Saturday Seventeen Freewrite

I have not had a FREEWRITE since March 9th. Say what? 

I don't think I have been overly busy, but my days are full. So I don't know if this person in the picture is really me. I like the picture though.

I have my non-negotiable things like Centering Prayer, and I think that addition has made it so that I don't end up like the person in the picture above, but I am still trying to figure some things out.

I don't know how many directees is too many. April ended up being a month that was not as busy in direction as it usually is. Part of it was that many of them were at a major conference in Europe and traveling from there, and so many of my people did not meet with me. I liked it in some ways.

I have been having so much fun. I finished The Reservoir devotional, and that was so rich and fun. I read a lot. I am also reading through the Bible Book Club again after not going through the last cycle. I am reading the blog I made starting 15 years ago, and what a difference 15 years can make in my heart and soul. It is encouraging. 

My life is full and rich and meaningful. I love what I am doing. I am finishing up my second "Campfire" group with the 2nd Half Collaborative, and I have LOVED this group. They are so open and vulnerable, and the discussions are so rich and meaningful. I have loved leading with my partner D. I pretty much have facilitated all the group times (other than when I was on the Camino in October), and he has been very supportive and encouraging. I think I have done well with the group. The group is smaller than last year. So it has been so much easier to get through everyone sharing, and most of the time, D or I have been able to share what we learned. We look at INTERIORITY. Then we look at COMMUNITY. Then we look at CONTRIBUTION/MINISTRY. It is really about the Communion/Community/Commission that Henri Nouwen talks about in the message I just linked. 

I love leading the group of new spiritual director. Each month, we go through one to two of their Contemplative Reflection Forms. This is a dialogue between then and their directee. The goal is not to correct how they asked questions, but it is to look at how they felt about themselves as they did direction. I also have two directees who are not in my group who are also spiritual directors. One of them has said that her supervisor is much more "punitive" in how she supervises. ACK! I cannot imagine being this way. The people I am supervising are, no joke, really GOOD at doing direction. So, I cannot imagine being punitive with them. They are the greatest group of people! I feel really blessed by them. 

The other group I lead is a Contemplative Cohort. It is sort of my "guinea pig" group. I am developing a curriculum that would be like a 1st Half Collaborative. It is teaching interiority and doing their ministry out of identity in him. They are not as committed as the above two groups, and I realized that I need a group more committed than this group of women. Some are, and some are not. So, I am evaluating. 

Now, I am still tentatively going to train new directors with Mary and Sandy as an intern for two years. This is a HUGE commitment. I have said yes. I think training directors is in my gifting. My desire is to train directors who will do direction with international workers. 

That is all the time I have. Time to listen to my book, The History of Tom Jones. 

Sweetest Memory of My Week

This picture is holding a place for the sweetest memory of the week. I baked challah bread for our recently widowed neighbor on Friday. When we went to deliver it, we heard beautiful piano music that stopped with our knock. I looked at George and said, “Was he playing?”

He answered the door, grateful for the bread, and said, “Would you like to come in for tea?” (He is a “Cockney” from Central London.)

We spent the most delightful tea time with him. He told us how he met his Cornwall bride of 64 years and how they came to Corvallis USA. He spoke so lovingly of his beloved, Janie. Then, he summed up his 80+ years of life and the choices he has made by quoting “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (the whole thing).

If that wasn’t enough to make our day, he said, “Would you like to hear a song?” We gladly replied, “Yes,” and he ushered us into his tiny living room that held a beautiful grand piano and played “I Love You Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel without any music. He didn’t even know the name of the song. He had just heard it and learned to play it by ear.

We left speechless and in awe.

I did not bring my camera. Perhaps that was better to savor every moment of that song.

This picture is to hold this day in my memory forever. It was blessed.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Oh, I have such mixed emotions about this book! 

First, great compassion for this woman. What a life! YIKES! I do hope she has gotten OODLES of therapy. 

Second, was her dad really a "closeted gay"? I would say he was a pedophile. Sick man. Mom should have gotten them OUT OF THAT HOUSE and that town.

Interesting note, I keyed in that he was head of the "Clinton County Historical Society," and realized it was MY ANCESTORS Clinton County, Pennsylvania. So, the author grew up less than an hour away from the town my grandmother grew up in and got out of (some of my relatives still live there). 

I am intrigued that there was a musical done on this!

WARNING: Some of the cartoons are sexually inappropriate and could have been left out! 

