myself Left To Myself that I remember preachers often scaring me into.
Asian Dramas: On Displacement, Vulnerability, and New Perspectives
When I was growing up, the beautiful people with interesting lives were American or European, like me. Always. This reality remained unexamined for me, as did its implied negative—that it’s a little less desirable to be anything else.
!Feliz Día de los Muertos!
The streets were alive with color, music, and chatter. Many people had painted faces, some sang, others danced, and most of us marched up the hilly street to the cemetery gates. This is how Mexico celebrates los muertos WITH los muertos.
Lights, Stories, and Celebrating Joy—Diwali
While I am not particularly religious, Diwali fills me with a strange sense of hope and light and all things new. Being away from home, I even indulged in a bit of worship as my mom taught me how to do it. This is the only festival I am willing to make the compromise on.
the practice of hope: reminders on how to be (or, contemplative practices against capitalism)
Share: meals, music, resources, festivities. Create alternative economies based on generosity and care. Sit on front porches. Feast well, and often.
Write Around the Mulberry Bush
At home, my computer dings, illuminating the puzzle of sentences. My fingers punch the keys, tap the space bar, cursor the thesaurus. Cut and paste, insert, delete. Reorder, revise, redo.
Everyone Else's Emergency
I don’t know which lens to wear to handle the news that the world, as I know it, might be ending in my lifetime. It’s not real, I think, I hope, because it doesn’t seem to be happening to me.
The Cosmic Ellipsis (or How I Chose to Go to Seminary)
It is a beautiful enigma. When, in the presence of a mountain, we must endure its puzzle. It is something greater than us, and everything that is greater than us invites us to rise.
From Where Does the Light Come?
Ok, so this is not from “real life.” It is, I know, biologically impossible for my father and my son to be five years old at the same time. But I imagine it is happening somewhere else, on some other plane.
Confessions of an Amateur Dancer, In 3 Movements
Perhaps my favorite lesson from dance is that there are no winners or losers. This helps me re-imagine my life, my community, and the world in terms other than the binary of conventional success or failure. It helps me have patience for being human.
Yin Yoga and the Practice of Holding Tension
Common wisdom holds that movement, particularly growth, is best measured by how far you are from where you began. But in yin yoga, you make micro-movements, sometimes nearly imperceptible to the eye. You lay low, commit to the pose, stay with it long enough to listen.
A Visual Vocabulary for Hope
The image of a hand reaching out into the dark encapsulates many of the prayers I have said over the years. In the darkness, I hope for light. I reach out my hand, and I hope that God will take it.
Theology Animated: Serene Jones’ Call It Grace
Call it Grace is not so much a primer on theology as it is a way of animating it. At its base, it’s a memoir and a telling of Jones’ life story overlaid with a theological lens. The book is full of the people that populate her world:
Fire and Grace: Healing Soul Loss
My soul loss is healing. “Live with fire and grace” has become my guide. I find that paradoxically to lose oneself in creativity is a way to find your place in life and to make this world a home.
The Challenge of Storytelling
Are we even capable of telling new stories and by doing so changing the social narrative? Stories don’t only teach us about other cultures or help us improve our vocabulary. Stories also teach us about ourselves. They tell us how we can see and understand one another.
Heliotrope
The siren song of my body cries out in panic, alerting me to the foregone conclusion of catastrophe. Something terrible happened to you, it says. Do not blossom like the dogwoods or magnolias or tulips. Shut up and close down, lest something terrible happen to you again.
Crossings and Currents
Yu-Wen Wu's visual art from the series Crossings and Currents appears in Issue No. 52: In Transit.
On Attention
Attention is one of the scarcest, but most needed, resources I have at my disposal. Attention is the seat of love; attention is the basis of compassion. Giving attention opens us up to the wilderness of the other, a frighteningly beautiful prospect.
Home After All
What must it feel like to have roots in a place? Roots that reach down into that particular soil in that particular place, generations deep? What must it feel like to know where you will be buried when you die?
Tethered
God of the stars, God of the endless black, God of the silence, God of knowing and not knowing. God in the questions and fears of childhood. God of it all. It's a mantra of my heart that beats with the movement of the mystery.
Finding Road, Not Water
That day, her screaming was so bad, I thought about it. About what metal and concrete and the slow-fast glide into a solid sheet of water would feel like. How nice it would be if everything just got a little bit quiet.
A Father's Eye View
I don’t have a God’s eye view of my son. When he finally falls to sleep, exhausted, puffy-eyed, after crying for forty minutes straight on his second night of sleep-training, I am still on edge, worried that he’ll wake up, that he’ll hate me in the morning.
Wonder, Despite: A Review of AFTER JUNE
Like many writers, she wondered if she shouldn’t give up. Why were we squandering time and money on art that few, if any, would read? The answer, as always, is because we have to.
What My Mind Keeps Enshrined
By now, however—as I approach my eightieth birthday—I am reconciled to the reality that I might never learn the answer to my question about the authorship of the lyrics. There are just so many questions, and so few answers, and so little time.
Take This Cup
I knelt with strangers around a circular rail, and a living hand came and deliberately placed bread into my open palm, eyes met mine, and a voice assured me that this, the body of Christ, was for me. It was intimate and humbling and for the first time I had the sensation of actually being fed.
A Longing for Change
It’s the season for change. Recent graduates are settling into their new lives. School is about to begin. Do I need change? I feel the tension of this energy, that if I don’t create change for myself it might be thrust upon me in a terrible way.
Life, abundantly: on everyday Easters, resurrection, and time travel
Octavia Butler said God is Change. She also said our destiny is to take root among the stars. Did she know back then that we are rooted in the stars at a molecular level, made up of remnants of explosions at the universe’s birth?
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