So yes, I’m at that age when sleep can be elusive, in ways that were foreign just a few months ago. Something makes me swiftly surface from what used to be a nice, quiet, unconscious night and I lie...awake. For a while. Sometimes a long while.

It is unbidden time, aka, time I wish were spent in another way. But instead of triggering my inner control freak and sheet plucker, sometimes, just sometimes, I find myself treating these gaps in rest as prayer. I, who too seldom make time for prayer, make the space to think about God...well, here is space handed to me. It’s a gap -- and it invites conscious prayers of awareness, of attunement, even of gratitude, if I can just be in the space and listen. Sometimes I find myself reveling in the silence.

I very recently replaced my beloved, ancient, very simple cell phone with, yes, a Blackberry, mostly to have an easier way to check email.

I am in that early blush of the relationship here, mostly looking at it with wonder, as I figure out how it does what.

So far my favorite, and most useful, button is one that looks like a U-turn, and lets you go back to the page, or function, you were on previously. And then go back to where you were before that. And the one before that.  Deeply reassuring, this.  Quick re-orientation and un-doing. Also very un-Biblical.

It's just before Pentecost, a Sunday thought of as the birthday of the church, when the Holy Spirit -- the very presence of God -- came into the church and gave it life.

As a part of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit is mysterious indeed, but also very promising, inviting, and challenging. (This Sunday, May 23, at Marble I will attempt to wade into the mystery with a class that looks at what this part of our faith means, and how is it perhaps rattling our cage. Please come at 1:30 or tune in at that time through live streaming.) The class is followed at 2:30 by a live Gospel Choir concert, "Breathe on Me."

Simple, jaw-dropping stuff ... aka, not so simple. (But probably everywhere.)

Yesterday I ate outside on a crystalline spring day in Washington, D.C. It was my step-daughter’s belated birthday celebration, and my husband and I were taking her to dinner. We sat outside in light and air that were exquisite.

At one moment I looked in the distance at a tree shot through with early evening light. Pure green leaves, gold light… it was aflame. As was my heart.

The poet Rilke has his famous line when he urges the young man he is writing to to "live the questions." To not look for answers just yet, but to live the questions now, in a way that you gradually live into the answer.

I've always liked this quote, because it is so process-oriented, so gentle in its way, so tolerant of mystery and unfolding. There are some questions in our lives that need this kind of breathing room.

I am recently returned from one of my favorite places: A Dominican convent north of San Francisco, where twice a year dear friends lead contemplative retreats. The beauty, the communal silence, the familiar setting both so orderly and so evocative -- it's a soul home.

And it was there that a sentence from a new memoir called Journal Keeper by Phyllis Theroux landed on me with the force of revelation...