Today is a gift. It is my day off from my job (which I love already). And since my job (which I already love) is new ~ like, really new, like I started four days ago ~ the timing is great because my brain needed a rest from all the new, NEW, NEW that has …
At dusk, an unscheduled detour and stop at the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, a place of calm for a very long time in my life. It is up a steep trail in a clearing in the woods on a hillside. It is a big white Half Egg, now with a functioning Buddhist temple beside it, …
A liminal time, this… when the veil between life and death grows thin, when the rhythm of day drawing breath shows itself in the crackle of umber leaves, in the moon rising low in blue autumn sky. Many named: Samhain, All Souls, Dia de los Muertos No need for words: our hearts know it better: …
“Everything is mortal. It dies. But its parts don’t die. Its parts become something else. And we know that when we bury a dog in the garden. And with a rose bush on top of it.” (Mary Oliver, interview with Krista Tippett) Perfect inverse proportion: as your days wane, your hours on the grass increase. …
So there’s this thing. A term of art that apparently everyone (who’s anyone) knows what it means and its relative import (very) in the scheme of things. There’s even a mediocre-to-bad movie I cannot bring myself to watch. When did this become a thing? How did this become a thing? It wasn’t a thing when …
The loss has been real. The darkness. Its apparent permanence. Hope cruelly stolen. Two millennia ago, we could not speak in the past tense, as we do now. We wouldn’t have found the rock rolled back, not quite yet. We wouldn’t yet be sure what to make of the empty tomb, the strange gardener clad …
Tiny Resurrections: Easter Sunrise 2015 (sermon) Read More »
for T.C. Forget pious blessing chatter. The nice-nice that assures polite company the world still spins properly. It doesn’t. It’s off kilter. Your son is gone. All is not right in the world. Should you take my advice, don’t just set it aside. Cast that shit away. Throw the mother-fucker to the …
Here is this blog’s first forray into hosting a guest blogger. You can learn more about the author of this post at the bottom; suffice it to say, Catharine is also on the path to be ordained at a UU minister. May you enjoy her voice! ~ Karen A dear friend asks questions of the …
This is a story of lesbians in love. It is also one facet of the jewel story of my sister-in-law’s sister, Jill Johnson-Young. I hope that I got all the details right, but I might not have – the heart of the story remains true. While caring for her life-partner-turned-wife-anulled-by-the-f*cking-homophobic-system-called-Prop8-eventually-turned-wife-again as she suffered from a …
True Story: Married not Once, but Twice, to a Dying Woman Read More »
I am not known to shy away from death (not yet, at least). Lest you forget or didn’t know, I am the foster parent (shhh, don’t tell DCF) who, when the cat hid away to die and was found twelve days later, I crawled under the porch, dragged the rotting corpse out, and showed it …