Dr. Claire French was born in 1924, Claire Anna Maria Margaretha Wieser, “in the backwoods of Bavaria” as she has described, where “pagan beliefs and superstitions were rife” and “so was Communism amongst the factory workers who lived in her… Read More ›
May you allow yourself to taste your longings and to bravely honor them. May you make wise sacrifices. May you trust in abundance. May you savor the many flavors of this sweet life before your eyes, beneath your feet, below… Read More ›
Hello FAR friends, I hope you are each doing well – that you are holding up ok during these trying times. It’s Xochitl here. I’m the behind-the-scenes co-weaver keeping things afloat (to varying degrees!) on this collaborative endeavor we call… Read More ›
I was released from a national hospital in Crete on Friday afternoon after a seven day stay. During that time, I had over fifteen tests, including several ultrasounds, two CTs, a colonoscopy, a gastroscopy, and an excruciating forty-five minute MRI…. Read More ›
List for today: Rescue tadpoles from the evaporating puddle in the driveway. Look for pink roses in the field. Look for wild strawberries along the road. Listen to the crows in the compost pile and try to identify them by… Read More ›
I struggled with what to write about for my May post. Would I write about the ridiculous notion which has countless Americans buying into the idea that COVID19 is a hoax? I could write about how it is fool hearty… Read More ›
Last week a friend of mine started a post asking people to share something that they’ve enjoyed or appreciated since shelter-at-home orders began across the country and globe. This friend was in no way trying to minimize the very difficult… Read More ›
“When life hands you lemons, sometimes you have to make applesauce.”
Maybe beautiful things don’t only grow from peace, maybe they grow from the soil of living, which holds both blood and tears muck and magic. Last week I tried to work on my book while the household debris whirled around… Read More ›
Our bounty is in creativity friendship community the myriad small adventures of everyday. We tell of magic and moonrise and listening to the pulse of the earth beneath our feet. Ah, October. Fall has settled into the trees and air…. Read More ›
It looks like it is time again for me to pack up and drive a few hundred or more miles to a new destination, a place I will finally try to plant roots, this time offering commitment + endurance, hoping… Read More ›
Carol Christ wrote about gift economy on this blog in 2013, and I am taken by her story of the woman who brought raisins or cracked nuts to the group even though she had very little. In beginning to encounter… Read More ›
Passover is a holiday of remembrance, of ritual re-enactment: this, we say, is what our ancestors experienced. This is what they felt and knew, what they tasted in their blood. The movement from slavery to liberation, from the soul’s winter to spring. We must never forget, we say, we must always remember, be thankful for our freedom, never take it for granted. “In each generation,” the Haggadah enjoins, “we should feel as if we personally had come out of Egypt.”
Departure. I stood deep in a toad hole slinging mud at twilight when the sky turned lemon and gold. They arced over my head in pairs, loose aggregations – it seemed like thousands crying out, crossing the river. Ensouled. Spirits… Read More ›
“Beginnings and endings are so very sacred, to give honor to all that has transpired, every experience, every joy, every pain, is a doorway to the magical. Hold your entire year between your hands, every day, every thought, every breath…. Read More ›
Strawberries shaped my view of a world full of gifts simply scattered at your feet. A gift comes to you through no action of your own, free, having moved toward you without your beckoning. It is not a reward, you… Read More ›
This has been another hard month. I don’t feel it to be hard. I just know objectively that it is. The typical challenge of balancing my work with the children’s needs and the management of a household has been intensified by the onset… Read More ›
I touch the earth and offer gratitude for this land I call home. I reach towards the sky and offer gratitude for sun, moon, and stars. I place my hand on my heart and breathe deep, offering gratitude for all… Read More ›
In folklore Old women are believed to control all aspects of Nature – Fire, Earth, Air and Water, but in myth and story they have a special relationship with water. The title “witches in the weeds” emerged after I did… Read More ›
“It’s a wild snail festival out here!” —Tanner (age 3) This spring we took a family mini vacation to Table Rock Lake, about three hours away from home. At its best, working and schooling from home with our family of… Read More ›
How the voices speak of what is and isn’t tastes of a superficial sauce I let drip from my lips. In the first dialectic of aging (harkening back to Marie Cartier’s helpful division of conversational foci), usually what is spoken… Read More ›
Forty years ago, I abandoned my own inner quest to establish myself as a writer/translator, discouraged by the voices of publishers who told me the book was unmarketable, worried about making a living and reassuring my family (whom I had broken from when I was seventeen) that I was “okay.” I chose the relatively safer path of becoming an English professor, and I worked for more than thirty years helping others to find their voices. I do not regret taking that path. It has led me here.
I was sitting in my then-therapist’s office one day, feeling exhausted and hopeless. Between mourning a break-up and constantly traveling for work, I felt like I’d been digging myself out of an ever-deepening hole of despair for months. “When someone… Read More ›
“Island living has been a lens through which to examine my own life…I must keep my lens when I go back… I must remember to see with island eyes. The shells will remind me; they must be my island eyes.”… Read More ›
Continued from Part 1. How do you start to put the pieces together? For me, it was imperative to keep a space to express emotions without self-censorship or self-prejudice, to identify exactly what was hurting me. It was not the… Read More ›
Tomorrow being Thanksgiving in the United States offers an opportunity to reflect on gratitude. With so much anger bubbling up on all fronts is it possible that gratitude could be the salve to heal our wounds?
One of the bigger problems with being the only Classics major at a Jesuit university is that all my friends were fairly old men before I had even reached drinking age. Now, they are pretty much gone back to the… Read More ›
When we come together, we are the Divine. I didn’t think I could experience that twice in one year; clearly, I was wrong.
How do you feel about me now? I was talking to an old friend the other day, and when I asked how he was, he said, “I’m getting by.” “Getting by? Not tearing it up, not taking ‘em down, and… Read More ›
Much of our lives lack the rich culture of ritual that I think would help us repair the relationships we have with our own bodies and with the earth. The Rg Veda is one of the oldest collection of hymns… Read More ›
