Very funny! How can you not enjoy "The Candy Man" song?

Tile

My first try at tiling. This is in the kitchen. Yes, there is no grout yet.

I'm going outside

Men like Ted are still sleeping and dying in the streets. In an effort to continue providing services that will house Ted and others, I need your support.

On Friday, May 7th, I will be sleeping outside to raise awareness and money. Please consider contributing to our efforts by donating online at my page , or by creating your own fundraising page and joining us that evening. It is a great evening with live music (“Squash Blossom Boys”) and often men from the shelter where I work and families who use our voice mail program join us.

Feel free to forward this post to as many of your friends, too. More awareness + more money = less homelessness!

Your money helps to keep open:

• an emergency shelter;
• a veterans' transitional housing program;
• a 24-hour respite care;
• and a program that offers women and youth access to jobs and housing through voice mail!

Your donation goes a long, long way. Thank you!

Carpet

Adding a little touch of the southwest to my brick floors.

How can you not love this?

Ever had one of those "just perfect" mornings? The morning you wake up and everything is in sync? I had one of those this morning.

I awoke before my alarm went off. Stretched and felt great. Good shower. Liked the form my hair had chosen for the day (I never really shape it; it does itself; plus, I don't own a comb). Clothes felt casually sharp. And I was ready, without rushing, to walk to church early enough to sit for a few minutes in silent meditation before the service began.

Then, as I reached to turn off my radio (playing peaceful classical, of course, on a morning like this), I heard a reminder that Day Light Savings had kicked in unbeknownst to me while I lie sleeping and unsuspecting. I was an hour late for church.

So now I am changed into grungier clothing and sitting at work, trying to catch up on some pressing deadlines. One never knows the twists and turns a day will take.

Image: Sam Brown.

Lent. It’s an odd sort of season, one which I can never predict how it will go.

Typically, I take on a good intention of some sort, rather than giving up something. I will decide to volunteer for some project, or will increase my daily meditation time, or will adopt a particularly meaningful book to study, rather than give up the stereotypical chocolate for forty days. It’s something that I look forward to and when this time rolls around each year I am glad. Glad for the quieting. Glad for the reflection. Glad to thaw the winter’s ice of my heart and soul that inevitably builds up in the course of the other 325 days.

What is interesting, of course, is that one doesn’t know how the ground will look with the snow blown away. What unknown seed have taken root? What will begin to grow? Anything?

I began Lent this year with the good intention that I will only do things that I would be fine with everyone seeing or knowing what I was doing. That seemed fair and challenging enough. But the ground has shifted with the spring thaw. I now have in me the question of, “What do I want?”

(Image by: Levan Mindiashvili.)
What do I really want? Not like a trip to Japan, or a better physique, or growth in my job. But who am I exactly that I want what it is that I want? Maybe that is the deeper question, one which I doubt I can answer head-on. Nor do I particularly feel the need to have words for who am I. But I can at least be in touch with what I want.

In the monastery we called part of this a “Rule of Life.” It was sort of play book which, knowing the goal, you could draw upon for guidance in life. We each have one. They just aren’t always spelled out and bound in a book. (By the way, my good friend Charles Lafond is working on a book about having one’s own rule of life. I’ll keep you posted as to when it comes out.)

From time to time, they change, those little rules of our for life. As we change, our desires shift.

So I’m looking around right now What has shifted? What do I want? What do I really want?

Nathaniel Ayers

Artwork by Sam Brown.