Writing, Parenting, and Working in the Mess: Authentic Spirituality and Social Justice

In January 2010, my daughter and I left my father’s apartment for the last time in his 1994 Buick Century. We had packed boxes of his belongings into the trunk and the back seat, as well as a gold box that contained photos of each of the flower arrangements that had been delivered to the funeral home, as well as copies of the program at his funeral, his obituary, and his death certificate. By the time we arrived, we had been away from Minnesota for several weeks on a study abroad trip to the island where my father was born. He died on our way back to the states. Although I can recount many details of the days following our arrival in Ohio, I don’t remember returning home. I remember only that my supervisor called me the next day to check in and see when I was coming back to work, and I told her I would be back in on Monday. Monday came, and our lives went on as usual; I reviewed the notes the substitute had prepared for me and went on teaching my class; I rescheduled all the servi...

I've been without a computer at home since early summer, when the cat knocked over a beautiful vase of flowers onto the keyboard, which I'd left open on the kitchen table. So much has happened since I had regular access to this blog that I can't even begin to step back and make sense of it all. But, I'm back at the page, attempting now to do my best not only to summarize the last four and 1/2 months of my life, but also to see them as one of my creative writing professors told me I ought to, stepping not just a few feet, but at least a mile backwards, but also in a new direction. I like that image, of walking backwards away from your life in a direction you've never traveled before, of seeing everything from a new perspective, and knowing you are nowhere you've been before, in unfamiliar territory--but also facing in the same direction from which you came, with the path back always in your sight. There were a few times over the last few months that I've...

It is hard to believe how much the prairie can change in just a week and a half. The golden Alexanders and beardtongue litter the bike path with yellow and purple. Monarchs settle onto the tight buds of milkweeds, impatient. Birds of all kinds squawk and sing loudly enough that I can barely hear my own thoughts--which is a relief. At five a.m., and, after an hour of trying my best to overcome my panic with meditation and prayer, I finally get up and start walking, half-dazed, toward the bike path that will take me on a seven mile hike through prairie. The fog is thick enough in places to make the path feel most intimately familiar and completely unclear--much like the path I'm walking at the moment. For the last four years and two months of my life I have been battling my daughter's school practically daily just to ensure that she get a good education. I take that back. I had expected a good education, fought for it for two full years at the beginning. Then I gave in, took...

For the last two weeks, the fog has descended on and off, seemingly unexpectedly, lying down near the ground, thick as snow. Stepping out into it, I always half believe the snow is deeper than it actually is--as it should be this time of year--almost expect to hear a crunch when stepping even into well-worn paths. After awhile it will begin to rise like a veil between things, as if it were trying to remind us of how little we pay attention to our own neighborhoods, how easily we would walk into a tree or a hole in the ground if we didn't have our sight. I'm looking out the window, watching it rise slowly from thick blanket to veil right now, as I type. T sends me regular texts about the weather; maybe because she lives in a place where people aren't nearly as obsessed with it as they are here, and, being a Minnesotan at heart, she needs to have this conversation, even with someone who isn't just a gas station attendant or server at a restaurant. And it has been unseason...