A Moment at a Time: Hope for a Nonviolent World 

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…

Memories from Past Garden Parties

Picture 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…

Fielding a Dream for the Wider “We”

Many 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…

Shooting Star Rock Painting

Last 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…

Song & Time Travel

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…

Living A Nonviolent Life

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…

Kindness Rocks

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…

Demarcations

“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…