The miracle of grace is available to us even when it has been left untended.

Remind me that life is magical and mysterious.

Love is reaching through the generations with expectations that I live through challenging times.

The changes that take place in winter are a kind of alchemy, an enchantment performed by ordinary creatures to survive.

The wilderness alongside every moment, sprawling in each direction, holds more than the silence that theologians imagine of God.

What once seemed certain is now unpredictable, even dangerous.

This ritual begins by lighting a candle from the chalice, and placing it in position. A list of supplies is at the end of this resource. One: Fire. Source of warmth and life for our ancestors; and for humans still today....

There is relief and remorse equally in my heart as the growing season comes to a close.

My four-year-old daughter has taught me this lesson: when a child wants to derail Business As Usual— to curb the hubris of adults who dare believe in schedules and plans and productivity— one fierce little body and one clear, piercing voice, strategically applied to the right pressure point,...

There are so many spiritual lessons from the natural world and—in a season filled with Ingatherings and Water Communions—this is one for me: oxbow lakes as a beautiful combination of resiliency, strength, and flexibility.

Rain falls upon the surface of the earth, and pulled by gravity each drop begins to flow downhill. Drop merges with drop, flowing together, into a trickle, a streamlet, a creek, a mighty river, flowing onward. Some of the water seeps down into the earth itself, as groundwater, or deep aquifers,...

It was my inadvertent letting go that made this wild, interdependent beauty possible. And at that very moment, I knew I didn’t need that sort of control anymore.

In our water ritual, we bring water from the places we live or the places we may have visited and pour it in one container. All of the water mixes together, and every drop has some of the molecules of water from every place....

I call the tall bush on my back patio “Burning Bush” because in autumn its leaves are a fiery red. All winter long I overlooked three uninhabited nests inside of it. For months and months I could have perceived—but didn’t—what was in plain sight. ...

We could see the main path to the swimming hole ahead, but we had to pick our way through sand spurs to get there. Behind us were rattlesnakes. What did the youth do? They started playing.

On my worst days, it is gravity I am most grateful for: the way the earth pulls at me from her core, yearns for me, keeps me pressed tightly against her surface. When my own core is hollowed out, when I have no more mass than a leaf dead on the branch, still this is enough for the earth to find me.

Who are the angry birds in my life? What are the sticks I carry in my heart so as not to be hurt again?

Water unites us. All water is one water, shape-shifting as it goes on and on in its unending cycle. The stream we gather by unites us with all the waters of the world, for all of life depends on water. That's why this common, everyday element on which our very lives depend is sacred. In our...

May we find unexpected ways to remember where we came from and imagine where we may go next. May we find touchstones of our pasts, and may they become a foundation for the future.

For all the mothers and mother figures The grandmothers, aunts, and extended family members who mother The soon-to-be mothers, the wish-they-were mothers, the never-wanted-to-be mothers, the “it’s complicated” mothers The birth mothers, foster mothers, adoptive mothers, stepmothers The “used...