October 17, 2019
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.
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October 15, 2019
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.
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October 08, 2019
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.
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September 30, 2019
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.
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September 26, 2019
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.
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September 24, 2019
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.
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September 17, 2019
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:
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September 12, 2019
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.
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September 10, 2019
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.
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September 05, 2019
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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September 04, 2019
Yu-Wen Wu's visual art from the series Crossings and Currents appears in Issue No. 52: In Transit.
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September 03, 2019
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.
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August 29, 2019
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?
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August 27, 2019
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.
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August 22, 2019
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.
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August 20, 2019
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.
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August 06, 2019
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.
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August 02, 2019
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.
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July 30, 2019
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.
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July 25, 2019
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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July 23, 2019
We walk, my age-deaf dogs and I. My softness is gone now, like my dogs’ hearing. The three of us live in a harder world: the planes of my face sharp; the ears of my old dogs closed unwittingly to my voice, with only the lines of my sharp expressions to understand my commands.
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July 18, 2019
Riding the bus for me is a privilege and an inconvenience; it’s a bit new and a bit mundane, and, like most things in life, holds many contradictions...For this bounty, I give thanks.
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July 16, 2019
In our work and business and in our private lives, traditional communities are disappearing. And, perhaps, without being entirely conscious of it, many of us feel worse off. Research has not only shown a sharp decline in communities, but also a lower sense of belonging.
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July 11, 2019
As we consider the future of Ruminate, we have identified a need to build a community of supporters invested in the long-term sustainability of our operations.
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July 02, 2019
A few summers ago, as my own family survived a brush with cancer, I realized that, while at the camp, it is possible to peaceably coexist with my mortality. In the mountains, a single human life is constantly contextualized, thrown into sharp relief by the ancient boulders and myriad stars.
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June 27, 2019
It turns out that sitting in silence with my own self makes for uncomfortable, awkward hours of company. I like myself a lot less than I thought. Slowly though, I tried to better sit with the given day, tried to hear the room around me and make space for whatever thought might slide through the door unbidden
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June 26, 2019
The Waking is an online literary magazine and part of the Ruminate creative community that houses high-quality literary writing about what it’s like to be human. We are interested in flash fiction, flash nonfiction, prose poetry, other short-form prose, as well as image-text hybrid work.
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June 25, 2019
I wonder if when Ecclesiastes says books weary the soul, it’s referring to the many books that have been written about things that don’t matter when there are so many things to write about that do matter, or read that do matter. Stuff that makes contact with redemption in this day and age in a unique way.
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June 22, 2019
Brooke Fossey's short story "State Line" appears in Issue No. 51: Consume.
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June 20, 2019
It had always seemed so simple and self-explanatory to me that “man” had two different meanings, depending on context. It could either mean “man” or “person,” and I didn’t see why I had to change the way I spoke and wrote because higher-up academics had decided this was no longer correct.
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June 18, 2019
The unimaginable: losing a mother young, while I was 25. It happened fast. A stroke. My mother dying on her own birthday, only to have my youngest daughter born that very same day 15 years later.
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June 11, 2019
This small moment, I believe, is what is so magical about Rachel—that among the beautiful tributes of her friends and colleagues since her passing, there’s been a small army of voices expressing similar moments to mine: Rachel in some short moment speaking life, offering encouragement, naming and blessing the good work others took on.
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June 06, 2019
There was a quiet fierceness in how she defended her choice and her beliefs. I had become conditioned to accept how people saw me, but what I began to learn through our letters was that I didn’t have to. I made my own set of vows and I chose to live by them.
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June 04, 2019
We tear and mend and tear again. We speak and find quiet and speak again. We weep and laugh and weep and laugh again. This is a list of cycles, because seasons are like that.
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May 30, 2019
In Islamic understanding, ibadat mean[s] the various services that can be given towards praising God or Allah. I become alive as I pray into the night. I wake up around 3:00 am to eat suhoor, I wash my body, and around 4:00 am I pray, and then I begin my fast.
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