Posts Tagged ‘loneliness’
The Corps of Christ
July 8, 2020
Once upon a time I thought belonging just happened, was angry or ashamed when I couldn’t experience it. But togetherness happens with practice and intention. It takes everything: pain, grief, rage, as well as my good intentions. This is even more evident now: though physically distanced from my church, I feel less alone in the body of Christ than I ever have before.
Read MoreThe Best of Rivals
March 20, 2019
The following is Jamie Smith’s editorial from Image’s hundredth issue, which mails to subscribers this week. A special extra-thick issue on friendship, rivalry, and collaboration, it features Shane McCrae, A.E. Stallings, Bruce Cockburn, Molly McCully Brown, Padraig O Tuama, Christopher Beha, and many others. If you don’t subscribe, you can still get it as your first…
Read MoreCutting Away the Noise
June 6, 2018
Fifteen years ago, there was no end to the noise. It took a cutting to get me to silence. I worked twelve-hour days and longer in an aircraft hangar on a flight line of hundreds of helicopters with the cacophony of auxiliary power units, the collision of metal, and rotor blades beating the air outside,…
Read MoreAn All Too Ghostly Ghost Story: Part 2
August 29, 2017
Continued from yesterday. Four years ago, my wife and I moved into our red brick cottage. The living room and bedroom walls were a bright pink; the kitchen floor was green linoleum; a small yellow ball with a star rolled around, but we had no pet to play with it. It was as if we…
Read MoreLifescapes and the Lonely City
September 21, 2016
I have a friend who occasionally asks me when I’ll move to a real apartment, meaning a modern one that I can’t afford. Mine is in a 130-year-old former bakery I like to think is haunted by donut ghosts. The building was built on top of an aquifer, and the sump pump thrusts out massive…
Read MoreA Poet Walks Into a Business Networking Event
May 12, 2016
The poet gives a young woman $15 for admission, squeezes her drink ticket like a talisman. Voices roar like surf. The poet straightens her arms so she can shimmy through the crowd. She must reach the color-coded name tags. There’s a palette of categories: Tech, Finance, Start-up, Health. She must decide between Arts, yellow, or…
Read MoreDriving the Dark Roads
October 14, 2015
The other day I got an email from a high-school boyfriend, which drove me headlong into remembrance of a time in my life I’ve tried to forget. My husband is the only person I know who enjoyed high school, so I don’t harbor any delusions that my unhappiness made me unique among teenagers. In fact,…
Read MoreGethsemane Companions
August 21, 2015
If I had a garden to kneel in to call out to God, it would be my mother’s yard. Lined on three sides by pasture, the ground is ribbed with roots from an oak tree that towers by the fence, and is patched with dirt from where the grass never properly went to seed.
Read MoreCome Away to a Lonely Place
October 18, 2010
Two weeks ago I put on the moss agate ring my great-grandmother won selling magazines in the red dirt of her Oklahoma girlhood. I still wear a wedding band and it keeps the moss agate’s roomy rose-gold band from slipping off my finger. But the wedding band can’t keep the moss agate steady and the…
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