A Year Ago Today

A year ago today I spent nearly the entire day alone in Florence. My friends left in the morning after breakfast, and I left the guesthouse where we were staying shortly after. According to my journal entry, I was feeling exhausted by 2:45. My tired feet got mention more than once, as I was walking pretty much the entire time after the fifteen-minute-at-most bus ride into the center.

I also mention how much encounters with rude people can affect one's day. I wasn't able to reach any of my friends via telephone, and I was having trouble getting the public phones to work. I had also learned that getting out to my friends' house in Strove was going to be costlier and more complicated than I expected.

At one point I wrote, "The song title 'O Sactissima' comes to my mind, even though I don't know the music. It changes to 'O Stanchissima,' though! I am so tired in my legs and feet." (Sanctissima means very holy; stanchissima means very tired.)

The redeeming moments of the long day were talking with the artists near the Duomo, buying a backpack I'd found a few days earlier, and eating wonderful peach and berry gelato.

At the end of my entry for this day, I wrote about how tumultuous the past two years had been, knowing my job might end, having it end, working in a less than stable situation, moving to the new house, etc. Even the trip to Italy had come up rather suddenly as a possibility. My last two sentences are, "It is nice to be away. I don't think I've even thought that until just now."

Well, it was lovely to be away, and here are some photos taken after the ones from the previous post.


Carolyn and I spent the morning in the Oltrarno (literally "across the Arno" river) section of the city. Of course we crossed the Arno via the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge.)


No, it's not a taxidermy shop, but a sandwich shop. And they did serve wild boar meat as one possible ingredient.


Santo Spirito, the church of the Holy Spirit.


We met back with Carolyn's husband and granddaughter at the Piazza Signoria.


And suddenly the skies turned dark!


And torrential rain began, and people were getting soaked. We huddled under the Loggia for protection with hundreds of others. Soon we were getting wet there, because of the strong wind, so we crossed the street to stand under the porch of the Uffizi. It didn't really make much difference.

We bought rain ponchos from the vendors who had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, slogged our way down the street to a trattoria for lunch. Wet and bedraggled, we were seated. The rain stopped within ten minutes.


And the skies were blue and beautiful the rest of the day, except for another downpour later in the afternoon as we were leaving a DaVinci exhibit.


And blue and beautiful that evening. (I know it's blurry, but I think the color's worth it.)


The next day we saw the Casa di Dante,


spent a good bit of time in the Boboli Gardens,


and defied gravity walking up from the guesthouse to the church of San Miniato, just in time to hear the last several minutes of the monks singing their evening prayer service.







San Miniato way up on the hill, seen from the other side of the river (taken that morning),


and Florence seen from inside San Miniato (taken that evening.)


This is from the day when my feet were so tired. I had sat down to rest near one of the old city gates. If you look closely, you can see that the tiny white speck about 2/3 of the way down, in the center, is a soccer ball!


When I first went to live in Florence, my friend Jay said, "Always remember to look up. If you don't look up, you'll miss so much beauty." This is a part of the city I'd walked through countless times back in those days, but until a year ago, I'd never looked up at this particular point. Jay was right.


From the steps of San Miniato, from my journal.

A Year Ago Yesterday

The beautiful little church of Monteriggioni, just across the piazza from our lunching place, but seen here from the city walls.



Towers of San Gimignano.



A view of Florence from the Piazzale Michelangelo, probably taken before supper.


A year ago today I had lunch in Monteriggioni, ice cream in San Gimignano, supper in Florence on the Piazzale Michelangelo, and dessert in the home of friends in Scandicci, sort of a suburb of Florence. The neighborhood was once my neighborhood, called Le Bagnese. (Alas, I didn't take any pictures that evening.)

The famous places were wonderful, but according to my journal, which agrees with my memory, “The highlight of today for me was taking the Bateys [my beloved friends and travel companions] to Le Bagnese and to Paolo and Tosca’s [more beloved friends] house for a lovely visit, lots of laughter, little desserts, spumante (Moscato), and the full moon rising over the hill. It was a perfect evening, except too short.”

Today, sitting in my office, that day and those places and people seem far, far away. Sometimes I have a hard time believing that the various parts of my life do actually all belong to the same life—if that makes any sense.

And yet I know they do, and there are echoes all around even today of those other lives.

