By Lindasusan UlrichFebruary 12, 2025“Your tattoos like the stamps upon your passport….”—“Wheat Like Waves,” by Death Cab for CutieFor the longest time, I’d admired friends’ tattoos but couldn’t think of what image I’d want permanently stamped on my own body. One day the lightbulb went off: I wanted
By Erika HewittFebruary 5, 2025“The hardest part of training a dog is developing the skills necessary to train a dog.”—Chad Mackin, dog trainerI don’t have a dog, but my social media feed knows how badly I want one. A rapt audience, I scroll through endless videos, preparing for the day I become a d
By Oscar SinclairJanuary 29, 2025“[Hope] transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. Hope...is not the same as joy that things are going well…but, rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance
By Susan MaginnJanuary 22, 2025“God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder." —Kalistos WareThe other day I was walking near a cove a mile or so from my house, and a pair of shoes caught my attention—because they were my shoes; my favorite shoes. I do not covet many thi
By Julie Yeeun KimJanuary 15, 2025“Whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’The word of the Lord has brought me insult and injury all day long.”—The Prophet Jeremiah (20:8)When I was sent to the principal’s office in the second grade for pointing out my teacher’s co
By DanaLee SimonJanuary 8, 2025“Resistance is the secret of joy.”—Alice WalkerThe theme of Joy has been reverberating as a holy echo in my life over these past months. Joy feels like one of the most compassionate offerings I can hand over to the depth of my soul which, in many moments on many days,
By Geoff DukeDecember 18, 2024“...This is the solstice, the still pointof the sun, its cusp and midnight,the year’s thresholdand unlocking, where the pastlets go of and becomes the future…”—Margaret Atwood, in “Shapechangers in Winter”When my family moved into our Vermont home, I built a small cave
By Rumni SahaDecember 11, 2024“There is no path to happiness: happiness is the path.”—attributed to Gautam BuddhaIn 2018, I embarked on an 8,000-mile journey to meet the Dalai Lama. I meticulously planned the trip after learning that the man I had worshipped all my life would be in his adopted home
By Kim MasonDecember 4, 2024“I wish for you… a season in which there is room for the complexities that occur during this time. A season of complicated memories, of happiness and pain, of comfort and loss, of disappointment and fulfillment…. A season of joy which also has room for sadness, because gl
By Rayla D. MattsonNovember 27, 2024“Give a person a fish, they eat for a day. Teach a person to garden, and the whole neighborhood gets tomatoes.”—UnknownMy grandfather’s farm was in the middle of nowhere, Georgia. When my family would visit, he would often complain to my dad that my sister and I w
