Is acceptance in your toolbox?

The timing has to be perfect. This was a belief my mother gave me when I was very small. She had an unplausible theory that “the right things” were “easy” and timing was a big part of that equation. If it didn’t flow, it didn’t go in my house. I can remember as a...

The Kit Bond Bridge. When I’m coming home from a long trip north or when I fly to my destination, the marker I am in the homestretch is the Kit Bond Bridge. I always take a picture to mark the occasion and I feel accomplished no matter how tired I am. My journeys are...

Storms can destroy, and storms can reveal. I live in the Midwest and we are no stranger to storms of all kinds. From whirlwinds to blizzards, the weather is here can be rough. I’ve seen it obliterate homes, uproot trees, and rearrange whole environments. The clash is...

Small confrontations. They can rattle you for sure. Sometimes one will shake you deep enough that you find yourself wondering “why did that make me do this” after the fact. Stop. Take a moment and recognize you are being handed an opportunity to discharge an...

Patience is like water — when you have a well of it to draw from, you don’t think about it. But … when that well runs low, all you can think about is how much you don’t have access to what you need. For me, patience and trust are tied tightly together. Trust asks you...

On a misty morning, she appeared at my round pen. Her heart was heavy and her soul tattooed with patterns she knew were no longer random. Her wonder had lead her here —  her desire to gain mastery over the things she could control and a need to respond with grace...

No. No. No. The cold seeps in through all the cracks, freezing my capacity to think, to move, to act. A blanket would help I think, block out what the supersaturation of the chill. But then am I just covering up the inevitable? The cold is diligent in finding a way to...

I am a gamer. And in my game life we use the term “sweaty” for the serious players. As a geek, this is my sport. I play on a team with 11 other people. And we are very serious. We are among the top one to two hundred players in the entire, very popular, game played by...

I don’t sew and the reason I tell myself I don’t sew is because I can never get my finished project to look like it does in my head. The edges of the material never seem to come together the way I promised myself they would and that leaves me frustrated. This means I...

As a culture, we are focused on finding happiness. So many of us, however, have never thought deeply about what happiness might actually look like when it shows up at our door. Stop and think about the word “blissful.” Blissful is the term for “perfect happiness.”...