Category: hope and imagination
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All Those Who Wander: The Spiritual Practice of Walking
I could have driven to the coffee shop. I’d have stayed warmer and drier. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that it was time for a walk. So, inside heavy wool coat, hat, scarf, and mittens, I set out on foot into the swirl of damp snowflakes. They stuck everywhere: on my nose,…
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Living in Color: Working with the Difficult Parts of Our Lives
In “Quietness” the Sufi mystic poet Rumi speaks of taking an axe to one’s prison wall and walking out “like someone suddenly born into color” (trans. by Coleman Barks). It’s left me thinking of how many prisons humans build – both literal and metaphorical – and how often they do not serve the purposes of…
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On Mental Illness, Silence, and Suddenly Color
There are many reasons we have difficulty talking about mental illness. Those silences have shaped my new novel, Suddenly Color: A Sacred Grounds Novel Book 2.
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Miracle of the Fish
If you were to imagine God as a character in a story, what would God be like? Like a human? More like some other kind of creature? What kind of personality would this character have? (Don’t go with your first thought. Keep brainstorming and try an idea that’s four or five ideas down the list.)…
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On Joy and Summer Trees
Are there memories whose goodness has surprised you? Though not a poet, I took a workshop earlier this year which involved writing a poem that explored the divine through joy. Inspired by the vividness of Li-Young Lee’s sense-awakening poem “From Blossoms”, I tried writing about a kind of remembering moment that has taken me by surprise,…
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Known: On Thinking of God at an Angle, Part 2
How do you picture the face of God? Does She smile with you? Does He gaze down with a stern expression? Are Their eyes totally unreadable? When a writing workshop asked me to write something that approached God from an unexpected angle, I began thinking through the language of Psalm 139, which seems to suggest…
About the author
Callie J. Smith writes about women who, like her, are finding themselves. Her essays and cozy fiction (contemporary and fantasy) explore everyday things like hope, creativity, and grief.
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