Earlier today I shared with a mentor how I loved my life in Italy, what a special time of life that was, and how it led to unexpected events that have shaped my life ever since.

This afternoon I made a date to visit a new friend in my new neighborhood—a 100-year-old woman who is an artist and who also loves Florence and actually has some of her photographs of Florence being shown right now. So I’ll be going to her house Saturday to see her pictures of Florence and to share stories.

Our dogs are named after Tosca and Paolo, a daily connection to those precious friends. Tosca became my friend via an English class I taught way back in that other life, back when I was pretty fresh out of college with an English degree.

And today I came closer to that English degree than I’ve been in twenty years, by signing up for a creative nonfiction writers workshop coming up in the fall. Which is exciting, because it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. And scary, because I’ve done so little writing in recent years, and I wonder what I’ve got in me and if it’ll hold up in the presence of more experienced writers.

Shortly after signing up for that, I received a message from a friend who was part of a spiritual direction group with me for two years. We had not communicated in months, perhaps in over a year. He mentioned among other things being blessed by Morten Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium,” which I had shared with the group. And while the music has no direct connection to Italy, in my mind anything written in Latin connects me to the Italian language and thus to Italy.

Reasons abound for my absence on this blog for so long. Without going into unnecessary detail, it’s enough to say that the past year and more has been a time of disconnection, of floundering in some ways, of deepening in others, of wondering and waiting, of being stretched and strained and stressed and strengthened, of trying to find some narrative for life that was cohesive enough to hold it all together.

Today feels like a coming together of several pieces of a jigsaw puzzle life. As if just maybe it could result in some kind of picture that will make sense of all the pieces. Or a story that actually ties together all the loose ends with a coherent plot and theme.

Time alone will tell.

Meanwhile, it’s fun to look at my pictures from last year’s trip!

(And something with the computer or Internet wasn't cooperating last night, thus the discrepancy between title and text. I'm posting a day late.)

Pattypan Squash

I just think they're wonderful. So roundishly cute, I almost feel like petting them, as if they had jolly little personalities to go with the shape. Who could have thought up something like this?

One of the joys of summer that I keep trying to come up with when it's so easy to think only of the heat!

Let 's See

Were I in a more creative mood, I think I would compose a little poem about the trials I've experienced today with this blog. But it's the end of the day, I'm getting tired, and all I really need to do right now is see if the crazy thing will even allow me to post.

Perhaps the poem will come later.

So, let's see....

Hey, it worked!

And now I am trying it with another browser. Will it work? The suspense is killing me....

April Showers and May Flowers

On the day the Mississiipi River crested at Memphis, I could not resist driving down to see that mighty river so swollen. Since age 4, this river has been a constant part of my life, as we used to drive from Arkansas to Tennessee and back often to visit family. And of course now we live here.

So, I went down to see how this old friend looked in the current condition.

Pretty amazing.







I remember when we were younger and would make the drive, hearing my parents explain what that long high hill was that stretched as far as the eye could see along the Arkansas side of the river. They said it was to stop the river. Which made no sense to me, since the river was a couple of miles away. But as you can see in the photo above, the river made it to the levee. Just amazing. I'll never drive by that levee again without remembering seeing the water up this high.






I don't know if all the rain we got earlier, given that it was accompanied by so much wind, actually made the flowers prettier or stronger this year or weakened them, but they sure are pretty.

One Hundred Sixty-Four

That's how many days it has been since the last time I wrote something here, if I've counted correctly.

Seems like an awful lot of days in blogland. Not so many in the context of larger kinds of lands.

I never intended to go a hundred sixty-four days without writing, but in an odd way I kind of like the fact that I have.

I think quite a lot about how technology has changed, and continues to change, the way people live in time and space. Especially how they (we) think about time and space. Many people who use the technologies tend think that because there are cellphones, people should be available all the time. Because there is email, which is instant, people apologize if they don't respond as soon as possible (even if there really is no need for an instant reply.) And because there is an Internet and there are blogs and search engines that are searching them 24/7, people should blog often.

Well, in a larger context, a hundred sixty-four days is not really that long, and even though I didn't set out to do it, I think I'll let my absence and return symbolize that life is much bigger than the Internet.

And I will add that it is because of a larger context coupled with technology that I decided to write tonight. Since the fall, I have occasionially looked at the "stats" on my blog, amazed at how many people wound up finding it even though I wasn't doing anything with it. It just struck me as strange.