Right after reading this, I saw on the news that this book is in an elementary school! NOOOOOOO!!! It is not appropriate for children. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

One might expect a graphic narrative to be lean, wry, linear. Yet the pioneering triumph of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is that it’s resonantly rich in thought and theme, nuanced in its framing and feeling, and contrapuntal in its treatment of chronology, character, and incident. Bechdel imbues her story with an expressive pulse that moves from words to pictures and back again like an intricate melody passed between the instruments of a string quartet. The memoir is the story of a pre-adolescent girl with two brothers who comes to certain realizations about herself and her family. A labyrinthine web of literary echoes and mythological invocations captures the emerging complexity of her intelligence, and you have to read her images with as much attention as her allusive, probing, and alert prose. More than metaphorically, it’s a handmade book, and lived time is layered into every panel. 

Laughing in the Hills

This is another book I never would have picked up if it weren't on my list. He is a good writer, and he incorporates history into the whole thing. I cannot say it is a favorite book, but it was OK. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Author Bill Barich started playing the horses out of the desperation bred by his mother’s battle with cancer. Other family sadnesses followed, and to escape their shadow, he decided to spend a season at Golden Gate Fields, a thoroughbred racetrack outside San Francisco. Barich’s attentive, anecdotal account of track life is keenly observed and placed in intriguingly wider contexts by his off-track learning; you’ll discover a good deal in these pages about the city of Florence and its Renaissance culture, for instance, and the author is ingenious enough to place his reading in conversation with the racing life around him. It is the kind of book that, once you’ve finished it, will make you long to be asked, “Read anything good lately?” You don’t need to love horse racing to fall in love with this book. 

American Pastoral

What a masterpiece! It is on every list for American fiction. It has some brief unsavory sexual parts, but overall, it is such a reflective historical novel. The main character was born in New Jersey the same year my mother was born in Chicago. So, I could have been the daughter in this story, but thank the Lord I was not. I think it should be on the list. 

"An unexamined existence no longer serves his needs. He wants something recorded." Chapter 1

Another significant quote:

“You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and yet you never fail to get them wrong. You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion. ... The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that -- well, lucky you.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

The meaning of the title that is quoted toward the end of the book:

“And it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligionized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds all. A moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion of the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the year. A moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone else. It is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hours.”
― Philip Roth, American Pastoral

What Wikipedia says about the title and conclusion of the main character: 

Seymour sadly concludes that everyone he knows may have a veneer of respectability, but each engages in subversive behavior and that he cannot understand the truth about anyone based upon the conduct they outwardly display. He is forced to see the truth about the chaos and discord rumbling beneath the "American pastoral", which has brought about profound personal and societal changes he no longer can ignore. Simultaneously, the dinner party underscores the fact that no one ever truly understands the hearts of other people.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

It’s easy to begin talking about American Pastoral by noting its central place in the Zuckerman Saga, a series of nine novels that follow the fortunes of Nathan Zuckerman, a novelist who shares an awful lot of characteristics with his creator (make that ten fictions if you count The Facts, from 1988, an ostensible autobiography that opens with a letter from Roth to Zuckerman and closes with one from Zuckerman to Roth). But what’s most memorable about this 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner is the way the author engages the subject of America with a fervor few novelists have dared since World War II. Passages of American Pastoral, especially those describing what was destroyed in the 1967 Newark riots, have a fierce and grieving majesty seldom matched in our literature. In telling the Swede’s story, albeit in the voice of Nathan Zuckerman, Philip Roth embraces his past with an almost penitential reverence, honoring the world that made him—and is now forever gone—with nostalgic, rueful, angry tenderness.

Lonesome Dove

The writing is so rich, and the character development is excellent. I had heard about this because the 1989 mini-series won numerous Emmy Awards. My husband and I are watching it now.

I agree with Mustich! See below. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

Men of action require a field to work, and few fields have proven as fertile in this regard—in life and in the imagination—as the American West. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 epic, Lonesome Dove, may be its richest literary harvest. Set in the late 1870s, it tells the story of a cattle drive from the Rio Grande to Montana, led by two former Texas Rangers, Augustus (Gus) McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, who have been friends for three decades. Along the way, McMurtry enlists all the familiar elements of Western lore: a hero capable and wise, yet easygoing (Gus), and another stoic, reticent, and duty-driven (Call); a whore with a heart, if not of gold, then glittering with allure; rogues disguised as friends; hostile Indians and bands of renegades; sheriffs in relentless pursuit and women both passionate and profoundly pragmatic; and a young cowboy who will inherit the dusty dreams of his elders. For all its cowboy grit and glory, Lonesome Dove is more than just a celebration of the Western ethos. 

