Almost four years ago, I walked up the Capitol steps in freezing rain to join other clergy and officiants to perform the first legally sanctioned same-sex weddings in Washington State.  Those of us who could legally perform a ceremony were invited to donate our services to any who chose to get married under, near, or around the Christmas tree in the Rotunda.  Robed…

Say that you are going to a party, or going to the mall, or to visit your old aunt who is failing.   Say that you are going to a new place, somewhere you have never been before and you don’t know what to wear.  You put on the usual dress, the one you’ve worn so many times, perhaps it is beginning to fray a little, but never mind.  What shoes will you wear this time?

You look at all the shoes you have collected over the past ten years.  You know, the black work high heels, the…

For over thirty-six years, we have gathered to celebrate the Passover, a re-telling of the Hebrew peoples’ crossing the desert into the Promised Land of milk and honey.  We read the Haggadah, we drink the wine, pass the matzo, flick the plagues off our fingers like an Italian curse gesture.  We sing Dayenu, the song that voices the wonder of any small act to be sufficient for knowing God’s abundant love and grace to us, the people who follow the law.  The youngest…

     “Will you catch me when I fall?”  Those are the words of a refrain from a Danish song by the group Danser med Drenge (Dancing with Boys).  The image helped me recall the old trust games used in group-building back in the day.  Someone stood in the center of a group, crossed their arms across their chests and closed…

When the waves crest

In Australia

Sometimes you can see dolphins

Or other fish

Backlit by the sun

Suspended in the clarity of water.

That moment of perfect balance

Before the wave crashes

And dissipates

Leaves scant traces of shells

Which will be brought back into the ocean

Soon…

I recently started a new painting, using a canvass big enough to use up some old paint.  It was to be a study of yellows, with burnt sienna, vermillion red and other odds and ends I had accumulated over the years.  So I mixed the old paint with walnut oil, hoping to reconstitute it…

Therapy through the Ether

I have spent all day alone in my office

Seeing people

The ping of the…

This is a public confession  -  since my undergraduate days when I first had to read Society and its Discontents, I gave Freud a big pass.  What I learned about his theory through a liberal education was enough for me to dismiss him.  His theories about everything being about sex, repressed sex, expressed sex, delayed sex, women envying men, all about the phallus, turned me off.  I…

When I was actively serving in the ministry, I leaned more to the Universalist side of Unitarian Universalism. Theologically, I was more drawn to the idea that Love overruled Thought, that universal salvation, the belief that no one is condemned to hell is better than some going and some not. It seemed a more humane position to take on the human condition. Mistakes could be made,…

Variation On A Theme By Rilke
by Denise Levertov

(The Book of Hours, Book I, Poem 1, Stanza 1)

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