New Season, New Blog!

Merry Epiphany! I have redesigned and revamped this blog and moved it to a new home. To check it out, please visit The Painted Prayerbook.

A New Blog for the Holidays (I resisted naming it The Yule Blog)…

Happy Advent! During these weeks that lead us to Christmas, I’ll be posting primarily from a new blog I’ve created for the season. I welcome you to stop by The Advent Door for some peace and quiet in these days!

Music and Mystery

Like lots of folks, I rely on music to help me cross into the holiday season and to navigate its terrain. During Advent and Christmas we anticipate and celebrate the incarnation, the Word who became flesh, but sometimes it takes more than words alone to evoke and enter into the mysteries of the story of the God who came to be with us.

Over the past few years, I’ve gone in search of Christmas music that takes my ears beyond the customary holiday fare. Although there are some contemporary songs in my stack of holiday CDs, my collection leans pretty heavily toward music that reaches backward in time. This is music that draws the listener deep into the layers of stories and legends surrounding the birth of Christ, music that echoes with the ancient human longing for light and celebration in a dark time. These are songs of signs and wonders, with words and melodies that beckon us to enter into the audacious, mysterious, hopeful, and wild tales they have to tell.

Here’s some of what I’ll be listening to as this holy season begins.

Wolcum Yule: Celtic and British Songs and Carols
Legends of St. Nicholas
On Yoolis Night
Anonymous 4

The women of Anonymous 4 are masters of reaching into the treasures of centuries past to offer sustenance in the present. These three CDs are now available in a boxed set titled Noël: Carols & Chants for Christmas; the set also includes the CD A Star in the East, a collection of medieval chant from Hungary. (As a single CD, A Star in the East is now available under the somewhat more mundane title Christmas Music From Medieval Hungary).

La Bela Naissença: Christmas Carols from Provence
Patrick Vaillant, et al.

Ooohhh, I really love this one; it’s one of the newest in my collection and is among my all-time favorites. I first heard excerpts from it on Harmonia, the splendid radio show that features early music and offers archived shows on its web site. “La Fugida en Egipte” (The Flight into Egypt), with its wry alleluia, is worth the price of the CD, and Patrick Vaillant’s liner notes are a big slab of icing (chocolate) on this Christmas cake. He writes,

the Nativity is not just a series of images. A whole imaginary world is stirring behind them, and it is this that carries the entire story and all its little meanders, giving a bit of legend here and a measure of familiarity there to the whole mystery. The music is there to reveal, to unfold the tale, to give these images their dimension in sound….Christmas carols are witnesses.

The Bells of Dublin
The Chieftains

A great CD with a big dose of Irish flair. Here the Chieftains mix it up with such folks as Elvis Costello, Nanci Griffith, and Marianne Faithfull, plus Jackson Browne with his song “The Rebel Jesus,” which should be part of the Christmas carol canon.

Christmas
Bruce Cockburn

One of the first CDs I purchased when I started searching for nontraditional fare. It’s actually very traditional, in the sense that it draws on lots of old carols, including the haunting “Iesus Ahatonnia” (The Huron Carol, written by a Jesuit missionary in the early 1600s; Cockburn says it’s the first Canadian Christmas carol) and “Down In Yon Forest” (of which Cockburn writes, “If there were a contest for the title of the spookiest Christmas carol, this ought to win hands down”). Though filled with traditional fare, the Canadian Cockburn puts a spin on it that makes it feel like a different animal entirely.

Christmas Through the Ages
Various artists; the composers include Arcangelo Corelli (how could he not have written Christmas music, with a name like that?), Benjamin Britten, and John Rutter

Aside from the tasty Christmas fare this contains, I couldn’t resist having a CD with a cover that features a fantastic depiction of the wise men wearing what look like particolored stockings, from a 6th century mosaic in the basilica of San Apollinaire Nuovo in Ravenna, Italy. (Here’s a link to a photo of the spiffy magi.)

The Black Madonna: Pilgrim Songs from the Monastery of Montserrat
Ensemble Unicorn

This isn’t specifically a Christmas CD, but this wondrous collection of medieval pilgrim songs from Spain begins with a song about the Annunciation to Mary and ends with a Catalan round that makes mention of the magi. Sandwiched in between is a festive array of songs that tell some of the stories and miracles of the mother of Christ. The CD includes a couple of selections from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, an enormous collection of 13th-century songs in praise of the Virgin Mary. Written in Galician-Portugese during the reign of King Alfonso X, known as “El Sabio” (“The Wise”), a number of the songs are attributed to El Sabio himself. The interaction of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic traditions often exerted an intriguing influence on the culture of medieval Spain. The songs included in The Black Madonna bear witness to this; they convey the sense that something very ancient and complex is at work in them.

