Poets and monks... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.

The High Plains, the beginning of the desert West, often act as a crucible for those who inhabit them.

The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.

Pay close attention to objects, events and natural phenomenon that would otherwise get chewed up in the daily grind.

True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

But it is daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that the religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit, and these days it is easy to lose sight of that as, like our society itself, churches are becoming more politicized and polarized. Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs.

Disconnecting from change does not recapture the past. It loses the future.