Tread Lightly through Life

A walk in the woods is a good reminder of the fragility and vitality of life. Under every leaf and stone is decay and new life. You witness vibrant colors and contours amongst the branches, grass, and creatures. Then you discover, not only do these things remind you of all manner of insights, you are…

Walking Space

In the summer of 2015 I walked the Camino de Santiago, walking 500 miles in 28 days. Midway through that walk I envisioned (with a possessed-like quality) a place, not unlike the Camino, in North America where people would gather, walk, and re-sync their hectic lives with nature and fellow walkers. For me, long-distance, multi-day,…

“God works in Mysterious Ways” is Fake News

The church would like us to think that God is a mysterious, unreachable, unknowable being. What makes God mysterious is our blindness and unwillingness to accept the Truth and our resistance to change and to see reality as it really is, the positive and negative and everything in between. Like love, there is nothing so…

DIY Self-Improvement

We are always at a precipice. One move away from greatness, obliteration, or stagnation. We search for answers and we seek and seek but few ever seem to find. The problem with seeking, most of the time, is that we want to be given the answer. But the answer is different for each person, even…

Why do we talk about the weather so much?

Conversation after conversation seems to be entirely about weather. It is a required topic to discuss. The weather takes up about a third of most newscasts. It is unceasing. It is interesting. It is boring. Why the obsession? Because it is always changing. It’s the “in the moment” way of weather that makes it interesting to speak…

My “someday” has arrived

“Someday I’m going to do what I want and not what everyone else wants.” “Someday I’m going to resign from my job and travel.” “Someday I am going to start something that only I am meant to reveal to the world.” “Someday I’m going to learn another language.” That someday is today. This week I…

WWJD

WWJD? Remember this? When I was in school people would wear bracelets that had the WWJD acronym written on it. For those who don’t know what it stands for, it means “What Would Jesus Do?” I never wore one. It wasn’t because I wouldn’t, I just have an aversion to doing things that everyone was…

You don’t deserve anything

Think of a forest. All of the trees, bushes, insects, birds, deer, fox, owls, microbial bacteria, mushrooms, mold, moss. The diversity in one square mile of forest is enough to give a scientist a lifetime of discovery and they still wouldn’t have discovered in all. Nature doesn’t act out of a desire to achieve, destroy…

Stop treating life like a dress rehearsal

We have a tendency to procrastinate. We love making New Years resolutions but hardly anyone keeps them. We say we are going to start a business or write a novel but so few of us actually do. We treat life like a dress rehearsal – like we will get another chance. As if we can…

The house is already on fire, so we might as well warm ourselves.

The house is already on fire, so we might as well warm ourselves. ~anonymous I can’t recall where I read this, but it was at just the moment when I was feeling the most upset and down in my life. And as soon as I read it, I had the longest and heartiest laugh I’d…

On Walking

In my teenage years I walked miles upon miles in fields of corn for my summer job: detasseling. It involves going through a corn field and removing the tassel from a stalk of corn, thereby ensuring that it is pollenated by another corn plant (having left a row un-detasseled) which drastically increases the yield during…

Stop being so surprised when someone does something stupid

Sensationalizing the idiocy of someone’s actions is a central cause of our anger, fear and anxiety. We sensationalize things by saying things like: “How could this happen to me?” “Why would she do that?” “What an idiot! How stupid can you be?” “Look at what happened to ME!” We seem to be forgetting something very…