Mistletoe and Wine
Mediaeval Baebes

Baebes indeed. This CD gathers up songs from a couple of their previous holiday CDs and includes “There Is No Rose Of Swych Vertu” and “The Coventry Carol.”

To Drive the Cold Winter Away
Loreena McKennitt

Containing a couple of original songs from this distinctive Canadian singer-composer, this CD primarily features traditional Christmas music from England, Ireland, and Scotland.

A Winter’s Solstice III
Windham Hill Artists

For sentimental reasons. This is one of the oldest in my collection of cool Christmas CDs. I still particularly delight in Pierce Pettis’ take on “In the Bleak Midwinter” and Barbara Higbie’s “Lullay, Lully.”

The Night of Heaven & Earth
Gary Doles

I’ve been saving the best for last. This CD makes me think of a passage from the Book of Isaiah, where God says these words through the prophet: “I will give you the treasures of darkness and riches hidden in secret places” (Isaiah 45.3, NRSV). Gary (also known as Garrison) Doles is an award-winning singer-songwriter who has entered into the dark and secret places of the Advent and Christmas seasons and has found the riches there. With this treasure trove of utterly original songs, Gary invites us to come and find the delights and the challenges of the God who put on flesh and came to be with us. He also happens to be my sweetheart, and my enthusiasm about this CD isn’t merely a girlfriend’s bias; it’s this kind of amazing stuff that made me fall in love with him in the first place. Check out The Night of Heaven and Earth at CD Baby.

All this talk of Christmas music, I may not be able to wait until Advent to start listening, after all…

May your ears find many delights to draw you into the mysteries of the coming season.

Ho-ho-hold on a minute…

At the church where I worshiped last Sunday, the leaders of the service had decided to get a jump on the Advent season. I understand the impulse. Oftentimes, Advent begins on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and particularly given that the marketplace has had us awash in Christmasy stuff since before Halloween, it’s not too surprising that some folks are raring to get their Advent on, even though the season doesn’t begin until this coming Sunday.

Surprising, no, but a little disappointing.

I try not to get too crabby or soapboxy about the commercialism of Christmas, and how it seems to begin earlier every year. I figure it’s probably not going to change anytime soon, and so instead of griping about it, I work at discerning what I can offer in the midst of it: words, images, spaces in which folks can pause and ponder for a few moments before heading back into the holiday fray.

Still, my liturgical self is casting a vote in favor of church being a place, perhaps the last place, where Advent and Christmas come in their own good time. This sacred season of anticipation, preparation, and waiting is precisely a season that invites and challenges us not to be grabby with time. Jesus, the flesh-wearing God, took a full nine months (and untold millennia) to get here.

I think we can wait a few more days to start the party.

Having said all that, I definitely don’t feel a need to be a Christmas fascist; I won’t listen at your door to see if you’ve already listening to carols on the radio. God knows that most of us could use a good celebration. It’s practically December, we’ve got Thanksgiving (literally) under our belts, and I think it’s a fine and wondrous thing to be getting into the holiday spirit. Moving into Advent, though, is more than that. The season, which prepares us for Christmas but is not the same thing as Christmas, invites us to hear beyond the holiday hype; it challenges us to listen beneath and between and around the copious external stimuli, so that we can begin to discern and welcome the God who is seeking to be born in our midst and in our very own selves.

These last few days before Advent are also the final days of the year, liturgically speaking. In the cycle of Christian time, Advent marks the beginning of a new year. So this week is a threshold, an in-between space that invites us to ponder the year past and to look toward the year to come. As we cross this threshold, what would you like to carry with you from this nearly finished year? What do you want to leave behind? As we lean into the season and the year to come, what do you desire for the days ahead? What will you give your energy to? Where will you look for the God who is yet to be born?

Happy almost Advent to you.

Cover Girl

Okay, maybe it’s true that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but I think it’s fair to say that at a literal level, if we’re talking about actual books and not metaphorically applying the aphorism to people, a compelling face often provides a good suggestion about what the inside holds. A comely cover, or sometimes just an appealing spine, is almost always the first thing that prompts me to pull an unfamiliar book off the shelf. While a “good cover-to-good contents” correlation may not always hold true, I’ve learned it’s a better than decent bet that if the face of a book catches my attention, its innards will be worth a gander as well.

