After a week with my in-laws, a week where I didn’t have to work and had time to cook dinner in the evenings, I’ve had two days of double shifts split between lunch at the Duke restaurants (making soups, mostly) and evening catering jobs, one on a grand scale (520 people) and the other, a…

I’m not sure how much preparingfood for five hundred is likepreparing the way of the Lord,but I’ve had morning, afternoon,and evening to think about it. The best division of labor wasto choose and do one thing:I grilled vegetables – squash,actually – for an hour or two.It was not the featured food, but it was my…

posada they called it, and translated“inn,” in Spanish, then, in robesand scarves and hoods theycircled the sanctuary, stoppingat each door, singing for theirshelter, and being turned awayuntil they got to the doorat the altar; they sang againand one little bearded boybent around the door andsaid, “Yes, you can stay here.” Yes is the harder answer…

In my reading earlier in the week, Madeleine L’Engle (on a page I can’t find now) talked about the necessary structure of life giving us freedom. She used poetry in general, and the sonnet in particular, to make her point: the boundaries of the form create the space to move freely. I’ve had my copy…

Since I share a birthday with Frank Sinatra, Jennifer Connelly, Emerson Fittipaldi, Tracy Kidder, Dickey Betts, Edvard Munch, John Jay, Gustave Fluabert, and Dionne Warwick, among others, this song feels appropriately celebratory. Peace,Milton

These are the words with which my day began: Only a daredevil makes metaphors. To make a metaphor is to walk a tightrope, to be shot out of a cannon, to do aerial somersaults without a net. The trouble with metaphors is that you never know when they’ll let you down. You turn a somersault…

Who would think a single motioncould carry multiple meanings.I spend my days stirring the soup,measuring out the corn meal,making sure everyone eats well;it is good and honest work. Tonight I stood over the soupin the warm light of our kitchen,carried by the scent of cornbreadin the oven, the scuttle of schnauzersat my feet, pouring more…

Time is a living thing. We talk about it as something that ticks by or slips away, something we make or take or keep or lose, but it is a force, a dimension, an entity on its own terms. Though we often talk about telling time, we do better to listen to what it is…

James sings Joni. Peace,Milton

I first found Chet Raymo in the Science section of the Boston Globe where he wrote a weekly column. I was neither an ornithologist nor an astronomer, but he talked of birds and stars in a way that fed both my curiosity and my faith: he made me think I could understand what he was…