OPreach
Dominican Preaching through Word and Image
Beauty at Our Feet
“The air was hot and still. The waves were an old rhythm beside me. I knelt over flat sand, where the tallest wave had sorted a ribbon of shell. Some four-footed creature had been along, leaving a trail that turned aside, as mine did, for every cluster of debris, every drift-bundle in the sand.”
– Kim Stafford, “A Walk in Early May,” from Having Everything Right: Essays of Place
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
Living in Harmony with the Doe
“She rose up, watched a moment for any response to her rising, then stretched and stepped out onto the open slope. Beside her, another doe rose up from the shade. The two stood, slightly oblique to one another, divided as the one’s ears had been to listen. They did not look my way, only below into the brushy ravines between shoulders of clear ground.”
– Kim Stafford, “A Walk in Early May,” from Having Everything Right: Essays of Place
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
Life Overcoming Adversity
“Pine is born to a cleft in stone, and makes the most of it. Whitebark is most primitive: the cones must rot before the seeds can split and live. As in the parable, one fell here on stony ground. Unlike the parable, this tough seed lived anyway.”
– Kim Stafford, “Pine, Fir, Cedar, Yew,” from Having Everything Right: Essays of Place
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
Beauty in the Branches
“The branches turn abruptly back on themselves like the rune named yew, the rune for death. I want to ask their twisted forms “Does it hurt so much, coming out of the ground?” I lean on a trunk. The pitchy berries are dull red, the flat needles still. Then starlight.”
– Kim Stafford, “Pine, Fir, Cedar, Yew,” from Having Everything Right: Essays of Place
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
Watersound
“Watersound woke me. Dark. I was ready to lie there season by season, to die from my life, or to live as the river lives, to climb with salmon and fall away from that final loving work like rain, to tumble headlong, to flicker away silver with light, powered by moon and sun.”
– Kim Stafford, “River and Road,” from Having Everything Right: Essays of Place
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
What Are Our Stories as the Sun Sets?
Bring me a story you hear in dark silence
after the last light, the gone that gathers dew
in the fingers not to hold, carry away, but
only to feel.
– Kim Stafford, from “Do You Need Anything from the Mountain?”
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
Grace on the Wing
Wings in the mist riding, gliding—no trace.
Heart-surge song rising from inside—beauty’s custodian.
A short, intense, breathless life—grace.
– Kim Stafford, from “How Birds Live”
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
What is Your Vision of the World?
“Every vivid memory holds some essential truth about your vision of the world.”
– Kim Stafford
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
Guests on the Earth
Like the trees, we are visitors, guests on the earth.
– Kim Stafford
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center’s will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
At Home on a Bed of Fern
He would have a quiet way. He would be a peaceful man. And maybe, when he was a little older, he could make a cedar house somewhere, at a secret place, lie down on a bed of fern there, and live, for a time, alone.
– Kim Stafford, from “Shell Ash at the Midden,” Wind on the Waves: Stories of the Oregon Coast
Starting on February 11, 2021, Santa Sabina Center’s will offer an Online Writing Retreat with Kim Stafford: “Speak Beauty to Power.” To learn more and/or register for our online retreats and offerings, please go to: http://www.santasabinacenter.org/retreats-page
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