Local 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…
One 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…
Music 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…
“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…
The 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…
Small 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…
“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…
A 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…
Last 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…
Near 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…