Acknowledging that most if not all of us have experiences of deeply entrenched racism in our personal lives, in our family story, is a first, fierce step toward spiritually, practically and creatively practicing nonviolence. In attempting to embody nonviolence in her own life, Minnijean Brown-Tricky began by tracing her personal narrative of nonviolence and “the…
DetailsPicture this: Last winter, my husband and I spent days decorating our house to look like a grand ballroom in the heart of New Orleans. We cooked a four-course dinner, complete with jambalaya, shrimp with remoulade sauce and beignets. We got in Mardi Gras costumes and donned our masks and beads. And then our eight…
DetailsThree years ago, Sister Helen Prejean, a tireless advocate for abolishing the death penalty, came to speak at Coe College and stayed with us at Prairiewoods. It was an honor to both meet and spend time with Sister Helen, whom I have admired for years. Today, following the execution of Daniel Lee by the federal…
DetailsI’d like to begin by stating the obvious. Chipmunks are adorable. It is impossible not to fall in immediate love with each one of them. However, my dearest love is a feisty three-inch tall beauty with long dark eyelashes, who lives in a hollowing piece of wood. (My house is next to hers, and I…
Details“St. John’s Wort is one of the so-called St. John’s herbs—which also include yarrow, mugwort, fennel, and elder; they would be picked on St. John’s birthday and hung over doors and windows to keep evil spirits away.” —Caz Hildebrand, Herbarium (2016) If ever there was a time when we needed help in keeping evil spirits…
DetailsMany Iowans relish and quote the lines, “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa!” from the iconic movie Field of Dreams. The film is a baseball lover’s paradise in which an Iowa farmer hears a voice that inspires him to plow under his corn crop and build a baseball field. Who would do that? Despite the economic…
DetailsOne of my favorite flowers is the rose. Go figure! As a child, I used to really, I mean really, dislike my name. Why would my parents name their oldest child after a flower of all things? I was teased relentlessly at times, called every other flower but my name, Rose. People expected me to…
DetailsWe long for a peaceful and just world. Shortly after the catastrophic event of 9/11, a beautiful poem of Judyth Hill’s circulated. All were invited to “Wage peace with your breath / breathe in fireman and rubble / breathe out whole buildings / and flocks of redwing black birds …” Challenging the violence then, Hill’s…
DetailsLast week on our PanDeepening blog, I talked about the Kindness Rocks project that is filling our world with color and kindness. You’ve likely seen cute rocks that people are painting and leaving in the community for strangers to find as an act of generosity and kindness. Now I’d like to invite you to paint…
DetailsLocal Cedar Rapids writer Lyz Lenz tweeted on Monday: “When this is over I’m never spending time alone with my thoughts ever again.” On a Monday morning—following a holiday weekend typically known for its social spirit but this year spent largely alone—I completely agreed. This introvert had had enough solitude! All it took to remind…
DetailsOne of my favorite books by Joyce Rupp is Prayer Seeds: A Gathering of Blessings, Reflections, and Poems for Spiritual Growth. In the prayer “The Container of Your Heart,” we’re invited to hold our hands in the shape of a small bowl and let that symbolize the container of our heart. We begin the prayer…
DetailsMusic brings resilience and strength. A story, an invocation or a verse shared in song travels beyond reaches of rational thought to make its home in the soul’s memory. In his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King Jr. said that song was the soul of the Civil Rights Movement. Hope and determination…
DetailsThis time of PanDeepening has called many of us to open our minds and our hearts and to broaden our awareness of the larger Earth community of which we are part. As we reflect on the wider “We,” we human-kin might find ourselves at a loss for understanding the languages of our plant- and creature-kin, our…
Details“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.” —Joseph Campbell These summer mornings I love waking up during the pre-dawn moments before the “robin concertmaster” sounds the first pitch of the morning symphony waking up a sleeping world. She announces…
DetailsThe spiritual practice of living a nonviolent life poses tremendous challenge today in a world where it seems pent up anger, bitterness, dualism and resentment erupt into rage and disrespect for life. To counter such violence, how can we even begin to live nonviolence, to talk about nonviolence and to respond from an inner, grounded…
DetailsSmall Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from…
Details“If we reach common ground, and can understand what everybody’s going through, we can really affect change. And make sure that everyone is treated equally and has the same freedom.” —Colin Kaepernick One day, as I walked the land at Prairiewoods, I saw the tree photographed above. Note how it stands in a place of…
DetailsA couple of years ago I had two special people in two separate conversations suggest the book Braiding Sweetgrass to me. Sister Nancy suggested it one day when we were talking about books and then not long after that my friend Sara happened to be at Prairiewoods with that very book in her hand. She’d…
DetailsLast week, when the rain came, I found myself awash in its energy while also dry-of-foot. I walked through the gardens and trails at Prairiewoods and found the message I needed in that moment. Donning my waterproof boots, straw hat and little blue umbrella, I held presence with the rushing stream, the dripping canopy, and…
DetailsNear Stonehenge, the recent discovery of subterranean Neolithic shafts forming a two-kilometer wide ring up to ten meters across and five meters deep around the “super henge” at Durrington Walls has caused quite an archeological stir. The structures have been carbon dated to about 2500 B.C.E. Research on Stonehenge itself has been the focus of…
Details
