The day started early. Long before the sun was set to rise from its nightly slumber, my family and I were pacing frantically about. While I wish it was for something exciting or joyful, especially given the hellacious slog of these recent weeks, the cause for our early morning was to accompany my mother to the hospital for a much-needed surgery. While scheduled, the anxiety of the moment lingered not too far below the surface of our flesh. How will it go? Will healing go smoothly? Do we have all that we need for the journey ahead? As nurses and other caregivers came and went, each shared a...

By Rev. Anna Blaedel My mom recently stumbled across a photograph that neither of us have any memory of. I am eleven, or twelve, or thirteen--somewhere in that age and stage of particular bodily awkwardness--and I am sitting in my dad’s lap. My dad and I are on my grandmother’s couch; my mom and I assume my grandmother took this photo. My dad is cradling me, his baby, me who is too big to be cradled, and yet still cradled. The photographer is watching him, her baby, holding me. My eyes are closed, and so are his. We seem to be asleep. We are at ease, at rest. My arms are draped against his...

By Tarek Abuata Growing up Queer and Palestinian, I was a happy child, full of life. With negative and later positive judgments cast upon my identities, the years churned my insides into a struggle of polarities. At first, I was put down. A fighter, I confronted and pierced relentlessly. And after 15 years, they lifted me up to the pedestal. Upon the pedestal of recognition, I continued the fight, this time along many friends. But even during this fighting, I unknowingly force fed yet another polarity to my soul. At the end, all laid me bare to rediscover home. My poem describes my journey...

By Rev. Anna Blaedel "Prentis Hemphill likes to begin episodes of their podcast Finding Our Way with the question: How would you describe where we are right now? As a writer, healer, and Somatic practitioner, they invite us to always begin our assessment of where we are--spiritually, politically, relationally--by paying attention to our bodies. Our bodies--our enfleshed lives--are the place our stories reside, and thus where we can access different stories for who and how we might become. Our healing and transformation, Hemphill offers, are how we realize the world we want, and vision, and...

By anonymous contributors What is necessary, what is required, what is possible on pathways to collective flourishing? Through our "poetry through Lent" practice, each day we provided  a different word for reflection on these questions. Over 450 people journeyed with us - one poem, one phrase, one prayer at time. Enjoy a few of these nourishing glimpses, anonymous contributions from companions on the journey. May they be nutrients for your day. (You can read the full collection here.) Imagine a dichotomy constructed between imagination and real life--practicality, feasibility, productivity...

In the recognition of loving lies an answer to despair. (Audre Lorde) Sorrow is part of the earth’s great cycles, flowing into the night like cool air sinking down a river course. To feel sorrow is to float on the pulse of the earth, the surge from living to dying, from coming into being to ceasing to exist. Maybe this is why the earth has the power over time to wash sorrow into a deeper pool, cold and shadowed. And maybe this is why, even though sorrow never disappears, it can make a deeper connection to the currents of life and so connect, somehow, to sources of wonder and solace....