cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
Red Tent Living is a community of women from across the world reading, writing, reflecting, and responding to one another daily as we reframe what it means to be feminine. We welcome you to join in the conversation and submit your own work!
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Purpose: Once a month gatherings for 6-8 women that include enjoying a meal together and taking time to share pieces of their lives with one another. It is a place where believers and non believers in Jesus can experience community as they find connection in unexpected ways with one another.
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One short block away is the beach. The soundtrack of the waves rolling consistently onto the shore travels the distance in the cool and refreshing tailwinds. Wrapped in a large beach towel, I notice the softness and warmth of its fabric and the vertical stripes of its rainbow colors. Sitting in the dark of morning,…
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For the month of June the women of Red Tent Living will be considering the theme, The Lost Cause. Join us by reading along or by gathering some women around your own table to share stories provoked by this theme.
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Black spandex leggings—“Spanx”—hug her tightly. The wide waistband at the top stretches across her abdomen, smoothing and holding her core. On top she wears a long-sleeved black top, silhouetting her curves nicely. The rust and burgundy crushed velvet flowers covering her duster make a bold statement as she walks.
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I’m standing in front of my closet, swapping heavy, dark winter wear for the brighter, lighter garments of spring. When the annual exchange is complete, I begin to look through a neighboring rack of dresses, nearly untouched during the last year spent largely at home. I pass by one, two, three black dresses before I…
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It’s Monday, and in-person schooling for my second and fourth grader are finally underway. Schedules are set, school devices charged, extra masks in backpacks. The house is quiet. There is nowhere I need to be and no one who needs me. Then…
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In the late Sunday summer afternoons of Eastern North Dakota, the sun is already beating its way through our Ford Pinto windows and onto the black vinyl seats we are about to gingerly put our bare skin on. There are four of us who need to get into the car and, luckily, no car seats…
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Who is the woman in black? Is she you? Is she me? Is she a woman with stunning beauty, wearing a little black dress? Is she a woman hiding her body, hoping to distract you with a slimming dark color? Is she a woman in mourning, grieving a loss so deep? Or is she a…
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I had begun to notice Muttsy’s decline about three months earlier. She’d developed a little cough, which wasn’t unusual, considering we’d gone on a month’s stay in Austin, which had a polar-opposite climate to Northern Colorado’s in the winter. Like most minor health annoyances, I figured this one would come and go.
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“The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Romans 8:26 I notice the black turtleneck as we meet. As we sit down, I hear her sigh deeply. She looks at me, eyes searching. Neither…
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“The irony of man’s condition is that the deepest need is to be free from the anxiety of death; but it is life itself that awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.” — Ernest Becker I have been struck recently by some people’s freedom to talk about death. The number of recessed…
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