I’m posting this from my parents’ home, where books—and a supply of intriguing book covers—abound. I’ve been hanging out here over the Thanksgiving weekend. This holiday is always a big reunion time for the Richardson relations. These past few days of paddling around the gene pool have included the annual Thanksgiving feast that nearly everyone in our hometown comes to, along with lots of out-of-town folks who come back for the festivities. We normally have our noontime chowdown in the community park, but this year, for only the second time in the feast’s half-century history, we got rained out of the park. Fortuitously, the local United Methodist congregation completed the construction of a fellowship hall earlier this year (its first building project in almost 100 years), and, while eating pecan pie isn’t quite the same indoors as under sunny skies, it was another splendid gathering.

I’ve lingered with my folks in Gainesville, grateful for the chance to spend more time with family and friends over the weekend and to catch up on my sleep. I’ve been poking around my parents’ bookshelves while I’ve been here. Many of the books were part of the landscape when I was growing up; I imagine lots of them arrived in the magical book boxes I wrote about previously. This weekend I pulled out some books whose spines had caught my eye on earlier visits. They contain collections of poems by Ogden Nash, the 20th century poet known for his agile handling of light verse. I first became acquainted with him through some of his short poems that I’ve heard my Dad recite, such as his “Reflection on Babies.” (“A bit of talcum/Is always walcum.”) Nash also brought us “Further Reflection on Parsley” (“Parsley/Is Garsley.”) and “The Cow” (“The cow is of the bovine ilk; One end is moo, the other, milk.”) If you know only one Ogden Nash poem, it’s probably this one, which occasionally gets attributed to Dorothy Parker:

Reflections on Ice-Breaking

Candy
Is dandy
But liquor
Is quicker.

The Nash books on my parents’ shelf were first published in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, and there’s something about their simply designed covers that my eye finds really pleasing. Even their spines, cozied up together on the shelf, form an appealing line. When I pulled out one of the volumes on this visit, I was intrigued to see that the jackets were designed by Maurice Sendak. It was one of those occasions where I could see it once I knew it; the images are pretty different from his other work such as we find in his famous book Where the Wild Things Are, but it’s certainly kin.

I haven’t spent enough time with the appealingly attired Ogden Nash books to know whether they bear out my general rule that a good cover suggests good innards (although they did provide some enjoyable recitation and conversation at the dinner table tonight). But I’ve enjoyed this confirmation of what good covers can do for good books (and sometimes not-so-good ones), and how books are more than just words slapped on pages sandwiched between two boards. Some books are presences over time, part of the landscape that helps orient us in this world; they offer a visual feast that can sustain us even if we only infrequently partake of what they contain.

This holiday weekend, I give thanks for that.

In the Cards

In the “Random Bits from the Studio” Department…

These are a few wee collages I pieced together on playing cards, inspired by a friend who took a class where the instructor had them do this kind of exercise. Being much smaller, more spontaneous, and much speedier than my customary creative fare, these are a good diversion from my usual way of working; they don’t ask for a lot of planning and pondering and attention. I did these a couple of years ago. I’m thinking that in the wake of my most recently finished artwork, the mondo Welcome Table piece, it might be good to scale things way back and pull out the deck of cards and box of scraps again.

Here’s what else I’m thinking: in 2008, lots of small collages instead of one huge one…

Collage was my path into becoming an artist. I continue to find that in the practice of working with the pieces of paper, I’m also, at some other level, working with the pieces of my life. Play with the bits long enough, follow the unlikely juxtapositions, something new always emerges.

And everything can be used. Everything. I figured out long ago that God is the consummate recycler: in God’s economy, nothing gets wasted.

The wild preacher-painter Howard Finster put it this way, on a hand-lettered sign in the art-drenched Paradise Gardens Park he created in Georgia:

I TOOK THE PIECES YOU THREW AWAY
AND PUT THEM TOGETHER BY NIGHT AND DAY
WASHED BY RAIN AND DRIED BY SUN
A MILLION PIECES ALL IN ONE.

