I got another storage alert from my phone this morning. There is no space left, and my phone will no longer function appropriately. There is no space left. I take photos again and again that swallow space, sitting unused and unappreciated, views that (at least at one time) had soothed…

I’ve watched for decades the way that people needing to be right, or worse, needing to be righteous, destroy the secure sense of safety necessary within their intimate relationships. The only way to win is not to play. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about defensiveness, looking at ways in…

You prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies…(Psalm 23:5) Something about the 23rd psalm conveys a sense of safety all the way through. Safety and provision. If I think back and try to pinpoint what I felt the first time I read this passage consciously as…

When you wake up in the morning, what is the first sensation you feel in your body? What are the first thoughts seeping into your awareness? And when you sit down to meditate or pray, and you allow the silence to settle around you, what kind of voices interrupt the…

My mother raised me, well, all four of her girls, to make our beds, to be prompt for dinner, and to do our homework before we watched TV. She ran a tight ship. While this probably doesn’t sound very remarkable, please consider the setting. My precious (late) mother was the…

Stuff I’m Thinking About Mornings set the tone for the day, no doubt about it. We are either consciously giving ourselves a push in the right direction, or we’re allowing ourselves to be pulled by the tide, getting sucked passively wherever the current takes us. No telling where we’ll end up. I have a…

Concerning meditative prayer, a young friend recently asked the question, what kind of mantra do you use when you’re spinning out into obsessive thinking? Hmmm. Maybe we should start by defining mantra. According to Merriam/Webster, a mantra is “a mystical formula of invocation or incantation,” while the Oxford dictionary adds…