I have been on this journey for a long time.

I have only pastored for three years. I have only cooked soup at ThPM for one. But this dream has lived within me for more than a decade, since I woke up in the middle of the night in dreamlike Louisiana with a fire burning in my throat.

So if I sometimes seem a little angsty, there is reason. This life we are trying to carve out right now, it’s long invested.

You know what I think is funny? ThPM is more comfortable with being organic than I am. There are few people that squirm a little when we don’t know what we’re doing, but for the most part everyone rolls, and rolls along, and rolls a little more each day.

Lee came tonight and I couldn’t be happier to see her beautiful face and hear her funny stories about Bumpershoot music marathons and high school crushes.

Emily and Israel danced in my dining room.

My children watched people they love draw heads for the paper doll who had lost hers.

Rebecca gave me a hat–who does that?—a hat and a book of lovely photographs of people in hats. I could melt.

Craig came to pick up Iz and the saxophone on their way to the Chai House for open mike beat poetry night. Shall we go shall we go shall we wear our trousers rolled? Perhaps we will dip in next week to cheer our young laureate on.

I miss Fiona though. And Matt and Liz have utterly utterly disappeared.

Monkfish Abbey lurks on the horizon…my new dream to build a community of contemplatives within our beautiful organic garden, spilling pell and mell through the doors and windows of our rooms with the red ceilings.

I feel better tonight than I have in weeks.

I’m not really stuck here, I just thought I was.