I Carry Vacation with Me My brain needs space to rest and roam; my heart needs room to feel.  A book in hand is a key to a place where ‘away’ becomes the real. Wizards, mansions, and moors and trains; detectives, urchins and spies, this and that and now and then and here and there,…

Over the years, I keep returning to two quotations… One by Walt Whitman–Do I contradict myself?  Very well then, I contradict myself.  I am large and I contain multitudes.  And this one by Frederick Buechner.  Both speak of letting fullness dwell within; of letting what is most real dwell within.  And that living with fullness,…

19 June, 2019…In the heady coffee-cinnamon humidity of No. 9 Coffeeshop. Paul Simon overhead. Your colours were a brief and glorious glimpse of flair this morning. The peach gradient on the horizon, rather spectacular. And the clouds and trees upon the water—as though they needed a reflection to adjust night flattened branches or to fresh fluff…

Several mornings of my recent retreat were spent on a wharf in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. I was drawn there for the spacious quiet, for the water, the horizon, the creak of the pilings and cries of the birds, and, honestly, the comfortable chairs close enough to the edge to prop up my short legs and…

Here in Halifax, and elsewhere, it has been a grey stretch of time, these last months. Grey and rain; grey and fog; grey and something between rain and fog; Grey. Yet still the Public Gardens green and bloom in technicolor because that is what trees, flowers, and plants are called to do. And in fact,…

     The role of repetition in prayer is long standing across different traditions.  Sometimes it is a repetitive action or movement, sometimes it is linguistic. Mantras, rosaries, sets of yoga poses…all assist both in focusing and in letting go… The act of repetitive behavior itself has a role in that way. Any prayer that…

What was intended as a quick errand to drop mail into the postbox turned into a lovely thick amble down the main shopping street near here and then up a side street to Citadel Hill; and along there until reaching the northeast corner entrance to the Public Gardens. I turned in and, as happens sometimes,…

It’s funny the unexpected things that can happen before noon in a day…You can wake up singing show tunes (which I did this morning); You can shoof-shoof-shoof the flappy ears of a puppy, brush a cat, and lay witness to a duck on a wander…all in the middle of a city, all within twenty minutes,…

This past Saturday was the celebration of the Feast of Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, the foundress of the Society of the Sacred Heart. I choose to believe she  understands why I did not get out anything ahead of time this year. It was a crazy full May… I hope she would have delighted in how…

       There is a within of things…  —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin We are a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.  —Thomas Berry She was not daily bread. She was stardust. —Martha Dickinson Bianchi (1914) speaking of her aunt, poet Emily Dickinson Three quotations I thought to record in the midst of…