Dear Friends,
I Wonder - how have you all been doing? The weeks are stretching on in our new normal and while that’s okay, I am starting to imagine myself into new stories. When I step outside, the air smells like spring and I just want to talk through my neighborhood, but I refrain. Sometimes I sit in our sparse backyard, but it’s not the same. I live where there are mountains and streams and so much wildlife (the bears have been wandering the neighborhood over the last week) and I want to drink it all up.
Lacking all this, I am using my Sacred Imagination.
There are a lot of stories of captivity, of being stuck, but sometimes I think we need something smaller. My community of children hasn’t entered the spiral curriculum yet. They are new to the wondering. They come to it, but I am trying to choose points of entry that make sense, that open the story. So far we’ve told Creation, Baptism, and Advent. We are still at the beginning.
And so, I wanted to offer another story today, and some inspired wondering. This is “How to Paint the Portrait of a Bird” by Jacques Prevert. It’s a story about patience and about creation and even about repetition.
So, I Wonder… what are you waiting for?
And I Wonder… where you happy place might be?
I Wonder… if you have songs you sing that help you come to that place.
And, more than anything, I Wonder how much longer we will have to wait. I will wait as long as we must, would wait for years to keep people safe, but I miss my friends and I am sure you miss your.
Still, I sing -
And especially I sing Jess Ray’s “In The Meantime” - a powerful reminder that all things happen in God’s time. I sing it while cooking and washing dishes and in the shower. Singing is at the core of how I think about ora et labora, but more on that some other time.
If you’re looking for more stories, I recently learned - care of the wonderful Wendy Claire Barrie - that Daneen Akers has been sharing stories from the wonderful Holy Troublemakers & Unconventional Saints. They’re all fantastic, but this week I commend to you her profile of Rachel Held Evans, entitled “It’s Okay To Have Big Questions”. I’m reading RHE’s “Searching For Sunday” because grownups have big questions too.
In The Meantime,
A. Bird