Category: Life

Back in One of My Happy Places

The view from my apartment at the Collegeville Institute.

After three Covid-forced years away, I’m back at the Collegeville Institute this week and next, leading a workshop called Apart and Yet a Part. I couldn’t be happier.

For the next ten days, I’ll be meeting individually with writers who will spend their days with no commitments other working on their own writing. Evenings, we’ll have dinner together and post-dinner discussions about writing and life, a book exchange, a meditation walk, and a final-night reading of new material.

This is the land of Minnesota Nice, which isn’t as glib as it sounds. Our power was out this morning and it strengthened my belief in humanity just to watch the staff here interact with the physical plant workers who came to get us back online. Everyone was respectful and helpful and thankful and had a good sense of humor. Why aren’t we all this way with each other all the time?

The Beauty and Care of Children

Yesterday morning, I heard the sound of children’s voice, and when I looked out the window, a preschool teacher was taking a picture of her students with our ridiculously large rhododendron as the background.

Those sweet faces and smiles were exactly what I needed to see after the awful news out of Texas the day before.

Leaving aside, for a moment, the discussion of guns and gun violence in this country, we need to do everything we can to protect our children in every way, not only from killings but also poverty, neglect, and abuse. If we aren’t willing to care for and protect children, whether they are ours or someone else’s, what kind of a society are we?

Still There Is Much That Is Fair…

I took this picture after a fierce deluge battered our just-blooming dogwood tree yesterday. It seems a good illustration of the Tolkien quote below–the kind of reminder I need with all that is going on these days.

“The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien

Halfway Through My Pandemic Project: Reading the Entire Bible in German

In early April 2020, when we were less than a month into the pandemic shutdown, I was going through some old books and found a copy of the Bible in German a friend had given my wife years before. The cover said the writing inside was in “heutigem Deutsch,” which means contemporary German.

I’d never read the entire Bible before and I’d been wanting to improve my German, so I decided to make reading that Bible my pandemic project. I figured if I could average two chapters a day, I could read the whole thing in about three years.

That was exactly a year and a half ago, and yesterday I reached the halfway point in my reading. I still have a year and a half to go, but I have no doubt now I’ll finish. That’s one good thing that has come from this awful pandemic period.

Here’s a look at my low-tech record-keeping: