Journey of the Heart

Uncertainty presses us to trust beyond what we can see and to be expectantly present in each day we are given... The initial inspiration for this poem came to me more than eight years ago, when I was traveling in Ghana.  While there, I had the opportunity to attend performances of several classic plays I had seen in the United States (including The Sound of Music and Grease). I loved seeing the different ways these stories were translated through another culture. That got me thinking about ways of reframing the familiar, looking at the same concepts through different cultural lenses.     At the time, I was trying to eat vegetarian, which proved to be a challenge in Ghana. My nearly-daily diet consisted of rice and beans, sweet plantains, and life-changing pineapples and mangoes. My friends insisted that I try traditional Ghanaian fufu. In West and Central Africa (as well as parts of the Caribbean), fufu is a staple food, prepared by boiling starchy veget...

Amongst others, there is a certain passage in the Bible that gives me goosebumps…  That seems to whisper something bigger than I can quite put my finger on. It’s in the New Testament Letter to the Ephesians and is talking about being able to approach God with confidence... it goes on to say: “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being,   so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that ...