While I was in college in San Diego, one of my favorite places to wander around with a camera and journal was Balboa Park — a giant, urban park studded with Spanish architecture that holds museums, art, a conservatory and gardens. With buskers playing instruments and dancing, it is always full of music. Alcázar Garden…
During my commute to and from work on the bus the past few weeks, I’ve been listening to snippets of “Faith, Hope & Carnage,” an audiobook of rich conversations between Nick Cave, the Australian singer-songwriter, and Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan. They talk about the meaty heartaches and joys of what it means to be alive,…
On the cusp of turning 80 years old in 2020, David Hockney, the British pop artist known for his vivid California landscapes, decided to go to Normandy to paint the arrival of spring on his iPad. Taking his iPad outside in ‘plein air’ (a French expression referring to the act of painting outdoors), he painted…
Soon after I turned 24 last winter, I went on a weekend hermitage. I stayed in a solitary cabin in rural Illinois, remote and full of bare trees, ice, quick, glittery sunsets and freezing temps at a retreat center, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. My first day there, I spent a long afternoon…
For Putin’s conversion, to be able to see our friends again soon, for a good day, for an end to war, we pray. For over a month, every night since the war began in Ukraine, members of Faith and Light and L’Arche-Kovcheh Ukraine have hosted a “Prayer For Peace and an End to War” Zoom…
When I was in first grade, I made a stapled-together picture book about the pear tree in our yard called “My Friend the Tree.” I drew her in each of the four seasons with me, a smiling face attached to legs, right alongside her. I sensed that before I knew how to talk about it…
In hope, in prayer, we find ourselves here … I sang these words with a chorus of climate and Indigenous activists on a humid June morning in front of the White House. In hope, in prayer. The words became a refuge, an embodied cry that gave me courage as my timid self stood steady, as…
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