So many people I know, especially those in their twenties and thirties, speak of feeling lost sometimes. Partly it’s that we had a plan or expectation of what life would be by now and it hasn’t worked out that way. Or it has, but it’s not what we thought it would be. Partly, it’s that…
Things I believe in
I’ve been blogging less lately, and I wonder whether it is partly because many of the things on my mind and heart right now are so particularly hard to articulate. Combine that with my mental and physical energy levels being pretty depleted and I wind up with a few unfinished drafts and a lot of…
On making pasta, and other Small Things
Today, the children and I made pasta, and it was a small thing, really, but also a big deal, as the small things so often are. It was a big deal because I had been ill and it was the first time I had been able to summon the energy for such a task. And…
Lent
Lent is essentially a “churchy” time, when the unfashionable concepts of discomfort, sacrifice and mortality are brought into an uneasy focus for us, beginning with the marking of a cross on our foreheads in ash. We are dust, and to dust we shall return… For a long time in the West, our privileged culture has…
2021 in Books…
Like everyone else, I didn’t find 2021 the easiest year. As I pushed my way through it (much as one might hack through relentless thornbushes: with a lack of verve, but a certain sense of grim resolve), I found ways to take care of myself amid the sheer exhaustion. I threw myself into short power…
Old House
This year, our current home, the one I’m sitting in now, has become affectionately referred to in our family as “the old house”. For the past year, we’ve been planning a move “up the lane”, where we have been extending a little bungalow at my in laws’ place. It’s a small extension, and a small…
What I’ve Been Reading: Once Upon a Time in the East, by Xiaolu Guo and Hungry, by Grace Dent
These are two ostensibly different memoirs, but they have in common authors who reveal an immense force of vulnerability, strength, tenderness and passion. Both women have sharp intelligence, gritty determination and a gift for insightful, vivid writing. In both books, we explore childhood: Guo’s in rural China and Dent’s in working class Carlisle. Both authors…
World Adoption Day
It’s World Adoption Day, and, as with many of these occasions, its immediate effect on my day-to-day life has been pretty low. I saw a couple of extra adoption related posts on social media, and that was about it. And yet… Adoption, of course, affects every minute of my day-to-day life, every day. Adoption is…
List (A Poem)
Sometimes I feel a weight in the world: it’s dreary And I know it’s not just me. Sometimes I see strain and grief pervading things The ache and edge that all of this brings. The effort it takes to wade through the pressure Of comfort and wanting Or striving and worrying. Or the lonely stone…
Gracious Uncertainty
I’ve had these two words ringing around my heart and head for days now. Each morning, when I have my shower, I take two minutes while the water warms up to read a page of a Christian devotional book. Perhaps more than ever, I’ve needed these two minute reads lately. Often tired after a broken…
Life Lived 