Jesus and John Wayne

I thought this was going to be more about patriarchy in the church and less about politics. It was mostly politics, and something that I don't get involved with.

As a biblical feminist for my whole adult life, I did not see all that she said as evident in all iterations of evangelical Christianity. That is simply hyperbole.  

It is a man's world. That is evident in both the secular and sacred. Mainline Protestantism and evangelicalism. The MeToo movement and all the sex scandals in the secular and sacred world shows us this. Patriarchy is a problem. I do not doubt this. But she just wanted to shoot down one segment of the population while making another segment seem like they are perfect and wonderful. (You do know that Bill Clinton has his own history of sexual assault and his abuse of power when it comes to women, right?). 

It happens on both sides of the aisle, and it is equally disgusting. 

She went through a ton of history that I already knew. So, I was pretty bored. 

There were some things that I laughed at because they were factually inaccurate, and someone who does not know history is going to assume that it is history rather than just the author's interpretation of history. We are all entitled to our opinion though, but it should be stated as so rather than saying it is a fact. I wouldn't want my kid in one of her classes. I would want a balanced view of things. 

So now I know what all the fuss is about, and for that reason, I am glad I read it! 

A Year in Provence

After struggling through Adventures on the Wine Route a few books back, one of the people who also slogged through it said that this book would be much better. I heartily agree. It is delightful. 

A British couple moves to Provence. It is about cross-cultural communication, country life, and good food and wine. Delightful.

I liked the series by the same name too. It is a bit dated, but it followed the book really well! 

We want to go now and try a Patis!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

James Mustich

This charming narrative, in which former advertising executive Peter Mayle chronicles his inaugural year as a British expatriate in Provence, offers a refreshing respite from one’s own routine. In pursuit of a long-savored dream of the sweet life in the South of France, Mayle and his wife purchased a two-hundred-year-old stone farmhouse between the medieval hill villages of Ménerbes and Bonnieux in the Luberon, set to work on its restoration, and settled—sometimes with élan, sometimes with awkward Englishness—into the rhythms and rituals of Provençal life.

Women Talking

All I can say is WOW! I highly recommend this book. I saw the movie. So I had to read the book. It is written in the voice of the only male in the room because he is the only one who knows how to write. 

It is based on the story here: 

https://time.com/6250526/women-talking-mennonite-bolivia-real-story/ 

It might be my favorite book this year. It is so important to discuss this. Patriarchy is real and not biblical, people. This is an extreme example, but it happens in milder forms. 

Freewrite: GLORY!

One of my directees yesterday is going to be speaking on glory. After our session, I took a walk (typical of what I do to digest the time and process it with the Lord). I walked up near the "Wildrose Loop" and saw the clouds parting, giving way to the sun. I entitled it "Pathway to Glory" and sent it to my directee. There was something glorious about that sun that had just come through after the clouds parted. 

It has been a good week. I have eaten too much, but I had a good talk with God about this this morning and am back on track.

My back is a little wonky too. I have not had back wonkiness since maybe last Spring when I was teaching my last classes in May. I think not wearing a lift in my shoe to church did it. That is all I can say that I possibly could have done. So strange. 

We went to see Jesus Revolution at the Regal. Who knew I had an account for the Regal Club and was able to get our tickets for $5 Tuesday! It was such a beautiful movie. (See my review of the book a few days ago). I cried through the whole movie. So beautiful, and I LIVED IT! I was part of the Jesus Movement (we didn't call it a Revolution back then). My heart is warmed. I highly recommend watching it. Talked to my spiritual director today, and she knew one of the people in the movie because she was part of the beginnings of the Vineyard. So fun to hear her perspective on things. 

One Way - JESUS!

Speaking of my director, I just love her! She is a great lady. She challenged me to talk to someone about something. Usually, she does not tell me what to do, and she pretty much said at the end, "Just talk to ________." So, I will. I am really not that afraid, and I know that it will be received well. I just have a lot going on right now. 