And tonight I saw that after the U.S., Iran again came in second place in my blog's audience. Fascinating.

And somehow just knowing that people in Iran (and Latvia and Ukraine and Hong Kong and China....) are coming across this blog while searching for something or other, made me want to put something new here, just in case they decided to look at the home page (if that's what it's called?) for some reason.

Besides that, it's almost Easter. Seems a good time for bringing something back to life.

Bent World

I was reading an article tonight by N.T. Wright, on "How Can the Bible Be Authoritative?" It was originally given as a lecture, and it's really worth reading, mainly for what I believe to be very worthwhile thinking about the questions involved. I also have to give credit to anyone who can write about the Bible and questions of authority--and work Shakespeare, the piano, and G.M. Hopkins into the mix! An author after my own heart!

Because of the Hopkins connection, I want to share this on my Hopkins-inspired blog:

In a paragraph on how "the church is always in danger of getting too like the world," Wright writes,

We then have to allow the story to challenge our traditions, not to get rid of traditions but in order to see where we've come from, and who we are as the people of God in the 20th century, and to reshape our traditions honestly and properly. But, also, we must allow scripture to stretch our reason back into shape. We must allow scripture to teach us how to think straight, because by ourselves we don't; we think bent, we think crooked. Gerard Manley Hopkins said, "The Holy Spirit over the bent world broods with warm breast and with Ah! bright wings." And the Spirit broods over us as we read this book, to straighten out our bent thinking; the world-views that have got twisted so that they are like the world's world-views. God wants us to be people, not puppets; to love him with our mind as well as our soul and our strength.

From what I know of Hopkins and Wright, I kind of think they would probably get along well with each other. I know I'm thankful to both of them for their relentless search for truth, their fresh ways of seeing and writing about it, and their willingness to share what they write (even if Hopkins made us wait a while before reading his.)

From what I know of myself, I do need scripture to teach me how to think straight, because by myself I don't. Sometimes I try to imagine what I would be like without the influence of the Bible in my life. Of course it's impossible to know and practically impossible to imagine. But when I try, the result is not very pretty!

And trying to imagine western civilization without the influence of the Judeo-Christian scripture is just as impossible a task. As bent and crooked as the world is now, how much more so would it be without "Love thy neighbor as thyself," without "God is love," without the story of the "good Samaritan," or without the belief in a God who forgives and teaches us to forgive?

Tonight I'm thankful for Hopkins, thankful for N.T. Wright, and thankful for the Spirit that broods. And thankful to be a little bent part of this bent, crooked world.

All Saints

It is November 1st. All Saints Day, for those who follow the church calendar.

This weekend I went for my annual fall retreat at St. Columba. (The photos are from a past visit there.)

Yesterday I looked for a hymn for today and found one that immediately became a favorite. It's "Who are these like stars appearing?"

Who are these like stars appearing,
these, before God's throne who stand?
Each a golden crown is wearing;
who are all this glorious band?
Alleluia! Hark, they sing,
praising loud their heavenly King.

It has quite a lot of such glorious descriptions of the saints around the throne. But what made it a favorite is the fourth verse:

These are they whose hearts were riven,
sore with woe and anguish tried,
who in prayer full oft have striven
with the God they glorified;
now, their painful conflict o'er,
God has bid them weep no more.



God knows I've done my share of striving with Him, of having my heart torn apart (riven), and while I sometimes dare to hope the worst of it may be behind me, it's hard to believe it's over at this point in life.

While on retreat I also read over half of Come, Be My Light, the account of Mother Teresa's spiritual struggles as shared largely in letters to her spiritual directors. Her story certainly fits the image of striving with God even while glorifying Him, about a thousand times more than mine.

I have a hard time reading her story, and stories of other people of faith, because as I read them, a part of my mind is almost continually hearing a critical voice, the voice of an imaginary psychologist, I suppose, who attempts to explain everything away with some kind of diagnosis, or at least to show that the people living these lives had unrealistic or perhaps "neurotic," as the word is still used, thinking and emotional experiences.

And you have to wonder, would Mother Teresa have suffered so much if she just hadn't believed in God so much?

And almost certainly the answer is no, she would not have. You could say she brought on the suffering because of her belief system and the crazy choice it led her to make with her life. (She did fear greatly at the beginning that people would call her crazy for doing what she felt called to do.)

