Bill and I experienced our first wildfire in November. We never dreamed it would be on our property.

Lucy Farmer is one of the most fearless of artists, free to try many forms from HGTV home flips to her own line of jewelry (Lucy's Inspired). She's an entrepreneur, a curator of beauty, a resource to artists, and a role model of living a beautiful, adventurous life.

What if I really believed he cares for me, is careful with me, that he will not let me be blown away if I live lightly? This downy feather responds to the breath of the wind. It floats. It rests. It doesn't cast stones, but even without much substance, it casts a big shadow.  

It sounds morbid but I love to wander in graveyards and read tombstones. Last year on a visit to Scotland, we explored Glasgow’s Necropolis. Ornate statues, monuments, and mausoleums fill the hill overlooking the city. The oldest grave reads 1832.

It's been more than 12 years since Mary Jo committed to a daily art project where she finds something in nature that inspires her. She says "the art of dailiness" has changed her so she is often in a state of creative noticing or deep play.

Bill reserved a hotel room for April 7 in Fort Smith, Arkansas almost a year ago. Eight hours away. Because it was on the edge of The Path of Totality.

I wondered if that was a famous rock band.

No. It’s the last full solar eclipse in the United States until 2045.

I learned a new word. 

Perseverate. 
 
To repeat something insistently or redundantly. To get stuck, to ruminate, to loop back over and over. And over.
 
As in, “My 91-year-old mother perseverated.” 
 
My mom passed away a year ago. But I’m still haunted by echoes of her three looping ruminations.

How will we emerge? That’s the question I’m asking myself and others in this “unprecedented” year. If I tune into the daily news or read the statistics, that question ripples through me with uncertainty and fear. If I lay the uncontrollable “we” down, and focus on me, I can answer. I want to emerge with some “more” in a year filled with “less.”

In the past month, we've attended too many funerals (masks and distancing making it even harder). For an 11-year-old boy who drowned in a creek. For a man who succumbed to suicide leaving a wife and three children. For a mother who died in her sleep five months pregnant. I’m flooded with “it-should-not-be-this-way” raging shouts in my head.

In a recent large group Zoom meeting with Harvard students, I asked them to find two empty containers, labeling one Lost and the other Found. In small groups, we took five minutes silently to write our losses on slips of paper and place them in our Lost jar. We did the same with our Found jar, and then we shared with each other what we wrote—ambiguous loss made tangible.  

I was introduced to the term ambiguous loss—having and not having—after my sixteen-year-old son suffered a brain injury playing football and became severely disabled for life.

If Wendell Berry were a musician, I think he’d have been Allen Levi. Allen is a man tied to the land and a man who chooses his words and stories with care and compassion. He’s a man who loves Jesus, truly listens to people, and makes beautiful music.

The thing most about-to-marry girls want to hear is how to prevent the mistakes their parents and everyone else in the world have made.