Throughout my life, prayer has played various roles depending on how holy I was feeling and how much I believed.  When I was in high-school, college and on up through my twenties, I prayed all the time.  I had this non-stop running conversation with God going on in my head.  I prayed for friends, relatives and co-workers.  I prayed for the people that I knew who were dabbling in Buddhism, vegetarianism, feminism and environmentalism that God would save them from [...]

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I recently finished the book Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen. When I first saw this book, I immediately assumed that it would be awful. I imagined a schmaltzy story where a former career woman comes back to her Mennonite roots and rediscovers love in a pasture. But that was not the story at all. Instead it is a non-fiction account of one woman who returns home to her Mennonite community after decades of living with an [...]

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There have been a lot of ups and downs with my garden this year. I have been battling bugs for months attempting to stay organic by handpicking the eggs and the bugs and spraying homemade garlic oil, neem and dish-soap on my plants, but after several weeks of this laborious regimen, I went out to my garden to find a new crop of squash bugs crawling all over my patty pan squash and pumpkin vines and in a fit of [...]

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I gotta barrow, gotta barrow full of sunshine… Sorry. It was really late when I wrote that caption.

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Dear Charles, I sometimes think that the whole world is made of wax… except for the people, who are made of regular old people material.  On the off chance that the world is not made of wax, what do you suggest?  I grow tired of scooping the waxen air out of my way and typing on a waxen keyboard only to grow hungry and be faced with either a wax apple or a waxy bowl of cornflakes.  Remember those tiny [...]

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