Well, I'm typing this on a bus, the Starlight Express from New York City back to Charlottesville. Did you get that - on a bus! Yet another technological wonder. I was at a conference, but I needed to come home early - our house is full of sick people.

I wanted to share this piece (interview, really) I did with Kate Barton and Skylight Studios. Juli Kalbaugh (our friend, painter and current housemate) works with Kate @ Skylight.

The conference I'm leaving and this piece I'm sharing have a common theme: the hope and belief that art can (should) do good and make our world more beautiful. I'd like to say more about it, but I'm running out of electrical juice on my laptop - and that is one technological feat that has yet to be conquered. But my friend Andrew Albers is working on it...

But what about you? Any art that has made your world more beautiful?

We enter the bright sadness. Sad for all that is broken. Bright for what God will awaken. But now the earth is silent and sorrowful.

The calendar tells me I am well into Lent. However, I don't know how well I'm into the practices and fasts I've taken on; they're coming, but it's been harder than last year to create the space I want (but resist).

This year, Miska has chosen for me (each of us choose the others' practice) to be off the computer every night by 8:00 and to have 30 minutes of silence 5 days a week. The computer has been no biggie, but the silence has been more difficult. I've fallen asleep. I've daydreamed. I've chased rabid thoughts around in mental circles, kind of like our dog Daisy when she performs her nightly ritual of chasing her tail in mad whirls.

But at least I've shown up, and I know I want more. Grace and quiet and longing invite me in.

I've put a daily Lenten post on Twitter. Here is a taste:

Lent is...a preparation to rejoice in God's love...casting out what cannot remain in the same room with mercy. {Thomas Merton}
  
Ashes are the end of things. The end of what we can make of our world. Our schemes and disguises mercifully burnt to the ground.

The beginning of repentance is homesickness. {Will Weedon}
 
We thrash. We flail. We angle, primp and prop up. Then in shame, we douse and we shrink. Will someone save us from ourselves?

Snag all of them throughout Lent, if you like.