A lot going on but not too much. I just love the balance of input and output I have going on, and God just seems to give me that balance as I have asked him to do it. I was willing to make time for a couple this morning even though it would be meant two days in a row of more activity, but they canceled, and I think this was just what I needed to do. I was able to process what my director said to me rather than going on to the "next thing" with this couple. So, it is good. Now all there is left is leading Silent/Centering Prayer at 12:15 today, and I think I am going to do what I have already done with a directee from last Thursday, Friday, and twice yesterday. It is so good. I have not really meditated on this poem in a while. So soaking in it before going into Centering Prayer has been so good. So good. My director did something she had done with me before (maybe two or three years ago?), but it was great. 

So I am going to go ahead and repeat what I did with this group last September. The probability is that most of them were not there for it anyway!

I just finished two books today and am looking to read a new one, but Libby app seems to not be working right now. Thus, why I am writing this Freewrite.

The rest of the week is just prepping for the Instinct class tomorrow and leading it on Saturday. So the week peeked yesterday and is going downhill now! It culminates in a dinner with the Wrobs on Saturday night since we had to cancel two weeks ago due to her sickness. 

I am looking forward to it. Well, off to maybe take a little walk and do some stretching and hoping my back loosens up! 

Learning Humility

I loved this book. It might be the final one by Richard Foster. It is winsome and wise and HUMBLE. It is Richard's musings about humilty over the course of a year. He follows the different moons of the Lakota Indians. It is lovely. I have especially loved having the podcasts and journaling prompts that are provided by the Renovare Book Club. 

Adventures on the Wine Route: A Wine Buyer's Tour of France

This book took me ages to read. This isn't a subject I would have ever dreamed of pursuing, and I had to spend time looking up word after word. But oddly enough, I ended up learning so much! 

This guy could probably learn a little bit about cross-cultural communication though. He seems to offend a lot of French winemakers along the way! 

I feel like it was a feat to have finally "finis"! 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

In 1972, a young man named Kermit Lynch opened a little wine shop in Berkeley, California, hoping to introduce neighborhood customers to the sort of artisanal wines he was passionate about. A year later, invited to accompany an importer on a buying trip to France, he discovered his true calling. In the decades between then and now, Lynch has sniffed, swirled, and tasted his way to prominence as one of America’s most renowned importers of wines of character made the old-fashioned way—especially those that won’t break the bank. Part memoir and part travelogue, Adventures on the Wine Route is also a manifesto about the wine business and the ways in which conglomeration, trends, and market demands can threaten the very things that make the fruit of the vine worth savoring. Peppered with gorgeous (and often amusing) black-and-white photos by Gail Skoff, the book is suffused with the qualities the author seeks in casks and bottles—nuance, surprise, subtlety, expression, authenticity. By turns wise and very funny, Lynch—to say nothing of the many quirky vignerons he introduces us to—is good company indeed on this delightfully readable tour of the wine regions of France.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle

This is absurd. The fact that Bill Bryson loved it intrigued me (you have to read his Note from a Small Island), but I think Bryson is much funnier. It does make fun of mountaineering, and I think anyone who would want to climb Everest is a little crazy.

I would not have put it on the list, but...

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Originally published in Britain in the 1950s at the peak of mountaineering’s prominence in the public eye—Everest, after all, had just been conquered in 1953—The Ascent of Rum Doodle is an inspired send-up of expedition books in general, and of climbing and its literature in particular. Imagine Three Men in a Boat Go Mountaineering or Monty Python Climbs the Matterhorn, and you’ll get some idea of the hilarity Bowman provokes in this small gem of literary comedy.

Lost Illusions

I LOVED this book. This is my second Balzac novel. This was much better written, and it was a page turner. This man could write. I was transported back to a time where class and geography (provincial city versus Paris) meant everything (maybe it still does?) in France.

I cannot wait to get the 2021 movie from the library, but I have to wait for 9 more people to watch it before me. Maybe the summer?

What a tale. I don't want to spoil it. 

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

Lost Illusions is a massive novel—more than six hundred pages. Written in three parts between 1837 and 1843, its several story lines conspire to display most of the author’s abiding concerns: the claustrophobic dullness of provincial society and the ruthless snobbery of its Parisian counterpart; the wounds inflicted by every class distinction; the corruption of love and art by money and intrigue; the tawdry expediencies of the literary world; the cynicism of the press; the energies of commerce and industry; youth’s endless capacity for delusion. Balzac no doubt poured his own youthful disenchantments into Lost Illusions. But he filters these disappointments through an intelligence so alert to every nuance of physical, social, and commercial experience that his novel exudes a loyalty to life that no amount of disillusion can diminish.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

I am doing this post and realize I read the WRONG book! LOL! It has the same title as the one that Mustich says you should read. 

