outWORD by Matte Downey

Image by Jim Davis. Found on pinterest.com I have been following a post by a colleague (whom I have never met but we have mutual friends and are both studying theology) in which he writes about his efforts to change into a functioning morning person, mostly out of necessity due to being a parent and a writer (his words). I am not a parent so I will not comment on the challenges that children present to sleep and work patterns, but I do a fair bit of writing and find myself chafing at the assumption that disciplined and successful writers do their best work in the early morning.  I am not sure that such a generalization is true or helpful. It seems to me that there is a bit of prejudice against late-night functioning people. We can be viewed as somewhat lazy, undisciplined, still lingering in that teenage/student phase of staying up late and sleeping in late. Similar to the subtle disdain for introverts that our Western culture exhibits (social skills are highly valued), la...

Phew! Another semester over and done with!  I just handed in my last essay this afternoon.  The topics I was dealing with this term were 1) Hans Urs von Balthasar and the role of the witness (audience participation) in God's drama and 2) Rembrandt's self-portraits as an illustration of Paul Ricoeur's idea of narrative identity.  Very interesting and perhaps I will write about them here at a later date.  This afternoon I am sitting at my desk, enjoying the breeze wafting in from the back balcony, drinking a cup of tea I accidentally added 2 sugars to (oops, got distracted), doing the laundry, baking bread, and trying not to jump right into editing 3 more papers for presentation and publication.  One of the most intriguing and thought-provoking books I read this semester (I always have one non-theology book on the go to read on the subway) was Fire Season by Philip Connors.  I picked it up at a book sale at the university store and was p...

In the past few weeks, a few situations have arisen that have caused me to feel frustrated, to be annoyed, to be torn about which way to go.  What this signals to me is that I have something to learn in these areas and the lessons are starting NOW!  The wonderful part of all these hard lessons is that in the middle of them, some understanding, some teaching, and some helpful insights always come along.  Kind of serendipitous how that always seems to happen when you need it.  In case you are taking the same life lessons that I am in the middle of, let me share some of them with you. 1.  WHEN TO SPEAK OR WRITE:  I thought I knew how to write a paper, but I found myself in a bit of a rush with the last paper I had due this past term and made one big error:  I started to write having only finished half of my research.  The result was a messy conglomeration of 10 pages that wandered here and there, saying a bit of this an...