Category: The Daily Sip

On resilience and Peace

Funeral urn with turquoise filial We become what we do.  This is one of the primary learnings of neuroplasticity – how we are able to develop a return to peace after adversity. But if religion tells us that what we do is evil and naughty then how shall we find...

Silence and Healing

Living, as I did, in an abusive parental system, I found my refuge in books even at four and five years old. Part of the way through my large, beloved lap-book of Sleeping Beauty, or perhaps it was Snow White, there was an illustration which so terrified me that I...

Imperfections

Our imperfections make us gorgeous. Wabi-sabi is a “word-view” from Japanese aesthetics which centers on the willing acceptance of transience and imperfection.  It is often used in ceramics when something “goes wrong” but, actually makes the pot stunning precisely because of the “mistake.”  The notion comes from the Buddhist teachings...

Gentle Defiance

One definition of “Defiance” is “contempt of danger.”  The Latin root of the word is disfidare and is a combination of two words: “away” (dis) and fidus “faithful.” The word came from a 12th century attempt to make a new word which shifted belief or fidelity from danger to engagement;...

placenta

“There is something in the soul which is only God….The seed of God within us. If the seed had a good wise and industrious cultivator, it would thrive and grow up into God.  Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree…the seed of God into God....

Busy: how it kills and how to recover from it

“Hello.  My name is Charles and I have a work-addiction.” “Hello Charles.” That is how the work-addiction meetings begin. But I don’t really like the term “work-addiction” because it does not adequately tell the whole story of the addiction nor of the addict.   I prefer “busy-addiction.”  It titles and...

…and…

This is Kai-the dog.  He goes with me wherever I go and challenges with his very being this idea of an angry, domesticated God we seek to describe.  Kai-the-dog has accompanied me for 12 years.  Every night he licks my forehead before going to sleep and every morning he waits...

Free Listening

Yesterday, in the farmer’s market in downtown Albuquerque, I encountered a stall, a vendor of sorts, that I had never seen before, and it made me wonder.  In a space between a farmer selling flowers and cucumbers and one selling bread and delicious pastries like gruyere mushroom tarts and raspberry...

Go ahead…get out!

‘When some one sees that he (or she) is in danger of losing his (or her) soul, he (or she) does not need to ask advice…” The desert Ammas (mothers) and Abbas (fathers) of the 4th and 5th centuries were monks and nuns without ordination or certificates.  They were under...

the line in the sand

If one were to look very carefully at the sand in this image of the pathway to our peach and apple orchards, one would see three prints left behind by the pilgrims:  my shoe prints, the paw prints of Kai-the-dog, and Kai’s leash dragging behind him. We had just been...