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Living Water - Desert Voice
reflections on grounding, flow, and breath of everyday spiritual life
Photo credit: Michael Bush 2024
Welcome
This blog is about grounding. An anchor is good to have in life. We don’t always use it, but it gives some control when the waters get rough, or we decide we’ve had enough transition and just want some stability. Safe harbors aren’t always available, but knowing what grounds us can give us back a sense of self, balance, and trust.
This blog is about flow. Flow is about engaging both resistance and release. Both can keep our spirit from getting stubbed or stuck. Our resistances often point to obstacles that live beneath the surface - important to recognize if we don't want to stub our toe. Flow is about sensing there is a current moving beyond our individual control. We can release our resistances into its flow and find freedom and empowerment to become way more than we ever imagined.
This blog is about breath. In Hebrew, the word “spirit” is “ruach.” In Greek, it is “pneuma.” Both of those words from the biblical languages mean breath. Deep, life-giving breath. So, the spiritual life is our breathing life. As we breathe in our everyday, ordinary, very human ways, God breathes with us.
About
Hi, I'm Barb,
I'm glad you are here.
Thanks for visiting my space.
I’m always looking for kindred spirits on the spiritual journey. I’ve been nurtured a great deal in my life by both water and desert. Raised an upper Midwest kid in the United States, I spent much of my time in the water…swimming in lakes and pools, or playing in the rain and watching storms. As an adult, living for almost 25 years in the Southwest, the desert has also nurtured me. Its solitude, its “full-emptiness,” its fierce landscapes and brilliant layering and spattering of color have shaped spaces of holy encounter for me. As a clergy person now retired (I’ll get back to that later), I’ve found both are profound metaphors for the spiritual life.
Nearing the completion of the first quarter of the 21st century, apparently a century being marked by tremendous deconstruction and upheaval, I wonder if there is not more wisdom for our times to be found in these potent metaphors.
I am an artist, a mystic, a mother and grandmother, a wife, and now newly retired clergy trying to figure out exactly who I am when I get up late in the morning. I’m also a practical theologian – preferring to find God in everyday life, peeking out from under carpets, around corners, sharing stories over coffee, or finagling their way with me through daily conflicts and irritations, aches and pains of aging, and other surprising places (including naps).
Thanks for joining me on the journey!
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