My dear friend Mary Kay Deen, who now infuses heaven and earth with her light, had a favorite saying for young people graduating from the Starfish Café training program: “The hardest day of a butterfly’s life is the day it kisses the caterpillar good-bye.” Maybe this day, this tenth anniversary of Katrina, is the day…
As I have been with friends this anniversary week and as I have remembered, again deep gratitude washes over me for all the grace we received after Katrina. People prayed, sent gifts, came to help. Just today I learned that the Mennonites and Presbyterian Disaster Assistance are finishing repairs on a friend’s house that were…
Sitting next to the Courthouse Road pier in Gulfport this morning, drinking coffee and drinking in the soft sounds of lapping waves, I savored the quiet. No roar this morning. A few gulls almost still. Dolphins surfacing very near. Then a school of fish jumped, creating brilliant silver white images in the air. No little…
As we journey through this week of the tenth anniversary of Katrina, we are seeing many reminders in the media and all around us. Some of our feelings this week may be expressed more freely with color and shapes than with words. If that is true for you, I invite you to try creating mandalas.…
Telling our stories is one of the most healing processes after any trauma. Whether you lost your home and treasures in Katrina, lost nothing and have survivor’s guilt, went to the Gulf coast on work trips, you are a Katrina survivor, and journaling is one of the most healing ways you can tell your story.…
The waves on the Ross Barnett Reservoir where I live were gently rolling and dimpling this morning, just enough for the inspiration of wind and water. And yet what I saw in them was images of the roaring water that took our homes and our treasures and some of our lives ten years ago…
Today after I left copies of Katrina’s Grace in the Walter Anderson Museum Store, I took some time to dwell in the cottage room. For those who do not know Walter Anderson, he was a painter from Ocean Springs who loved nature and loved to paint nature. Most of the time he lived in a…
This past week-end I had the pleasure of being with my friends in their home in Yalobusha County, Mississippi. Deep in the woods away from highways and city lights, they have created a sanctuary of cabin, covered porches, and gardens. From the woods they have brought stones of all kinds and sizes to create a…
On April 12, at my home church, Trinity Presbyterian Church in Starkville, MS, we dedicated Katrina’s Grace. The whole worship service was built around Grace and hope following disaster. The biblical story was about the disciples gathered in a room, afraid, dismayed, confused, after Jesus’ body had disappeared. They had suffered the greatest disaster imaginable.…
Thursday night, March 26, 2015, Katrina’s Grace: Wind, Water and Wisdom went to press.
First, my dear friends Donna and Ben Toole and I celebrated a deeply meaningful ritual of release. We crumpled all the pages of the book with covers together so that it was a cylinder, put it in their fireplace on a piece of tin and offered it up to the Universe for its life to begin.