The problem with that critical psychologizing voice, however, is that she and many others have had such spiritual experiences, and many have suffered in their faith, and yet their thinking and behavior in all other respects cannot be shown to be aberrant, unrealistic, or neurotic. In fact, their thinking and living were (and are, for those still living) much healthier thinking and living than that of people with more "realistic" ways of looking at life. Mother Teresa functioned extremely well, under extremely difficult circumstances that would break most people emotionally, if not physically and mentally.

In fact, it's people like her--and many others, like my friends who have just moved to a remote region of India where he will travel to even more remote places to give medical care to people who would not get it otherwise--who fly in the face of my inner psychologizing voice which sometimes mimics the ideas of skeptics who insist that belief in God is a way of comforting ourselves, of making life easier, of not having to face the hard realities of life.

The people I know who truly believe in God live harder lives than just about anyone else, and they do it by choice, not by chance.

And so, Mother Teresa strove with God even as she glorified Him in her relentless commitment to love others, no matter what she felt, or didn't feel, and couldn't feel, inside.



And I trust (because, despite my inner psychologist critic, I'm one of those people who share her basic belief system) that one day we will see her, and she will appear like a star--a real star, not the kind of people we call "stars" in our crazy, neurotic, unhealthy world.

He will be her Light, as He was all along, even though she experienced such darkness.

And her tears will have been wiped away at last, forever.

Prayer for the Homeless

Tonight a man came into church late. Although he sat down quietly, he stood out. No one else in the group had a baseball cap on. And except for the minister, who was from Kenya, everyone else was white. Except for this late-arriving visitor.

I went to speak to him after the service. He said he had come into the church to pray, not realizing he would be entering a service, quite late. He said that since there were people there, he would also ask for help, and said he needed twenty dollars to pay for the boarding house where he was staying. He said he had been doing lawnwork that usually paid for his stay, but the past few days had not been able to get any work.

Intuition told me he was telling the truth. I asked various questions to see if my intuition might be right, and his answers and his demeanor seemed to fit with my initial impression.

I don't know if I was right or not, but since the Kenyan minister was not allowed to administer church funds and could only encourage the man to come back tomorrow and speak with the appropriate person, I felt the right thing to do was to try to help the man. After all, we were in a church, had just heard a sermon on prayer; and here was this man saying he had come to the church to pray for help, and now he was asking in a very respectful, non-manipulative, I-understand-if-you-can't-help-me sort of way.

So, I walked with him to our house, talked with my husband about it (I didn't have any cash with me), and we gave him twenty dollars. I also told him about HopeWorks and our program, gave him the phone number and the name of the person he needed to talk with if he were interested.

Two things from our conversation have stayed on my mind. At some point he asked, "So, you went to college?" and I said, "Yes, I did." He responded, "Wow, you were lucky. That's really good, that you got to do that."

And when he said something about how nice the people at church had been, I asked, "So, did you grow up going to church?" And he said, "No, I didn't. My parents were good parents, they did the best they could; but they didn't take us to church. I think that's part of why my life has been so....well, has lacked direction. I didn't have any direction in my life, and it just kind of came apart. I was thirty before I finally realized I needed to get to know God and find some direction for my life. And since I did that, things have been going better. I started to have some hope."

I remember a graduation speech based on Paul's words to Timothy, "What do you have that you were not given?" and the encouragement to remember always that anything we have (education, talents, abilities, economic resources, friends, family, whatever) has been given to us by someone. Even if we worked for it--and in the case of that degree, worked hard for it!--still, we didn't build the school, or supply the scholarships, or provide our own professors. Everything we have is given to us in one way or another.

And so, here was this man, Michael, walking down the street with me. He wasn't given a way to discover faith in his younger years. He wasn't given the means to go to college. And now he struggles with life, is transitioning out of living a homeless lifestyle, and is very aware of his dependency on others simply to have shelter over his head.

Something else about the evening stays in my mind. I was reading the blog of my spiritual director, who wrote about a couple who came to his church looking for help.

He makes an interesting point that I've never heard anyone make before. Lots of people in this culture (like the couple who came to his church) say they believe in God, say they are "spiritual," even say they have a personal relationship with Jesus and try to live according to his words--but they don't go to church and don't want to be part of a church.

