A religious doubter on why religion matters
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{Photo by Erica Hysert for Scopio} I am in the gloaming of my life, the early autumn of my life. That means I have not made it to winter or end of day, but I can see them from here. Always, I’ve favored evening, even the words for it, like “gloaming” and “dusk”; and autumn rivals spring as my favorite season. In the life of a deciduous tree, the autumnal stage, when leaves lose their youthful…
What Loss Taught Me About Surrender
{Image by Samuel Gauthier for Scopio} She was nose down in dense clover, tail feathers up and wings askew like an ill-fated paper airplane. No movement, and seemingly no way to right her injured self from the expanses of oxalis that had overtaken my late-summer garden. Whenever a bird strikes my front window, my eyes dart in that direction; if I don’t see the bird rebound and fly away, I scan the…
What Our Restlessness Is Telling Us
A Monk, Jacob’s Dream, and Finding God in the Every Day
And How World Events Colored the Feeling Tones of my Thirties
On Instinct and Flow States
{Photo by Renato Lainho for Scopio} “But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be if it isn’t a prayer?” —Mary Oliver (from “I Happened To Be Standing”) The Wren Who Changed Everything One day in late 2017, I sat writing. On this morning, I rode a fretful moment, the worry du jour being my first novel, Wren , for which I wasn’t finding a publisher. The challenge of publishing a first…
{Photo by Calin Strajescu for Scopio} Almost a month ago, I decided for this year’s Lent to dive into Spanish practice and “consciousness hygiene,” and an update on the latter seems in order. For the sake of brevity, I’ll focus on just one area. Early in the effort to spiff up my consciousness, I realized I needed to log off Facebook and Instagram—and to do this as part of my deep dive into…
Mindfulness, Spanish, and Silence
