Author: gracesmuggler

— Photos by Renee Roederer

I love this quote from Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

“Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.”

This weekend, I hope we’ll take off our shoes.

A treasured loved one introduced me to this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer:

“If you board the wrong train, there’s no sense running along the corridor in the other direction.”

Sometimes, we need to get off of the train. It’s okay to change our minds. We can take in new information and act on it. It can be remarkably wise and courageous to step off and move in another direction.

We’ll never get to the destination we desire if we just keep running along the corridor in the other direction.

— Renee Roederer

These images of Simone Biles and Jordan Chiles honoring and playfully bowing to Rebeca Andrade on the Olympic podium speak volumes. 💜

Fun Fact: I have three Olympic gold medals.
🥇 🥇🥇

Not from the Olympics you’d think about most readily, of course. But from… the Choir Olympics!

I suppose it seems funny that there is such a thing — a Choir Olympics. I picture choristers trying to sing while jumping hurdles. But in actuality, this was an incredible event with 350 choirs from around the world that competed in different styles of music on a world stage.

In 2004, in ways that shocked us — we weren’t expecting this at all — my collegiate choir won the Choir Olympics in in multiple categories in Bremen, Germany. Each time, we were called to the front of a stage in a large auditorium, and we watched the flag rise with the national anthem.

This is one of the best, most surprising, and most adventurous memories of my life.

Very grateful! 🥇🥇🥇

When I was seven years old, I was sitting at a lunchroom table in the Cafegymatorium. Our lunchroom tables were the kinds that people could pull down from out of the walls. At my elementary school, this room truly was a cafeteria, gym, and auditorium space all at once.

Each day, that table was pulled down from the wall, and we would sit there patiently. (Were we patient though?) until it was our turn. Then our 1st grade glass would be dismissed to line up where we would approach the lunch ladies. Once we reached the window where food was distributed, we would step bit by bit sideways, going down the line and receiving the various prepared food items onto our tray.

One day, I was sitting at that table, having already received my food along with most of my class, when one of our classmates arrived, sat down, and announced to all of us,

“I told them I didn’t want the green beans, and they didn’t give them to me.”

Wait, what?

“You told them you didn’t want them?”

I remember that we were astonished at this. First of all, the thought had never crossed my mind, and if it had, I would have assumed that we could get in trouble for this. But most of all, we were flabbergasted because we realized we could say No.

No — We could do that! That was a thing that could happen! We did not see this coming.

Over the next month or so, we relished in telling the lunch ladies that we didn’t want some odd item. And most of the time, they left an empty spot on the tray where it would have gone. This typically involved side dishes of various kinds. There was no way, for instance, that we were going to refuse eating one of those square pieces of elementary school pizza.

We found tiny ways to rebel and assert autonomy for its own sake.

Saying No is important. And we can learn it anew any time.

— Renee Roederer

— Photos by Renee Roederer

I thoroughly enjoyed this podcast episode:

Vox’s Unexplainable: Do we live inside an enormous black hole?

An interesting question and thought experiment!

Let Evening Come by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving   

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing   

as a woman takes up her needles   

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned   

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.   

Let the wind die down. Let the shed   

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop   

in the oats, to air in the lung   

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t   

be afraid. God does not leave us   

comfortless, so let evening come.