Navratri: Nine Nights of Goddess
A shiver moves down my spine, and I wrap my sweatshirt tighter. Sometimes, despite the incantations, I really just need one of your many arms to hold me. To hold all of us. I want to shout out—Bhoodevi, the earth, is at the bottom of the ocean.
A Year (And Counting) of Mercy
Mercy has become an exercise in noticing: the unexpected coffee bought for me by a friend, a kind email from a colleague, a whole chocolate cake left on my desk by a volunteer at a nonprofit I work for. If this past year has been one of sorrows, it has also been one where I step from mercy to mercy.
Finding Peace in a Greenhouse
Greenhouses toe the line between the natural world and the built environment. They protect crops by controlling natural forces such as heavy rain, cold, and strong winds. Though they contain aspects of the natural world like water, soil, plants, and microbiota, they are still highly cultivated and thus disconnected from the wilderness.
Reaching the Perimeter
God creates change in our circumstances and us. I have changed as a result of this season, and I have learned that saying, “I do not have enough,” will have to suffice. I do not believe that God created us to be boundless.
In the Beginning was the Beginning: On New Year’s Parties and Boundaried Beginninglessness
I’ve been thinking a lot about beginnings, and anyone who thinks a lot about beginnings begins to understand there’s no end to thinking about beginnings. New Year’s is a beginning, and time. So is creation: the first brick of a house, the first step across the threshold of a door.
The Wait, The Light: Ruminate Advent Reflections
Advent is a time spent in waiting and preparation for Jesus' birth and his return. Here are 5 articles on The Waking about Advent, a time of light, waiting, and hope.
I Used to Love You
I love God. I really do love God. However, I do not love the church. I have slightly given up on the church. It is hard to reconcile the trauma that the church continues to give people. I struggle at letting go.
Wishing Upon Shooting Stars
I am a sucker for shooting stars. Sometimes I’ve seen them. Other times I’ve not. We live life in the space of both /and, where we can hope, despite there being no guarantee that our hopes are realized.
A Quiet Truth
The poem read: "In America they kill their children." What if there’s a quiet truth to what this person, and most likely many others, think about our country?
Putting In
I find this tussle with ambivalence on-going in my writing life, rooted I know in fear. So, when I’m able, I listen for the voices of mentors. I listen for their guidance and faith as I consider tip-toeing in.
Put Me to Sleep, Doctor
“They put pets out of their misery,” my mother said. Mom then glared at her newest visitor. She continued with, “Why can’t you do that with me?” Mom was stitched together by rows of metal staples. They appeared like the tips of landmines on the battlefield of her abdomen.
A New Chapter for Ruminate
It is with a mix of gratitude and sadness that Ruminate announces the departure of our founder, Brianna Van Dyke, from her thirteen-year-long tenure as editor-in-chief.
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.
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Ruminate Community
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The Waking is an online literary magazine and a part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in short-form prose and image-text hybrid work. This art can be beautiful, it can be strange, we just ask that it feels true.