(I believe this photo is of otter prints I discovered in the sand, I have only seen these wonderful creatures fleetingly. The photo below is of Tune’s paw prints.) One of the great gifts of my time at the hermitage is being able to walk along the beach at low tide.  Because the tides shift from day to day I keep a tide table to guide me each day as to when I can break from my work and allow the words and images that have been swirling around my mind to settle into my body.  A walk always brings me some

***Make sure you visit the Poetry Party either by scrolling down past this post or by clicking here***    “Come along inside… We’ll see if tea and buns can make the world a better place.” –The Wind in the Willows I love the tradition of tea in the afternoon, especially high tea.  Something about taking time to slow down, sip tea, and talk with friends is so counter-cultural that I think making time for tea can be a revolutionary act in our world of busyness and fast food.  Bill Huebsch in his lovely book A New Look at Grace: A Spirituality of

***Come visit the Poetry Party here or scroll down to the next post*** What I’m reading this week: Slow Time: Recovering a Natural Rhythm of Life by Waverly Fitzgerald Waverly has a most wonderful website called School for the Seasons where she shares an abundance of resources for living more deeply into each season.  She just published her book about Slow Time which is about transforming your relationship to time.  Living contemplatively is one of my primary spiritual practices and her book is helping me think even more intentionally about time and how to live even more deeply into my own rhythms.

It is the end of one of those very long days and my body is tired, my spirit weary. I walk into the kitchen to fill up two large pots with water and put them on the stove to heat. Then I head into the bathroom and begin to fill the tub. We live in a condo with space only for a small water heater, not quite enough to fill the tub, so this routine has become part of my nightly ritual. “I can’t believe you live in the heart of Seattle and you have to heat water on the

Time for another invitation to come join me and my delightful teaching partner Betsey Beckman in November for a week of integrating creative expression and spiritual practice.  We already have several brave and beautiful souls signed up and there are just a handful of spots left, so won’t you come and play?  Awakening the Creative Spirit: Experiential Education for Spiritual Directors in the Arts & Imagination with Betsey Beckman, MM and Christine Valters Paintner, PhD November 11-17, 2007 St. Andrews Retreat Center Union (Hood Canal), WA A week-long experiential intensive exploring tools for integrating the arts and imagination into spiritual

In the last couple of weeks we have watched Blood Diamond which takes place in Sierra Leone and The Last King of Scotland which is about Uganda.  They were both heart-rending films.  I also have been reading A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmeal Beah which addresses the Sierra Leone story from the perspective of a boy soldier who was rehabilitated and now lives in the US.  It raised again for me the question of how we live in meaningful engagement with the sorrows and struggles of the whole world? A couple months back we went to see a powerful performance of the Soweto Gospel Choir. 

I am very touched by the response to my post yesterday both in comments and in email.  I knew opening up this vulnerable place would begin to shift things in me again, move me again to that place where honoring my body is a gift rather than a burden.  I am always struggling in some way with the tension between the limits of my body and the calling of my creative inspiration, but it occurred to me that this tension sets up an antagonism between the two which I don’t at all mean to build.  I believe deeply that caring for