cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
Eternity pauses in the middle of this moment. In this creaking chair in the corner of this coffee shop with its cream brick and rounded windows on the north end of Main Street. From southeast Wisconsin, glaring winter is mostly gone. Faded ivy climbs the wall of the building next door as buds cling to…
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Alter Ego: The part of someone’s personality not usually seen by others. — Cambridge Dictionary This week I went away for five days to work on a writing project that I hope will emerge as book this year. In preparation I got some help to create a plan for how to spend my days as productively…
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“We women in our late 40s need a scapegoat,” my doctor, who is the same age, said, “and hormones are usually a viable option.” I wasn’t prepared to hear my doctor use the term “scapegoat.” That’s a term usually reserved for my psychology and religious circles, where abuse is often the topic. But she knows…
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Depth of character in the women of scripture was not a famously taught concept when I was growing up. I have wondered if this was why, for so many years, I related more to men than women since the Bible was the primary source of my educational foundation, having grown up in private Christian schools.…
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Growing up I loved personality tests. I would take and administer them to my friends and family constantly. I was obsessed with understanding more about myself and those around me. When I discovered the Enneagram, you better believe I went down that rabbit hole. The Enneagram helped me better understand my friends, my coworkers, my…
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We often sat in the little room that held the door to the elevator, blocked off by a small set of windows. The carpet wasn’t incredibly comfortable, just generic purple with a bit of a worn-down vibe. The room only saw high traffic on move-in weekends and with the occasional third-floor resident who was too…
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Who am I, and which part of me is real? It happens in the flick of a switch. The war within me between the “best version” and the “far-from-the-mark” mother. It doesn’t take much for this duality to be activated as pieces of my own story are stirred up. Both have a significant impact on…
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First, I wrote Leyla. She was a teen I thought my own teen girls might like. Leyla was for them. A Turkish girl, wandering the old city, who falls into an epic adventure to uncover a secret passed among women for two millennia. As she learns to embrace her own strength, she must also accept…
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In honor of the tenth anniversary of Red Tent Living, we are featuring a monthly legacy post written by one of our regular contributors from the past decade. Jan Meyers Proett is one of the original ten writers. The presence of her words, both here and in her books, has been life giving and restorative…
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She is the ultimate weatherer of storms, a lifetime of inevitable storms because living means storms. You can’t have one without the other. A post-World War I childhood, adolescence forged during the Great Depression, entering adulthood as the nation entered World War II, she lived through storms.
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