Dropping the other shoe

Crash heads to Ireland.

I drove up to the old Jesuit novitiate on Monday night to see my spiritual director, and to take a brief, but much needed plunge into the silence.  I was looking forward to two long walks, after dinner and early in the morning.  Somehow between taking my sneakers from the house to the car (along with my overnight bag, my lunch and my school bag), I dropped one.  Or perhaps I knocked it out of the back of the car when I was unloading the teaching supplies I picked up midmorning?  All I know is that after dinner, when I walked back to the car to get my shoes, there was only one. The left.

The shoes I had worn to work were not precisely walking shoes, but would certainly do as long as  I stuck to the paved paths.  I let go of the plan to walk the hedgerows toward the frascati and just headed down the hill toward the Jesuit cemetery.  I sat on the benches and prayed for the men buried there, and my own beloved dead.  I watched the full moon climb higher in the sky, astonished at how clearly I could see the craters on its surface.  And I contemplated my missing shoe, and what it might have to say about the other things I am missing (and not) in my life.

The Egg begins his college orientation.

A post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, about surrendering what I have been given, and what I hold onto appeared today at DotMagis, and as is often the way of it, others are writing funny, beautiful and poignant reflections about letting go and holding on. To memories, to visions of church and to kitchens.