Thanks to everyone who has submitted their poems already for the Poetry Party!  11 participants on the very first day is a great showing.  Make sure to scroll down or click here to see the fun.  And make sure to check out Annie Thorndike’s wonderful poem, I think our youngest ever participant at the age of 9.  Annie is the daughter of Rebecca who participated in our recent Awakening the Creative Spirit program.  Remember you have until Friday to share your poems here and then I’ll draw one person’s name to win a small prize. In light of our celebration

Advent begins a week from today and it is one of my favorite liturgical seasons in the Christian tradition.  Advent begins the new church year and is a season about waiting, preparing, and birthing.  It also occurs at one of my favorite times of year, this slow descent toward winter and the solstice.  This autumn was beautiful in the Northwest, and I kept thinking maybe it was my favorite season, but these last couple of weeks the trees are revealing in their essence again and those bare branches and the sun low in the sky make my heart dance (and I

***Make sure you go visit this week’s Poetry Party***  Your poems this week about hidden rooms are as evocative and amazing as ever.  Click the link above and continue to submit them and I’ll keep adding them! Early this past summer I had another dream about a hidden room:  My husband and I move into a new apartment which is much smaller than the one we live in now.  We are having dinner guests over and I’m not sure where they will sit.  I open a door I hadn’t tried before and behind it I find this large room decorated with antique furniture and

(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