Arena For me, home is associated with a person that you want to be with. The idea of home. The reality of home is something else completely different. Different from the idea. Different from the ideal. The reality of home is like being on a roller-coaster out-of-control at Niagara Falls in a hurricane. It is an emotional challenge, a continual confront to my sense of balance. The assault is something I hunker down against. But the...
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The Unseen Side Of Honor Burden is what shows us the unseen side of our responsibilities—our load. Instead of honor, it is burden. Or, to be exact, it is both honor and burden. We have each other. And the burden of each and every breath. Each and every touch. Each and every exchange. There is family. There is friend. There is enemy. All have his own basket of regrets, of unfulfilled wants, of unreached goals. It’s a flowing...
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The Unknown My whole life has been about The Mystery. The mystery of God. The mystery of life. And this whole mystery thing has meant two things to me: the unknown and being wrong. The unknown feels like a bottomless chasm. It only feels bottomless. But, in fact, when it’s time for The Mystery to be resolved, I land at the bottom. Hard. Absolute. The Truth Revealed. But in the meantime, between knowing that there is some...
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(by Anne D. LeClaire) Learning the Difference Between Listening And Waiting To Talk When she first arrived at her uncle’s estate and was exploring the grounds, Mary Lennox caught sight of a bird with a bright red breast sitting on the topmost branch of a tree, “and suddenly he burst into his winter song – almost as if he had caught sight of her and was calling to her.” On one particular morning my friend Ann and I...
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Walk Away It’s a battle term—retreat. It is the opposite of attack. To remove oneself from the fray. To hide amongst the trees, out of the sunlight, off the plain of conflict. It means to drop your weapon; to run, empty-handed away. It means to stop fighting; to stop thinking about fighting, even. Retreat. We want to think of it as a time of rest, of serenity, of knitting our frayed souls back together. But it’s really...
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