The Magical Book Box

I come by my penchant for books honestly; doubtless it’s a combination of nature and nurture from both of my parents. When I was growing up, my dad would periodically order a box of books. This was in the days before Amazon, when ordering books required a wee bit more effort. My recollection is that he’d have them delivered to his office in town and would bring them home from work. After supper, we’d clear the dishes, Dad would bring the box of books to the dining table and slice it open with his Craftsman pocketknife, and we’d lift out the new arrivals, one by one. The boxes always contained an assortment that reflected my parents’ varied tastes: astronomy and other sciences, photography, explorations of the English language, humor. (I remember spending a good bit of time with the books of both Charles Schultz and Charles Addams when I was growing up, which probably explains a few things.)

For a long time, I thought all families did this kind of book stuff.

I still love boxes with books. I always get a happy jolt when I see the mailman or UPS guy pull up, bearing a package with the imprint of any of the several places I order from, occasionally including England or Canada (when I’m too impatient to wait for a book to be published in the U.S.). I still love opening the box and pulling out the volume I’ve been anticipating, sometimes for weeks.

Here are a couple of the most recent tasty treats that have arrived on my doorstep.

St. Margaret’s Gospel-book by Rebecca Rushforth (what a great name!) Subtitled The Favourite Book of an Eleventh-Century Queen of Scots, this recently published book is part of the wondrously well-illustrated “Treasures of the Bodleian Library” series. St. Margaret was a relatively rare creature: a married woman who was later designated a saint. (Yes, I gather that marriage makes unofficial saints of lots of folks…) According to one source, Margaret desired to live as a nun rather than marry King Malcolm (whom Shakespeare portrays in Macbeth as the rightful heir to the throne of his murdered father Dunstan). The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates that God would not allow Margaret such a life because she would do more good as a queen. She gained status as a saint largely for her reputation as a woman of deep faith and good works; only one miracle is connected with her. Charmingly, it involves a book. It’s said that Margaret, who spent much time in lectio divina (sacred reading), had a book that she treasured above all others, a small, jewel-encrusted volume that contained excerpts from the Gospels. Once, as she was traveling, the person who was carrying the book carelessly let it fall into a river. Lost for some time, the book was later discovered miraculously intact and virtually undamaged, “so much so that it scarcely seemed to have been touched by the water!” her biographer exults. “At once,” he goes on to tell, “the book was brought back to the queen, and the miracle related to her, and she gave thanks to Christ; and from then on the queen loved the book even more than she had before.” (From the Life of St Margaret, attributed to Turgot.)

In the 19th century, a woman scholar was the first to piece together the historical evidence that the book described in this miracle is the one that resides in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

Also in a recent magical book box:

Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain by Mireille Mentré. Published in 1996 by Thames & Hudson, this yummy volume offers a lavish look into the manuscripts that emerged from the intriguing confluence of cultures in medieval Spain, particularly between the tenth and twelfth centuries. Some of the most impressive illuminated manuscripts, and the most prevalent, were created by monastic scribes and artists who turned their attention to the Apocalypse, also known as the Revelation to John. Drawing influence from the visual culture of the Islamic community that ruled Spain, as well as from Byzantine, Celtic, and other styles, the Spanish monks created an art form that came to be known as Mozarabic.

It’s pretty wild and wonderful stuff. With their energetic style and vivid palette that differ markedly from the more staid (but also charming and powerful) illuminated Apocalypses that would later emerge in England, the Spanish manuscripts give the impression that their artists absorbed John’s otherworldly visions directly into their veins and poured them straight onto the page.

See for yourself. There are great online resources that offer images and background on the Spanish Apocalypses, including the British Library’s Online Gallery page about the Silos Apocalypse and the current online exhibition “Apocalypse Then: Medieval Illuminations from the Morgan” at the Morgan Library’s website.

Or, better yet, you can order a book in a magical box.

Could You Become a U.S. Citizen?

Gary and I had dinner at the home of a couple of friends this past weekend. One of them teaches at a local college. As part of a project, one of her students brought a copy of the list of sample questions that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services may ask of someone who is taking the exam to become a citizen of the United States. We went through many of the questions ourselves, which prompted a lively conversation around the dinner table (and a visit to Google).

For you folks who were born into U.S. citizenship, how many of these sample questions can you answer? (The numbering is from the list of questions; the answers are below.)

