Dear friends ~ September, the month that rounds out summer's dreamy days, the ones in which Mary Oliver strolls though the fields, idle and blessed, falls down into the grass and gazes at the grasshopper eating sugar out of her hand. The days that carry enormous questions on their sun-kissed shoulders. "...what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"
Dear friends ~ Sometimes when he is feverish and sick, my son wakes crying because he feels "too big for everything." He'll tell us his arms are heavy and huge, and his body has ballooned beyond the edges of his bed. So we pull him into a hug and whisper reminders that he is actually quite small: Feel how you fit into our arms? You wouldn't even reach the ceiling on your tiptoes. And see how high the trees outside tower above the house? As his sense of self shrinks back into proportion, my son's breath slows and his body relaxes. His smallness, it turns out, comforts him.
Dear Friends ~ For the past month, my daily mantra and aim has been: Stay in the river. Let the current take me where it will.
This sounds relaxing, but it takes courage to trust that wherever the river flows, it eventually finds the ocean. It requires us to loosen our grip on what we think we know and allow ourselves to be taken, even cracked open. The good news is that in this releasing and opening there is also discovery: of the astonishing presence of grace already moving through our lives, of the endless becoming and rebecoming that courses beneath all things.
Dear Friends ~ Surrender. A simple and bewildering word. My childhood brain still carries the image of the wicked witch scrawling "Surrender Dorothy" across the sky while cackling triumphantly. My young heart soared when Dorothy refused to give in. In a world awash in forces that require resistance, entertaining the thought that a certain kind of surrender could open the gate of power and possibility seems outrageous, and worse, dangerous. Yet, confoundingly, this is the way grace and the Holy seem to work. Saints, sages, and poets know this and bear witness to the Mystery.
Dear Friends ~ In another corner of my life, I teach what I call Baby's First Research Paper classes to middle school students. Recently I guided two dozen tweens through a project creating timelines of the people and events that made possible an invention of their choosing. Their topics ranged from toasters and the Slinky, to water purifiers, baseball mitts, and seat belts.
Dear Friends ~ Rainbows may seem a rather glib focus for a March newsletter, but stick with me. Overplayed as they are in early Spring, I have the compounding factor of rainbow-enthusiast housemates; children pushing me to the next level of septacolored semicircles, selecting every story rendering a rainbow. As my spiritual directors, my children implore me to read and reread favorite picture books ad nauseum; a Lectio Devina of a bedtime reading ritual.
"Hope Is the Hardest Love We Carry":
Reflections on light, darkness, and the courage to stay
Dear Friends ~ Purportedly the beginning of something new, a whole breathless yet-to-be-lived year, January is moored in bleak mid-winter. The wonder of Solstice, of Christmas, have faded in the rearview; the promise of Equinox and Easter are far off. January is stuck trying to be something spirited in the gray-sky, sodden-snow middle, the dark borderland between one thing and another.
Dear Friends ~ It has been fifteen years since that winter day in Vermont, in a small house on Skunk Hollow Road, when Nan Merrill placed a colorful bundle of Friends of Silence newsletters into my hands. The air outside was cold and hushed, but inside, something radiant was stirring.
"Here's my baby," she said.
Dear Friends ~ Right now, as you are reading these words, take a breath. Let yourself arrive where you are.
The contemplative path begins in presence—rooted in the body, open in the heart, quiet in the mind. These three movements form one inner work: to awaken fully to the moment we are living. Silence and solitude are not escapes from life. They are deep forms of participation. They allow the soul to breathe, to respond rather than react, and to discover that prayer and love mature slowly through fidelity and surrender.
Dear Friends ~ Is it strange to envy a turtle? Not just turtles in general—I'm referring to the specific Terrapene carolina Carolina (box turtle) who took up residence in the tall grasses behind the woodshed this summer. She and I often crossed paths, especially in the morning hours while she bathed and sipped from the puddles in the gravel road. I liked to crouch, peer into her wary amber eyes, and make small talk about the weather.
Dear Friends ~ My young children replay variations on the same stories over and over. They are learning and growing through recurrent dramas of goodness, love, and bravery. In truth, I do the same: playing with the idea of myself.
Dear friends ~ “This isn't the world I want to live in." The thought echoes in my mind as I close the news app, the messaging app, the email app. My lungs wrestle down a gasp of humid Appalachia air in response to the endless feed of Apocalypse I just conjured with thumb swipes across a screen.
No, not Apocalypse. They are, in fact, creation stories. What else to call it when a group of people assesses the world and says, “We want it to look different than this," and then imagines a new paradigm into existence? From idea...to fruition. Creation.
Dear Friends ~ I want to speak now about the grace of community. Nan Merrill's interpretation of Psalm 133 says that this unity "is like a shimmering rainbow, breaking through a summer rain..." As children of the Divine Mother/Father, communion is our birthright, the yearning for community is our DNA. Particularly when fragments and shards of what once seemed coherent lie scattered around us, we need the experience of authentic connection and relationship to give us courage and the possibility of joy.
