The Meaning of Life and Other Minor Details: Practicing Mindfulness After Fifty

Prompt from Mindfulness: A Journal (Price, 2016) Make a list of ten everyday activities that you find relaxing or soothing--even those as small as calling a friend or making a cup of your favorite tea. Try it! Do one of the activities on your list and write about your experience.  The List, in no particular order: 1. read--theology, queer theology, JFK assassination theories 2. watch television--documentaries, period pieces, docu-dramas, biographies 3. having my afternoon cup of espresso made with my luxury-item coffee maker 4. playing piano 5. tidying up 6. singing 7. listening to music, which kind of music depends on my mood 8. reverie, including porch time with close friends 9. meditating with my Calm app I realize this is probably a sad little list for many people. I can't even think of a last item offhand. But I think my simple list hints at my capacity for finding joy in the simplest of experiences, noticing a blue bird, for example. This capacity, in turn, poi

I don't blog as much as I would like, so when I return to this site, I read the last post I've written. I did that today and thought it wasn't half bad. I remember writing it, I had intended it to mark the beginning of my commitment toward mindfulness.  That was April; this is January. I feel like I've failed at it miserably. I get anxious and angry. I get dejected and forget to meditate. I don't follow through well on activities, such as this one, that are good for me and make me happy. One of the tenets of mindfulness training is that practicing is succeeding. There is no failure, and so you should be gentle with yourself, compassionate to yourself, when you don't meet your own expectation. That's a hard one for me. In a weird way, when I'm disappointed in myself, rather than letting negative thoughts go and moving on, I run the script of--whatever it is--an argument, an embarrassing moment, a disappointment of some sort, over and over in my head. I

There's a line in the Indigo Girls song Watershed that goes, Every five years or so I look back on my life, and I have a good laugh . Absolutely worth pausing to enjoy: https://youtu.be/mut_T0GcehI The line reminds me of a therapy session I had a little less than a decade ago. I'm a firm believer in therapy. Every few years or so I look at my life, and decide that a little more therapy wouldn’t hurt. Anyway, after hearing me narrate my stories and give account of my life as I understood it, the therapist paused and suggested, Well,  you might ask yourself two questions: 1. what do you want? and 2. what do you need? Since then I've come to call these the two existential questions. Because when I come to crossroads in my life—when I take an assessment of it—I come back to these questions. Every time—what do I want, and what do I need. Considering them helps me clear away the clutter. And often, I find that clearing away the clutter, all the superfluous options, the

My paper at the 2017 South Eastern Women's Studies (SEWSA) Conference is Intentional Monogamy in the Age of Tinder: Queer Theology and Re-thinking Christian Sexual Ethics . That one title contains at least four ideas for an academic paper~~and here in one place I'm going to try to pull them together to look again at a concept that we take so much for granted we do it without thinking. Monogamy. I've begun framing my academic research over the last four years with theology; I even did a stint at the Candler School of Theology at Emory. For example, I believe that Dietrich Bonhoeffer's notion of ethics and existentialist theologian Paul Tillich's conceptualization of God and "the" Christ are not just relevant our world today, they are essential. They are my starting point; from them I move to Feminist Theology and Queer Theology, which are topics for another day. Just know that theology~as I define it the search for the nature of God~in its various persp

Sarah and I have recently taken to binge watching The West Wing . She'd never seen the entire series; I had, but after this presidential election, I wanted to watch it again. That doesn't really capture it. I felt compelled to watch it again. Even during the presidential debates, I started getting the feeling that in some way reality was slipping away from me and my country. Here was the heir apparent, the presumptive winner of the whole shebang, Hillary Clinton. She looked like a president; she talked like a president; she had all the experience and credentials one (well, a democrat one) would expect and hope for in a president. She appeared in debates with Nondescript White Guy and Bernie Sanders, a socialist senator from Vermont. A socialist senator from Vermont???  But, Bernie kept her--and us--honest.  I never for one minute thought he was electable, but we need politicians like Bernie Sanders to influence the Democrat platform toward equity and access. On the Republica

You make your plans, and God laughs. That's what happened to me over the weekend. Let me go back, though, and start with discovering the Atlanta Freedom Bands, which I wrote about here in November 2014. I recollected how finding the band made me realize how much I had missed making music, marching in parades, performing in concerts. How after more than 30 years, finding the AFB was like discovering a new, yet long lost treasure. Last year, I marched my first season of parades in various Atlanta community festivals. It was wondrous. And at Christmas, I performed in my first concert playing French Horn in 35 years. Last Saturday morning, I marched mellophone with the AFB in the Atlanta St. Patrick's Day parade. Afterwards, members of the band had lunch and drinks and fellowship at a local restaurant, which is the custom with this group. Saturday night, kept waking up with what felt like a neck cramp. When I woke up early Sunday my speech was slurred, which I chalk up to needing