It was a very good book, and the title comes from the book that is referred to in this book.

This one is about an Australian in a POW camp. It is exquisitely written but has some parts that made me physically ill! 

I am still laughing that I didn't read the one on the list! 

Here is the summary by Amazon:

A novel of the cruelty of war, and tenuousness of life and the impossibility of love.

Richard Flanagan's story — of Dorrigo Evans, an Australian doctor haunted by a love affair with his uncle's wife — journeys from the caves of Tasmanian trappers in the early twentieth century to a crumbling pre-war beachside hotel, from a Thai jungle prison to a Japanese snow festival, from the Changi gallows to a chance meeting of lovers on the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

The Jesus Revolution: How God Transformed an Unlikely Generation and How We Can Do It Again Today

I am going to see the movie today. When I reserved this book a while back, I didn't even know they were making a movie out of it. 

This book sent me back to a memory of being in the First Baptist Church of El Segundo, CA (a beach city in Southern California) sometime in the early 70s, on a Sunday night. There were hippies and congregants, young and old, gathered in the center aisle between the pews, holding hands and singing a modern Christian song (was it "We are One in the Spirit" or "It Only Takes a Spark"? - I cannot remember.). All I know is that it is a warm memory of people coming together from different backgrounds: non-churched and churched, in worship to our uniting Lord. It still gives me chills: GOD WAS IN OUR MIDST.

Who knew it was a revolution? I just saw it as a taste of heaven. 

I am in tears right now. Loved reading this book and being one of those non-churched people who came to Jesus in the process.

Praise be to our wonderful LORD.

Come, Lord Jesus.

(Going to see the movie in a few hours.)

Lenten Reflections: Friday Freewrite Fifteen

It was a sort of a holy moment just now. So I thought I would freewrite my Lenten reflections. 

How to you explain those encounters with God? I guess I cannot, but I could just talk about things that I loved about this morning. 

Meditating in the Sermon on the Mount was rich. I am still going through The Reservoir by Renovare.

What I liked most from this morning was going to the Ignatian Spirituality Center Friday Prayer. Many times I am not able to go because I meet with directees on Friday mornings, but I decided that I would not schedule anyone until 7:30 am (usually only one directee on a Friday). Their Lent retreat is on "Lives to Inspire," and this morning was a summary of the first few days. They just happened to be my three favorites: Ignatius, Benedict, Teresa of Avila. It was delightful, and I just listened to John Michael Talbot sing the famous quote by Teresa of Avila:

“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.”

I really love this rendition of this quote:

I loved this:

Thought for the Day

Teresa describes prayer as being initially hard work, akin to going back and forth watering a garden from the well. If we persevere prayer becomes a little easier, more like watering the garden with a watering wheel. As we continue to deepen our prayer, the experience flows more easily like a stream providing irrigation. Finally, prayer is understood as God’s gift, it falls freely like rain to water the garden. The initiative is entirely with God. The period when Teresa describes experiencing prayer in this fourth way was the busiest period in her life, founding Carmelite monasteries all over Spain. There is a real link between this prayer and action.

How would you describe your own experience of growing in prayer?

Perhaps you would like today to take a walk with God around your own “well-watered garden” and have a conversation about what you notice there.

Thursday Morning Thirteen

I have had a pretty free week. We were wondering why, but I think it was because we were gone this week last month for traveling to Anne's wedding. So, when I have been scheduling my directees four weeks out from their last sessions, there was no one being scheduled out from this week last month. 

I enjoyed it. I did lead a small group for the 2HC, which makes sense because I met with them while I was on the road last month because that was a set thing I had committed to leading every month. We stopped in Chowchilla at a good hotel, with good wi-fi so that I could lead the group.

Leading that group was the highlight of my week, really. One, I love this group. They are a really neat group of people, and they are committed to doing the work throughout the month and coming to the group sharing time. There was a lot that came out of that group sharing too, and I think the pot is being stirred for many of them in all the right ways. It is stirring things in my soul. 