There are all kinds of theological and logical problems with this thinking, but in this land of the free and home of the not-always-so-brave, it's a common thing to hear. Theology and logic aside, Jeff points out a very practical problem with this thinking: If people who say they believe just stop being part of a church, eventually there will be no churches to help these people who show up at churches asking for help. People seem to expect the churches to be there if they need them, but they don't see why it matters for them to commit to being there for others.

Hmmmm....He has a point.

Meanwhile, I'm glad there was a church for Michael that I met this evening. I hope he was teling the truth. I hope he will be able to follow through and continue getting his life going in a better direction. I hope he will continue to pray, and to find nice, caring people in churches.

Maybe someday he will have what we often call "a church home." Maybe it will be the one just up the street, as he indicated he hoped to see me again there.

And my guess is that if he does make that church, or any church, his home, he will remember better than I do sometimes that anything he has was given to him. My guess is that people coming for help will find it if they ask him.

You know, tonight's sermon was on prayer. And I'm realizing that this is not just a bunch of hopes, maybes, and guesses. It's a prayer.

It's a prayer.

Missing My Feet

No, my feet haven't gone missing. I've had no accident or extreme surgery. The title just kind of came to me like that.

As I was walking the other day, in my Nike Run Free Plus shoes, the ones that can catch a twig and hold onto it as seen in the previous post, I realized that I really miss walking and running barefoot.

About a year ago I wrote some about this, about the knee injuries and giving up running when it seemed I couldn't run without re-injuring. Then about the friend who recommended running barefoot, and how I tried it.

I tried it and liked it! Not only could I run without hurting my knee (without my knee even hurting....at all!), but I just relished the sensation of being barefoot outside. The softness of moss, the coolness of grass, the squishiness of mud, the cushion of dust, the splashing of puddles. Even the roughness of bark when I walked along a fallen tree trunk.

I had to stop when the weather got too cold. I tried several times to purchase a pair of Vibram FiveFinger shoes (and always thought I'd blog about them once I got them), but they kept selling out before I could get any.

So I settled for the Nikes and continued running once I got them.

And in the meantime we moved to this new house. And that's part of why I miss going barefoot.

At our old house, I could drive to one of the biggest parks in the city in just a couple of minutes. That's where I'd go, either to the public area or sometimes to the Botanic Garden--and usually in the mornings, no one was around. Or just one or two people, and once we had the conversation about why I was barefoot, they didn't think it odd, so it was fine. One woman, in fact, told me she was friends with a major Memphis runner and that he had begun running barefoot not long before.

From our new house, it takes me ten minutes to get to that park. And because of starting the new job, my morning time is more limited than before, so I just haven't been going there.


There's a wonderful park, pictured above, closer to our new house. It's really beautiful--smaller than the other, but with a lake and an island bird sanctuary. It's lovely. But it's also in the middle of a very nice neighborhood, and people do walk their dogs there each morning, or just walk themselves around the lake. It isn't really crowded, but it isn't as uncrowded as the first park. And I just get the feeling that the people there would look at me funny if I were barefoot.

Besides that, it doesn't have the large stretches of grass that the other one has. Going barefoot on dried magnolia leaves is not as pleasant as being on grass. And because of all the dog-walking at the new park, I end up having to be on the sidewalk a good deal. Which is not painful, despite what you might expect; but neither is it especially pleasant.

So, I'm thinking I'll have to give up either a bit of sleep, or a bit of workout time if I want the true barefoot experience again. I think it's worth the sacrifice, though it's hard to think that when I'm just waking up and it's still darkish.

Now that I'm thinking about this, I'm thinking that yet a third park may be quicker to get to than my old park. It has a golf area that I don't think anyone uses for golf early in the morning, because that woman I met in the park actually put me in touch with her barefoot running friend, and he told me that's where he runs. Hmmmmm. I'll just have to check it out.

Anyway, if you haven't gone barefoot outside for a while, I highly encourage it, before it gets too cold. I have this theory that the soles of our feet are connected pretty directly to our s-o-u-l souls, somehow. Because the barefoot time I had last fall just seemed to do something deep inside that can't be explained simply by nerve endings. It has to do with being connected to the earth, and to childhood, and to life, in a way that shoes just get in the way of.

Do it for your soles. Do it for your soul.