Touching Base

Home this morning after almost a month of travel - and not done yet...flying back out to Seattle in a week. This time with family to visit the Redwoods in northern CA.

I am sneaking up on the final months of this sabbatical year - and full of gratitude to have had the time to travel, research, reconnect and reflect. Most of all the reflection has been a powerful gift - and one that I realize more and more I have to have in order to really do anything else well. We have pretty much written it out of our daily lives - and I believe it numbs us to all kinds of evils. Speaking of reflection....

The Cloister Walk a favorite book - recounting (amoung other things) the time that writer Kathleen Norris spent at St. John's Abbey. She writes,

"Monastic people seek to weave ceremony through every mundane part of life: how one eats, how one dresses, how one treats tools, or enters a church are not left to whim. Ceremony is so large a part of what Benedictines do that it becomes second nature to many of them. The monastic life has this in common with the artistic one: both are attempts to pay close attention to objects, events, and natural phenomena that otherwise would get chewed up in the daily grind."

Earlier this year I spent some time in northern Minnesota at St. John's Abbey. I was there to talk to the folks at the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library about the St. John's Bible. This is the first bible that has been commissioned in the monastic tradition in 500 years. Those talks were extremely fruitful. Seven facsimile pages of the bible (stunning in their own right) will be coming to Milwaukee in January of 2007 as part of the exhibit that I am pulling (and this is exactly the right word some days!!) together this year.

More about this in the coming months - "Sacred Texts/Contemporary Forms: Spiritual Traditions in the Digital Age"

Yesterday I was able to stop by and introduce myself to Robin Kinney at the Bay View Book Arts Gallery. How wonderful to see this little jewel of a gallery within blocks of where I live and work. The work she is showing is worth stopping by to look at. I hope to have some images here soon as well.