19. How many changes, or amendments, are there to the Constitution?

26. For how long do we elect each [U.S.] Senator?

27. Name two senators from your state.

28. How many voting members are in the [U.S.] House of Representatives?

29. For how long do we elect each member of the House of Representatives?

35. What is the Bill of Rights?

39. Who is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?

40. What were the original 13 states?

63. What did the Emancipation Proclamation do?

75. Whose rights are guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

80. Name one right or freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment.

89. What kind of government does the United States have?

Answers:

19. Twenty-seven amendments

26. 6 years

27. The answer to this question depends on where you live. [In Florida: Mel Martinez and Bill Nelson.] [Visit the U.S. Senate website]

28. There are 435 voting members in the House of Representatives. [This number is figured proportionally based on state population.] [Visit the U.S. House of Representatives website]

29. For 2 years

35. The first 10 amendments to the Constitution

39. John G. Roberts, Jr. [Visit the U.S. Supreme Court website]

40. Virginia, Massachusetts, Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Georgia

63. The Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves.

75. All people living in the United States

80. The rights of freedom of religion, of speech, of the press, of assembly, and to petition the Government

89. A Republic

I paid a visit to the website of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services this morning. Ever had occasion to wonder what you’d need to do to become a citizen of the U.S., or apply for a green card, or what you’d do if you were a refugee or seeking asylum? Check out the “How Do I?” section at the USCIS site.

On this Veterans Day, I’m offering a prayer for all those who have come to the U.S., for those involved in making hugely complex decisions about immigration, and for our relationships with the wider world. A blessing upon the veterans who have given themselves to helping make this a place that people yearn to call home.

A Girl Named IKEA

I’m perpetually intrigued by synchronicity, that phenomenon that Carl Jung described as “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.” Translated into English, synchronicity is the thing that happens when mysterious connections pop up with no immediately obvious cause. Occasionally I experience synchronicity in big ways, like when I preached my first sermon about twenty years ago. I was with a group of folks from the Wesley Foundation (the United Methodist campus ministry) at Florida State University, and we were sharing in a Sunday evening worship service at a church in Pinellas Park. At the end of the service, as I was visiting with some of the church’s members, I realized that I had just preached my first sermon from the pulpit of a congregation that had been founded by the man who was the senior pastor of the church I grew up in, and who had been a significant influence in my life and my call to ministry, and who had just recently died of a brain tumor. Forgetfulness is occasionally a blessed thing; I’d heard him talk about Pinellas Park UMC plenty of times, but if I’d been aware I was preaching in the pulpit that O. Dean Martin had once occupied, I’m not sure I could have gotten through it.

When that kind of big synchronicity happens, I experience it as an occasion of encouragement and confirmation, sort of a cosmic “attagirl.” That night in the church in Pinellas Park, I was really early in my journey toward ordained ministry, and I still carried lots of questions about how that journey might unfold. Sitting alone in the sanctuary for a few moments after everyone had left, I had a sense that I was moving in a direction that, while I didn’t know quite where it was heading, was a good one for me, and also that God has a pretty keen sense of humor. (The humor thing has been confirmed plenty of times, and I find that God’s sense of humor seems to grow more twisted the farther I go along).

Those big occasions of sacred timing can be fairly strange, but it’s actually the small occurrences of synchronicity that really mystify me, those coincidences that seem utterly random and minor and without any obvious point. Like seeing a guy in the line at the post office one morning, and then spotting him an hour later in the grocery store. I’d never seen him before and haven’t seen him since. Or like coming across the phrase cui bono while reading a novel recently. It’s a Latin phrase that means “Who benefits?” With all the mysteries I read, one would think I would’ve encountered it before. Ten minutes later it popped up in a movie I was watching on TV.

The big synchronicities make a measure of sense to me because they offer some assurance that there’s meaning in the midst of our sometimes chaotic lives. They remind me that if we work at staying awake and discerning God’s longing for our lives, and if we seek to move in the direction of that longing, we’ll (hopefully) experience cool occasions of confirmation. But the small synchronicities—I don’t really understand those, though they happen a lot. When they occur, they make me wish I could go somewhere like the Existential Detective Agency that Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman run in the movie I Heart Huckabees, where you can hire them to investigate these kinds of small coincidences to see if there’s any underlying meaning.

Even though the small synchronicities don’t seem to have much inherent meaning or obvious point, I think of them as reminders that God is at work, even in the minor stuff, and that everything is somehow connected—mysteriously, mystifyingly connected; that we are “inexplicably inextricable,” as one writer has put it (in “Cold Calling” at her SouthQuest blog). My sweetheart Gary says it’s God winking.

