vocation

  • Boat

    Sometimes when I’m looking for a little direction, I’ll click on the ‘Laudate’ app on my phone, which contains the readings of the day. When I scan through, a phrase might pop out at me from a psalm or a gospel, or a whole reading might strike me in a new way, or some days…

  • Open

    This morning’s ‘Jesus Calling’ devotional asked me to open my hands and be ready to receive abundant blessings, and I was totally on board. Abundant blessings are always welcome here, after all, and the timing couldn’t have been better. I had a down day yesterday and a weepy night and I was ready for the…

  • Possible

    I dropped my kid off in the dark to catch the bus that will take her and her classmates to Washington DC. On the way home, the sky lightened, and it was the particular kind of spring light that makes everything look impermanent. Houses and buildings took on a cardboard quality, like they were a…

  • Sorry

    One by one, my students were telling me about the pretend flowers they grew in music class, and what they planned to do with them. “I grew a red rose and I’m going to keep it in my room so I can look at it.” “I grew a yellow flower and I’m going to give…

  • Around

    Today I taught music in the preschool my children attended, and that completes a circle for me. Over the years, in my role as an early childhood music educator, I have led programs in most of the places where my kids had their first playgroups, their library story-times, their kindergarten classrooms. All of the places…

  • Hero’s Journey

    This fall, my daughter took a half-year course called “A Hero’s Journey”, which delved into the theory of Joseph Campbell that all of our favorite stories resonate with us because they follow the same narrative pattern. A hero is separated from what she knows, is tested, receives help, battles and wins, and returns home, not…

  • Me

    I came across a picture of me as a child that was reminiscent of a picture of me taken this Christmas. Our faces are turned at the same angle and our coloring and features are similar. I never grew out of that unruly hair. But there are differences, of course. Nine-year old me had some…

  • Round

    When I heard the news that my first music teacher had died, I thought what most of her thousands of students probably did: Ta ta ti ti ta    ti ti ti ti ta ta It was a sweet way to teach basic sight-reading. On a huge, poster size flip board were illustrations and simple syllables…

  • Door

    I am always sending things out: ideas, emotions, hope, and it sometimes seems that I am sending these things out into a shapeless void. I place pieces of my heart in sealed envelopes, put them in my outgoing mail, and never hear anything ever again. This is a false view, of course, and self-centered and…

  • Waiting

    I don’t like waiting. Waiting for something important feels, for me, like a racing heart and a pit in my stomach and like my small voice echoing in a canyon: I AM ALONE. In the season in which I waited to get pregnant with Brian, I agonized and strived and pleaded with God. Two years…