Inspirations and Illuminations

Today has been hard.  I woke up this morning, and was immediately confronted by extremely disappointing news.  I thought of my daughters, one of whom was three days too young to vote.  I thought of all women, the battles won and lost, the rights obtained and those withheld.  I thought of the marginalized, the poor, the refugee, the minority--those Jesus commanded us to love and care for.  I thought of my friends in the LGBTQ community, and the children of my friends, who are either part of that community or allies to them.  I thought of the earth, the environment we as humans are making ever more inhospitable for ourselves.  And I thought of higher education, such an important institution that is becoming less accessible thanks to policy and funding cuts.  It seems that everything I care about is being gutted in the name of power and privilege. So, what now?  What do we do in the face of such bitter disappointment?  We do have options.  One is to move to Canada.  A coworker of mine sha

What is your dream?  When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?  A doctor, teacher, or fireman?  A rockstar, artist, or professional athlete?  Wealthy?  Powerful?  Influential? What qualities or characteristics did you dream of having?  That's a little harder to answer.  It's not a question adults asked your eight-year-old self, is it?  You may have dreamed of being a lawyer, but why?  To make a lot of money and be respected, or to help people in difficult situations?  If you wanted to be a business executive, was it to be important and have a lot of people to boss around, or to guide a business and its personnel into a positive way of being in the world, recognizing human value, environmental and financial impact, and service? I wanted to be a teacher.  I had a chalkboard in my room, and picked up textbooks at garage sales.  I made answer keys for the books, and taught my dolls and stuffed animals.  When I was in college, I started teaching piano lessons.

In 2023, I had weekly appointments with an eating habit coach who changed my life. Let me back up a little.   Since college, I’ve steadily put on weight every year.   My caloric intake has been high, and my activity level has been low.   I was active in my 20s, doing as many as six musical theater shows a year, but once I got married in my late 20s, and then had kids in my mid-30s and early 40s, my lifestyle became more sedentary.   I had a management job for almost 20 years that was increasingly stressful and draining of my energy, so my motivation to keep active and eat well decreased to almost nothing.   By the late 2010s, I weighed 250 pounds. In September of 2022, I discovered Kate M. Johnston, an eating habit coach for professional women.   I subscribed to her weekly email, and finally it clicked—my problem was not my weight or my lack of activity, but my eating habits, and more importantly, my self-image.   Kate sent out a free worksheet, and one of the exercises on it was t

I'm losing count of things I've heard or read about Sabbath in the last few years.  While Sabbath is far from a new concept, it seems the recent resurgence of talk about Sabbath has coincided with the rise of the minimalism movement.  Marie Kondo talks about ridding oneself of things that are not useful, or don't "spark joy."  Margareta Magnusson brought awareness to the practice of "Swedish Death Cleaning," or decluttering so that your heirs don't have so much to deal with upon your demise.  The Minimalists,  Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, operate from the thesis that the less stuff we have, the more meaning we can find in our lives.  This is a spiritual concept--the more stuff we keep for ourselves, the less we have to share with others, the greater our carbon footprint, the further we find ourselves from God/our spirituality (" it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kin

This September, I entered a challenge I found on Facebook--300,000 steps to raise funds for To Write Love on Her Arms.  That's an average of 10,000 steps per day for the month, or for me, about 150 miles.  As someone who generally averages about half that, this was a pretty daunting challenge, but since I'm trying to lose weight, and September is Suicide Awareness Month, I thought it would be a good way to combine two things I care about.  I had no idea when the month began how much I would learn through taking on this challenge. To keep me motivated, I decided to walk each day in memory or in honor of a person or group.  I had a few people in mind:  a cousin who took his own life a few years ago; a friend who struggles with alternating anxiety and depression; celebrities whose suicides are well-known.  Some were people I'd never met:  in 1992 I traveled with Continental Singers for the first time.  The night of our first concert, I stayed with a family who warned us when w

I'm sure the title will be misleading, but everything else I tried just served to take away the power of that one word.  This is not a discussion of the Jim Henson film starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie, and I apologize if that is disappointing to you.  As it evolves, though, there may be some parallels. This morning, my family and I walked the labyrinth at Glendale United Methodist Church, here in Nashville.  It's a cold and gray morning, pretty typical of Tennessee in early April, so we weren't able to really savor the experience as I'd have liked, but for a first very short labyrinth walk, a surprising number of thoughts came into my head.   To back up a little, I first learned of labyrinth as a spiritual discipline in a Spiritual Formation class I took last spring.  As the only 50-something in a class full of late teens and early 20-somethings, I had gotten used to the reactions of my classmates to things they'd never heard of.  Most of the class enthus