Category: The Daily Sip

Tenacity and Gratitude

The meditation loft over the study at Edgecliff House on Whidbey Island Way up above my study is a meditation loft. There are pillows and an electric tea kettle.  A hexagonal window looks out to the ocean off the cliff on which I live and so my pillow faces out...

Letting Go

NanNan's Letter Folder, later embossed with my name at ordination. I clutter my home with love.  Well, things really.  But they are icons of love – hard to let go of and yet...it is time to simplify.  It is time “to small” my life.  Small should be a verb. These...

To Delight (verb)

Kai emerges with delight after a swim in Useless bay. The thirteenth-century word “delight” comes from its Latin root, “delectare” which not only refers to pleasure and to that which brings pleasure, but also to arousal, seduction, and allure.  Delight is not just a clown or a Santa Clause…it can...

Sorrow and Joy

Some of my Tea Bowls. Setting Moon Pottery. Charles LaFond, potter. Number 1 when I was 18 - my first pot. Number 25 was fired recently. A life of bowls. “Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your...

Exhaling

Sorting things When we breathe, we inhale and then we exhale.  For those of us whose childhoods were particularly difficult or who have survived trauma, the breath is shallow, tentative, furtive, and so, rather more frequent. For most people however the breath is deep and subconscious.  In - belly swells. ...

Pathways in rainforests

So many tomes have been written about the Dark Night of the Soul.  Indeed the title of the great mystic was mistranslated.  The original translation was “the obscured night of the soul.” The word “dark” gets a bad rap. “Dark woods” are frightening.  “Dark Knight” is a medieval bad guy. “Dark thoughts” are...

Letting Anxiety pass

Before a storm at Little Bird Farm in New Mexico When storms approach Little Bird Farm, there is little doubt.  They come in over the mesa from the East, past the horse barn and the apple orchards as the raucous chirping of our birds hush suddenly.  The sky in New...

Through the field

The porch of my cottage looks out onto this field.  The cottage is in the center of a 20-acre alfalfa and grass farm which feeds the area horse farms in Albuquerque’s South Valley – made famous by the television show Breaking Bad.  The chicken restaurant seen in the show is...

Livid * – a poem of Holy Saturday

In the night after Holy Saturday - an angel. But before?An original icon in the collection of Charles LaFond Livid: A poem of Holy Saturday Livid bruises cover your still body. Plums. Blues. The resulting purple. The garden. The arrest. The savage beatings. And then in that cold, stone tomb...

Mary’s Other Song

Crucifixion Bas Relief #24: "With Rose". Stoneware, Cone 6, Rose Crystalline glaze, unglazed forms. Carved Bas Relief, 16.5 x 6 inches, Charles LaFond, artist. Lent, 2019, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Mary’s Other Song If I hold my hand against the wood, flat, like this I can feel your breathing from above....