I am planning a Mass with 45 kids and two other teachers. To get the maximum input, several different groups were created and pieces assigned. One homeroom, write the petitions and pick the kids to read; one homeroom, the offertory-pick the symbol to be carried forward in addition to the candles, flowers, bread and wine…

Well, not so much playing as using it as an analogy. I was having tea while visting a friend this afternoon when conversation turned to music and whether someone who knows music parses sound into notes instinctively the same way my friend, an artist, can parse shades and colors into component pieces that add up…

It’s soon to be Halloween. Doors are being decorated in the middle school, costumes planned, skits created, gooey brains flung onto the ceiling. Yes. Gooey brains. Created out of some sort of slime putty designed to please children and peeve adults. On the ceiling. On the sixteen-eighteen foot ceiling. Flung there by a holiday-thrilled eleven…

From RevGals… it’s the Friday Five! Tell us about the five favorite places you have lived in your lifetime. What did you like? What kind of place was it? 1. Don’t remember much about it, but my parents brought me home to a barn. Always makes a fun intro line when writing one’s life story….

I had a chance to hear the group Sweet Honey in the Rock this afternoon– it was an amazing experience! I have never watched and heard people sing so…so…thoroughly!! It was simply spectacular and stunningly beautiful to watch the sound come to life in the whole body of the woman singing. Yes…that’s it…sound coming to…

The Friday Five from RevGals… 1) When was the last time you flipped a coin or even saw one flipped in person? Flipped one today, actually, to solve a gripe…and taught a whole new generation the art of the thumb-flick flip. My students were quite impressed, thank you very much. I learned it from my…

I have posted before about the pleasures of various meals–the creating of them, the eating of them… I suppose in more than one way, it feeds my poetic soul to experience something with as many senses as possible. Writing somehow has become another one of them. Another way of experiencing, nearly another sense all together–to…

The roof was gone at Mass today. And, in a sense, it was a storm that did it—a storm of glory in the form of song that pushed against the walls, against the roof, against the heart, and could not be contained. The roof was simply raised up with the power of the notes, the…

It was not an easy week at work. It was not an easy week at work but the day is sunny today. It was not an easy week at work, but the day is sunny today and I have on rainbow colored socks as I write. It was not an easy week at work, but…

An excerpt from a bit of writing I did a while back and recently rediscovered… Part of what I was writing in the text was that there is no difference for me between the Muse and the Spirit. Given the truth of that, I also had to step back and notice then how much more…