One foot in front of the other.
Hi, everyone. Welcome to my new home, a little corner of the web graciously provided and appointed by my friends at *cino. I haven't gotten around to finding throw pillows for the sofas or Christmas lights for low-budget ambience, but I hope you'll make yourself comfortable regardless. This blog is all about doing the best with what you've got, after all.
I'm calling it The Curved Path in honor of a return to my roots. I adopted the pseudonym online about four years ago, while I was an intern at Sojourners magazine. Perhaps the most important truth I took away from that formative year was that everything about life was messier and more complex than I could possibly imagine. That realization was encapsulated for me one day at a retreat center, when I walked a labyrinth, a spiritual metaphor for life on - you guessed it - the curved path.
You can read about that experience in my most recent column for catapult magazine. If you want the condensed version of this blog's m.o., however, look no further than the pithy prayer I read before setting foot to ground in the labyrinth:
O God of many paths, I stand before this labyrinth today, metaphor of my journey to you. In the Western world I have been taught that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line," and being an impatient person, I am uncomfortable with waiting. I have often modeled my journey to you on the straight line. But you, God of infinite patience, have shown me that there is another path: the curved path.
Whether by choice or by necessity, this path is the one I've been taking lately. It's full of detours, but those are usually the most interesting part of the journey, even though they're often the most irritating in the moment. (Just ask my roadtrip buddy/sparring partner/lifelong fling Nathan.)
My former blog was about the journey itself, the Big Picture and its corresponding Big Questions. But this one is for the detours, which is to say: the recipes, the television programs, the terrifying but surprisingly alluring prospect of having children, the satisfying yet difficult new career, the half-assed sewing projects, the neighborhood gossip, the daily sadnesses and outrages, the good things my friends are doing, and the photos that document all of the above. (Well, except for the third item down the list - I'll spare you that.)
In short, the curved path is made up of what Kathleen Norris calls "the quotidian mysteries." She subtitled her little book on the subject "Laundry, Liturgy, and 'Women's Work,'" which might be suitably applied to this blog as well. Ordinary time, ordinary life, is sanctifying. The mundane is where the holiness happens, when it happens at all. I try to keep my eyes open so I'll know it when I see it - and I'll try to write it down here when I do.