Clerestory

Last fall, my dad showed me five three-ring binders he kept in his home office. Each was filled with original handwritten letters, many of them yellowed with age and written by my great-grandfather

A reflection in ten steps

Six months ago someone drove through a red light and drastically altered my life.

Emily, Naomi, Maryann, and Andrew share reflection and resources on ecology and interconnectedness.

I attend Clark Atlanta University in the West End of Atlanta, an area where 90.5% of the population is Black and the median annual income is around $34,000.

I grew up in the rural suburbs of Kenya, where farming was the primary source of income for most households. My fascination with plants, farming, and the environment stemmed from my mother’s love for gardening.

When you learn how to save seeds, you are taking part in an ancient tradition of your ancestors and contributing positively to the ecological cycles of the planet.

Imagine for a moment that our skin was a transparent membrane which revealed the inner workings of the body. That we humans had been designed in a way that left the mechanics and chemistry of our anatomy in plain view

As the ocean air spritzes my face on a late morning this past June, its saltiness meets the saltiness of the hot tears rolling underneath my tortoise-rimmed sunglasses.

It really happened: I received the things I was asking for: the simplicity, the sustainability, the radical freedom I desired.

Kindred to a forest of birch, a simulacrum of the body, I inhabit . . .

It was crawling next to Sara for a few seconds before she noticed it . . .

That day at the 90-acre park in the northwest suburbs of Austin, there were signs of life everywhere, and I was one of them. 

Worshipping outside for an extended period of time has been an invitation to be surprised by natural elements we cannot control.

The trees hold earth’s history. The pages revealing the evidence of the planet’s stages through the ages are bound most accurately not between the covers of a textbook but between the core and the bark of the oak, maple, pine, languishing ash. 

Good theology rewrites the stories we tell about ourselves. So for those who belong to a faith tradition, theology is essential to the climate movement...

Thirsting for a fundamental key to life in the universe. . .

At the height of the pandemic we were under total lockdown here in Aotearoa. The Government allowed us to leave the house only for necessities and local exercise with those we lived with, our ‘bubble’.

A reflection upon Wendell Berry’s “membership” from a suburban neighborhood...

A whisper of cloud stretched across the sky, as we stepped out of the lodge. We still had a half-hour to wait for the sun to come up, but the cloud already burned orange-mauve, spreading a pale rose glow onto the snow blanketing the meadow.

There is a place we return to every summer by the Gulf of Mexico. It has a long winding sandy path we walk on to the beach, covered with old oak trees, reaching to the sky with long branches that hang low and thick over the path like a mother’s hug.

The gardener is an artist, a creator, and an architect... the serenity in the garden sings to their soul.

Everything out there is related, linked, connected.

Early on a summer morning, before the heat held the city captive in its stagnant breath, I sat on a bench in Madison Square Park looking at Ghost Forest, an installation by artist Maya Lin. This barren grove of Great Atlantic white cedar trees stood like weathered sentinels in the verdant park.

Learning to love New Jersey roughly translated into learning how to love myself.