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.
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?
Chronometry
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.
Bus Life
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.
Having Local Community Stick: The Making of Culture Care
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.
Come Together For Ruminate
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.
The Camp, Explained
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.
What Silence Has to Say: A Review of Pablo d’Ors Biography of Silence
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
Announcing The Waking: short prose, image-hybrid work, the wonder and strangeness of being human.
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.
The Troubling End of Ecclesiastes
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.
Gender Inclusive Language: Confessions of a Latecomer
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.
Motherless Mothers Feel it All
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.
The Middle of It: Rachel Held Evans and the Invitation to Step Back In
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.
A Slow Rhythm of Renunciations
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.
A Time to be Born
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.
The Inward Dimension of Fasting
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.
Dying to Love
He pointed to the facts: I lived in a nice condominium on a nice island a ferry ride away from a nice city where my nice partner worked at a nice job. I pointed to my feelings: My nice life was killing me.
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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.