Here’s my favorite recent wink.

I’m a huge fan of the comic “Get Fuzzy,” which, for the unfortunately uninitiated, features a perpetually cranky, vengeful, conniving cat named Bucky Katt, who always has a scheme up his furry sleeve; an endearingly hapless dog known as Satchel Pooch; and their long-suffering human, Rob Wilco (who, yes, has a brother named Roger). A few days ago I was telling Gary about a recent “Get Fuzzy” strip (because it seems important to keep him up to date on what’s going on in their world) in which Bucky was plotting to do product placement in Broadway musicals. The strip I was recounting culminated in Bucky singing, “IKEA! I just met a girl named IKEA!” (You can see it here, though it won’t be quite the same without my off-key rendition of the West Side Story tune.) I told Gary about visiting the IKEA store with my sister in Toronto and that I wouldn’t mind having one here in Orlando. You know, for the day when I’m not living in a wee studio apartment, and Gary and I actually have a home together that needs furnishing.

So, the next day, an IKEA catalog shows up in Gary’s mail. And then yesterday I heard on the radio that IKEA is coming to Orlando.

Wink.

Maybe it means that it won’t be too long before Gary and I have a place that will give us a reason to make a trip to IKEA…

Books by My Bed (A Very Abbreviated List)

Seeing as it’s one of the few pieces of actual furniture here in this cozy studio apartment (which has certain advantages in the Housekeeping Department), my futon occupies a pretty central role in my domestic environment. Also known as The Place Where I Sleep&Read&Eat&Watch TV, my futon possesses a certain gravitational pull that tends to draw lots of stuff—and by stuff I mostly mean books—toward it. Here are a few selections from the stacks of books presently in orbit around my futon:

The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg. Drawing on her years of teaching the weekly Parsha (readings from the Torah, the first five books of the Bible) in Jerusalem, Zornberg offers an intriguing reflection on, as she puts it, “the book of Genesis, the book of beginnings, where the origins of all things are to be found.” She engages the sacred text in the company of others who have pondered and wrestled with it; as she listens deeply into the text, she turns her ear toward the voices of those who have lived with it across the centuries, who have studied it and prayed it and carried it in their bones. She acknowledges the wide range of tools that she uses in excavating the scriptures, from literature and anthropology to the Talmud and hasidic meditations. In her introduction to the book, Zornberg writes about reading the sacred text in such a way that we encounter our own lives within and between its words. She makes a distinction between introducing ourselves into the texts—an act that’s called eisegesis (literally to “lead in,” to read our own biases into a text)—and finding ourselves within them. “What is hidden,” she writes, “is, essentially, the reader’s most intimate life, the things and words of the night, fears and longings and questionings. It is these that I have tried to ‘hear’ from within the text of the Torah.”

The Holy Way: Practices for a Simple Life by Paula Huston. I’m an oblate (lay associate) of St. Brigid of Kildare Monastery, a community that draws from Methodist and Benedictine traditions. A significant piece of our life together as oblates, and a way that we stay connected in the midst of our geographic distance from one another, is our practice of talking together by conference call once a month. Much of our conversation revolves around something we’re reading together. We’ve recently started The Holy Way, written by a woman who is an oblate of New Camaldoli Hermitage at Big Sur, California. Huston shapes each chapter around a theme from the Christian monastic tradition; her chapter titles include “Silence: The Way of the Cenobite,” “Devotion: The Way of the Psalm Singer,” and “Generosity: The Way of the Servant.” In the opening chapter, “Solitude: The Way of the Hermit,” Huston describes the beginning of her search for solitude in the midst of a life that’s intimately intertwined with others. She writes,

Once solitude had a grip on me, once I experienced the clarity it brought, I couldn’t get enough of it. My longtime ache for Thoreau’s little cabin now had a name; my secret yearning for aloneness had an explanation. Perhaps I was not such an oddball after all; perhaps there were many others like me who craved solitude without knowing exactly what it was we were craving.

Ashworth Hall by Anne Perry. Mysteries are my brain candy. Just finished this one today. It’s from Perry’s series that features Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, an intrepid couple living in 19th-century England. It wasn’t among my favorite Anne Perry novels but provided a pleasant diversion.

Hong Kong Apothecary: A Visual History of Chinese Medicine Packaging. A gift from my sweetheart Gary. Oooohhh, all the cool pictures…