Dear Friends ~ Over the past several months, I've been gathering these quotes and now offer them to you as nourishment for the journey. I hope they bring insight, encouragement, and moments of stillness along the way. ~ Bob
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Dear Friends ~ The kids and I stare out the window, watching birds. The juncos are my favorite, presenting in sooty suits, bowing often in a jaunty jig of seed seeking. My son enjoys the sparrows, who descend in numbers that send our feeders reeling. My daughter likes the showy birds—right red cardinals and silence shattering jays.
Dear Friends ~ My window looks over the neighbors' rooftops to the poplars, box elders, oaks, pines of the woods that rim our village. The morning is gray, slashed with bitter rain. The harsh winds of a March storm toss the tree limbs hither and yon. Their tender buds must be clinging with all their tiny might. The chaotic flailing mirrors these times and the thrashing of both culture and nature. It feels, it is, dire. But the storm is not everything.
Dear Friends ~ This afternoon while slicing onions and tossing them into a pan, the realization washed over me that in four decades I've eaten more than (at this point I pulled up the phone calculator, allowing the onions a few slow minutes to soften in the oil) 14,000 evening meals. While I do my fair share of cooking these days, it's safe to say that I've personally prepared only a small fraction of those many, many dinners. If I haven't cooked all that food that sustained and satiated me, I wondered, who has?
Dear Friends ~ I wake before dawn. The sky outside the window holds an unrelieved grayness after a long night. January has always seemed to me to be a dark month. The candlelight and fires of Christmas have receded, leaving the dark and the cold. Yes, I know that the nights are shortening, that the light is returning. I know that January holds Epiphany, the feast of the Star, of Wise Ones who recognized God nestled and nursing within the circle of embodied Love and Belonging. I understand that the ancients considered the dark as revelatory as a sunrise.
Dear Friends ~ These are some of the passages that have given me hope during this cold winter. ~ Bob
Dear Friends ~ This season of Thanksgiving sings with resonance in my soul. I am grateful to live in an intentional community where we all have our tasks and teams to keep things running smoothly. I'm on the garden team, blessed to come together with others to plant, water, weed, and—indeed—harvest both bounty and beauty.
Dear Friends ~ I wish to speak about joy. In this season there is plenty to be joyful about: crisp mornings, mist rising from the river, trees bright with autumn glory, the faces of children sticky with caramel apples. Yet even as the scent of cinnamon lingers in the air, and grandchildren snuggle in for a fireside story on a gently darkening evening, we know that all is not well in our world. The trouble we are in as an Earth community is severe and seemingly inexorable.
Dear friends~ This next year my beloved and I will be married 50 years. I have "known" Jackie for more than 53 years, and yet I can still wake up beside her in the morning and realize that this person whom I have walked with over the decades is still a mystery and so much unknown. The truth is that we are growing old together. But if we can embrace our physical diminishment with gentleness and grace, our heart's surrender becomes, as Jackie calls it, "the sacrament of diminishment." This morning she gave me a folder full of her favorite quotes about relationship and love.
Dear friends~ It is early summer, and nearly nine o'clock until dusk finally pulls down the shades on the warm, humid day. It's well past bedtime for a Benedictine monk who will rise at two in the morning, then gather to pray at three-thirty. Yet he stands in the doorway to his dwelling, gently calling for the nameless stray cat he befriended as a kitten five years before. He hears her soft mewing nearby and finally notices where she's perched on a low wall not far off. "It's time for bed," he whispers into the dark.
Dear friends~ Slower, slower. Poorer, poorer. Smaller. Smaller.
This is slow work. It begins in poverty, and we become smaller, until we have enough being to be nothing. ~Bob
Dear friends~ Here is how you play "Hippo Toss", a game designed for two players:
Dear Friends ~ Each spring the seeds stir and push up tender shoots through the warming soil; buds swell, lining the tree limbs like tiny jewels. All around there are signs that the Earth is renewing herself, that the Holy relationship of loving reciprocity endures. This is more than reassuring, because by now we must see that we are witnessing the unraveling of the sustaining systems of a myriad of worlds and realms. How shall we make sense of this? Old stories may help.
Dear Friends ~ Each day after morning kindergarten my mom sent me harrumphing to my childhood bedroom for a nap. The sun would shine through the tree outside my window, casting shadows on the peach hearts wallpapered around the room. Begrudgingly at first, I settled into the quiet space, but eventually the shimmying branches lulled me into stillness.
Dear Friends ~ Warmth sweeps across the globe in its own time, as does the cold. Wet or dry spells make their ecological homes, then ebb away. As I greet you, dear readers, February is inviting winter in all its glory, despite its chilly inconveniences. It's a time to draw in close to the fire, to snuggle up with a good book, or brave the elements, swooping down the slopes, gliding across the ice, building a perfect snow man or woman with young loved ones, or admiring the beauty of transformed terrain.
Dear Friends ~ I want to stride exuberantly into this new year "full of things that have never been" (Rilke). I'm customarily inclined to seek out those quiet, inward "cracks of silence where breath is connected to spirit" (Karyn Dedar). I need, we all need, silence, as Nan says, "for the Word to be heard." And on a crisp January morn when the air tingles, the tree limbs crack, and the sun slices sharp shadows on the landscape, an invigoration seizes me. I want to stomp around and inhale and shout and gaze about eagerly. I want to move my muscles, sinews, and bones.
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