As I mentioned yesterday, Maria and I are off on a weekend retreat – today and Sunday. It starts right now.

No blogging, e-mailing, texting, no work, lots of silence, reading, meditating, thinking.

Thanks for all of your interest and support. We are both tired in the head; we need to breathe.

I’m eager for some silence. A spiritual life requires silence and some solitude. There is no shortcut. I’m hungry for silence; our culture no longer permits it naturally; we must find it ourselves.

I feel the same way about relationships. They need time to focus on closeness.

I should say Minnie is gone. She’s been missing for two days. We accept her death and do not expect to find her body. May she chase mice and moles for all eternity.

I was talking to my friend Ron Dotson, a pastor in Ohio, on the phone last night, and I had this impulse to ask him to pray for our retreat to be peaceful, productive, loving, and healing.

He agreed and prayed on the phone with us; he didn’t even have to think about it, and it was perfect.

I was touched, Maria cried.

It is good to have a friend like Ron, and he gave us a beautiful launch for the retreat. If there is a God, his spirit lives in Ron.

It was a great way to start a retreat, with a blessing; I felt the power of it.

Maria and our happy dogs went up the gates for the animals to go to pasture this morning.

Vegetable garden – Morning Glories

Thanks and appreciation to gifted gardener Judy Page, where I get many flowers. I bought the flower up top from him; she knows how to grow and tend plants. She has her greenhouse.

She has agreed to order some beautiful flowers for me next summer. I’m happy and excited about that. I’m not good at growing them, but I love taking photos of the flowers she produces and those I come across and experiment with.

Thanks for your good words and support. I am looking to be refreshed.