Laundry, liturgy and women's work all serve to ground us in the world, and they need not grind us down. Our daily tasks, whether we perceive them as drudgery or essential, life-supporting work, do not define who we are as women or as human beings.

If we are lucky, we can give in and rest without feeling guilty. We can stop doing and concentrate on being.

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

There seems to be so much more winter than we need this year.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.

Friendship is an art, and very few persons are born with a natural gift for it.

We shortchange ourselves by regarding religious faith as a matter of intellectual assent. This is a modern aberration; the traditional Christian view is far more holistic, regarding faith as a whole-body experience. Sometimes it is, as W.H. Auden described it, 'a matter of choosing what is difficult all one's days as if it were easy.