the good flesh continuing

Some disposable camera images from our honeymoon in Joshua Tree, something like six months ago now.

Also, lately:

Listening to Quilt. And Strange Bedfellows! Very proud of A. & friends.

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass, which is probably one of my top five favorite poems ever, and reading it is the quickest way to transport myself back to that perfect Berkeley summer.

Consuming a lot of strawberries with homemade basil-infused whipped cream. Nothing better.

Crossing build a raised bed off my list of goals this week, after A. and I hauled pounds and pounds of topsoil, shovel by shovel, into our little 8x4 bed. I planted purple cherokee tomatoes, green arrow shelling peas, broccoli di cecco, leeks, and bell peppers! Now to prevent the cabbage worms and bunnies from consuming it all.

and more, have our being

I spent the bulk of last week at Mepkin Abbey, in Monck's Corner, SC, just a half hour north of Charleston. I went to pray about my life, marriage, and vocation. I went also to rest, to write, to be alone long enough so that words can come to the wordless parts of me. I was surprised at how easily I slipped into the silence of the monastery, how right it felt to be alone and quiet for a few days. I walked away slow hours in the woods and gardens, spiraled through the labyrinth each morning, took at least two naps a day, read for a few hours in bed each night, and learned to listen for the bells calling us back to chapel for lauds, prime, terce. In many ways, it was more jarring to come back to the busyness of real life then to enter into the silence of the abbey.

"For I saw him and sought him; for now we are so blind and so unwise that we never seek God until out of his goodness he shows himself to us, and if he graciously lets us see something of himself, then we are moved by the same grace to seek with great longing to see him more fully; and thus I saw him and I sought him, I had him and I wanted him. And it seems to me that this is, or should be, our usual way of proceeding."

(Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love)