Sunday night I went over to the Pinhook, one of local bars, for the Fifth Birthday Celebration for Bountiful Backyards, our friends who helped create our little urban foodscape at our house. They do awesome work and I was happy to go and celebrate with them. The other reason for the evening is they are…

The spirit        likes to dress up like this:             ten fingers,                  ten toes . . . (Mary Oliver, “Poem”) My father-in-law, Reuben Brasher, would have been eighty-one tomorrow; Wednesday marks eight weeks since he died.  I miss him. poem, too I think the Spirit liked to dress up like Reuben:every ounce of his…

Look wherever you can find the information and you will find that our Sunday morning service at Pilgrim United Church of Christ begins at 10:30. Though it is not written down anywhere, most everyone in the room knows the service ends at 11:30, which is when it is time for coffee hour and whatever else…

Tomorrow I will play the prophet for the second time this Advent, and for something like the twentieth Advent in a row. Since our church follows the Common Lectionary (does that mean there’s an “uncommon” one?), the scripture passages ascribed to each Sunday follow a three year cycle. This is Year B, which is my…

it began as a ployto get them to finishtheir vocabularywho could blame meon a high schoolfriday afternoon “if you finishyour assignmentwe’ll go to caribou” –they made quickwork of exercisesalready past due and we walked across the parking lot to our latteswith the novelswe carried as coverto fool the front desk we sat in a squaresipping…

This afternoon, I went with our math teacher and the twelve kids that make up our little high school to a machine shop which is owned by the parents of one of the students. The teacher wanted the kids to go so they could see that math gets used in the real world. I went…

public instruction as I drove yesterday to theDepartment of Public InstructionI imagined a building filled with finger-pointing people telling other people what to do and how to do itI was going to be toldwhat I needed to do to getmy state teacher’s licensethe security guard instructedme to take the first leftthe man in the licensure…

Yesterday morning marked the first time in several days that I had to answer my five o’clock alarm telling me it was time to get ready for school. Gracie, our middle Schnauzer, was grateful for the return to routine because it meant she got to eat earlier and it was a return to routine, which…

I left my notes for my post sitting on my desk at school this afternoon as I was heading for the second shift at the computer store. I came home tonight to discover these words from Nate Klug, a new poet to me and a fellow UCCer. AdventIn the middle of Decemberto start overto assume…

As I sat down tonight to begin writing this Advent Journal, I decided to go back and read what I had written as my first Advent entry over the previous five years. In my 2006 post, I found this poem by Barbara Crooker: In the Middle of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,struggling…