One of the things we did was to evaluate our spiritual community in terms of Henri Nouwen's talk on Communion with God, Community with others, and Ministry (Commission) to others. We were supposed to draw a picture of how that looked for us, and I could not think of a picture. I drew one last time, and I wanted to have a fresh one for this year, but nothing was coming - even after my drawing time during our community worship on Sunday.

But then George brought me my malt-o-meal breakfast, and it said, "I did it in circles," not knowing that Nouwen talks about the above in terms of circles! 

He had done a big tablespoon lump of brown sugar in the middle and cut my string cheese in little circles spread throughout the Malt-O-Meal. Then there was the circle of the Malt-O-Meal. So, God and communion are the brown sugar, the little string cheese circles are the community, and the circle of Malt-O-Meal is the world. 

When it all gets stirred up, God permeates the world, and the people melt into the cereal too. There is unity and oneness in it all.

(Then on top of all that, my time with God the next day was on COMMUNITY - and Pray as You Go also had a theme that went along with it.) 

Then I put a couple of pictures with our community actually discussing the article around our fire table (I am reading about Hygge too - so I was trying to create a cozy time for everyone.) and all of us at the annual prayer event as we pray for the world. 

I know it probably only makes sense to ME!

There is the timer.

A Bullet in the Ballet

I liked this story! It was funny and a mystery at the same time. Not much more to say!

Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:

This distinctively funny British novel—the first in a series of four centering on the fortunes of impresario Vladimir Stroganoff and his rambunctious ballet troupe—delivers comedy in high style. As readers will soon gather, Stroganoff and his dancers are remarkable largely for their off-stage antics and their unbridled eccentricities. Lovers of ballet will find the work of Brahms and Simon doubly delightful; the former was a dance critic in the London press, the latter a journalist who was also a master bridge player (which taught him, evidently, exactly when to hold and when to play his jokes). Yet there is more than enough wit, hilarity, and abandon to bring great pleasure to any reader, even a confirmed balletophobe. While A Bullet in the Ballet is a murder mystery replete with corpses, suspects, interrogations, and revelations, suspense plays second fiddle to the decidedly screwball melody. This reader would have it no other way.

Friday Morning Freewrite

Here I am with a fifteen minute timer. I am listening to a book called The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It is about Australians in a POW Camp during World War II. I need a break, and the sun is shining for the last time today at 10:13 because the clouds are coming in. I really "should" be out walking, but I have not gotten myself out of my chair. 

We had a pastoral coach stay here for a couple of days while she and another coach debriefed an international worker. She was delightful, and we had much in common. I liked her. 

I am tired. I didn't have a ton of directees this week. So I am not sure why I am. Maybe just having a guest makes you always on your toes? I don't know.

I also finished the audiobook A Bullet at the Ballet. It was a pretty good read. 

I have been consistently having Two 20 minute sits for Centering Prayer this week, and it really has been good and transformative! I don't know the mechanism behind all this, but after that coordinators meeting, I read on their website:

One time a day for maintenance

Two times a day for transformation

I had never read that before. I usually will have a time in the middle of the day anywhere from 20-30 minutes. Then I will do another one at another time, but it might be shorter. But the website quote intrigued me. Why not try this for a week?

Well, again, I don't know the mechanism, but focusing my gaze on God twice a day HAS been transformative. Letting go at other times have been so much easier. I dropped a mug on a crystal salad bowl we were given as a wedding present. It was beautiful. but I said, "Oh well." (Come to think of it, I think it was a regifted wedding gift from a couple that divorced within five years. Then she passed away in her 20s. You ask me how I know that it was regifted? They left the card they received from the original gift giver IN THE BOX! Uh-oh!).

Back to the salad bowl. It wasn't a big deal. I didn't have to convince myself it was a big deal. I just let it go instantaneously with the shattering of the bowl. 

Is this the result of Centering Prayer? I don't know, but there were other things that happened this week. Little things, but there was this baseline peace that was always there and is here as I type.

I love this Friday because we had this guest. So I didn't schedule anything for today. It was great. 

I like meeting new people. 

I was asked by someone on our field leadership team to be their "overseer" but really it is more like spiritual direction, and I am honored. I think I will do it. 

I also think I will be an intern to become a trainer of spiritual directors. They really are my people more than any other people I have ever met. So, training people who want to become directors will be really lovely. 

Well, I am getting the itch to go out and walk a bit. I think I will take a flat route and just walk with no destination in mind (which might be to go get a gift for George's 61st birthday). 

Bye.