cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
When my friend Ted died from esophageal cancer, he was my seventh friend to die in seven years. I was bereft. Ted and I had been close friends for thirty years. By his generosity, he inspired me to be generous, and he also fostered my love of travel. Because of him, I have had some…
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“We both have truths; are mine the same as yours?” Pontius Pilate asks Jesus in the movie Jesus Christ Superstar. That line has stayed with me since the movie’s 1973 debut. That was the first year I was living on my own, disowned by my family, divorced from my husband, disconnected from myself, and feeling…
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My best friend, Jim, was the most predictable person I had ever known. I called him “The Man With a Plan” because he approached every day and every situation as though he knew what to expect. I marveled at his ability to stay calm and deal with whatever came along.
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*Trigger warning that today’s post contains a story of sexual violence. Through very little thought or planning on my part, my work life fell into place and eventually developed into a career plan. When I was twenty, I started working in a clerical job at a federal law enforcement agency, and over the next eight…
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Although I grew up in a large city (Detroit), I only inhabited one small part of it, what is locally known as the east side. Woodward Avenue divided the east side from the west side of Detroit, and I had no reason to cross Woodward Avenue. Everything I needed was available on the east side,…
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At seventy-one, I accept the reality that I am living the third third of my life. Sometimes the realization frightens me, but at other times, it brings me peace. There is nothing I can do about time marching on, so I may as well relax and enjoy. The realization that I am living the last…
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When I was in my mid 20s, a woman at church, who was just a few years older than me, had gone home to bury her mother; her father had died a few years earlier. “I am an orphan,” she said upon her return. I thought it was one of the oddest things I had…
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As I reflect on Genesis 3:8, the word “hid” catches my attention, and a memory comes back to me from when I worked at an organization called Citizen Advocates. My job was to recruit local community members to become advocates for people who had developmental disabilities and no one in their lives to speak up…
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Learning about Spanish culture was one part of my college summer school program in Madrid, Spain, and that meant churches, museums, bullfights, and flamenco dances. There were also many visits to nightclubs—called discotecas—but I don’t think my professors considered those part of my cultural education. I thoroughly enjoyed every museum and would gladly return to…
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Mark Nepo, in The Book of Awakening, page 205, writes: “…finding where I fit in the world feels a lot like spiritual fishing. The vast, mysterious ocean of experience keeps calling, and…I keep hauling up food…from a common depth no one can see, and then I spend time cleaning what I’ve found and hearing what…
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