All ink pen on 5″ x 7″ or 17 x 17 cm sketchbook paper.
My practice: go outside and draw something I see every day. I’m not being purist; if it’s pouring, or I wait too long and it’s dark, I draw inside, and in a pinch, from a photo I’ve taken. It has been a very rainy start to the year, and once I sat in our enclosed entryway while the rain fell on the poppy leaves just outside.
After the first day, I have drawn with a gel ink pen. I might return to graphite pencil at some point, but right now, given my tendency to get fiddly, I’m enjoying the constraint of having only black to work with. These are all 5″×8″ or smaller, the size of my current sketchbook.
Several years ago, inspired by my friend Janet and her daily butterfly practice, I drew a leaf of a California tree every day for the entire year, mostly from photos. I really enjoyed it and stuck with it, which is rare for me for a daily practice. So I am doing something similar this year, combining two spiritual practices: I will go outside and draw something I see there.
I’m not going to be a purist about it; if it’s pouring rain, I’ll draw indoors (ideally, drawing something outside from indoors). I thought I might have to do that today, but the rain let up and I went out to our back garden and drew a fern there. I’ll post my drawings now and then with the tag, “Drawing outside every day.”
Getting outdoors and making art are also both good for my mental health, even if I only do them for a few minutes. I’m prone to anxiety, and various studies show that spending time outdoors and drawing both reduce anxiety–certainly for people like me, who enjoy them. I don’t need to go to a big natural expanse, though I am very much looking forward to pulling over now and then on my commute through Marin and Sonoma Counties and drawing some of the more scenic stretches. Even spending attentive time with a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk is an experience of awe and beauty.
Well, more or less. I lost the notebook I used from January through mid-July, which is so frustrating, because I put everything in my notebooks: sermon notes, journal entries, weekly schedules and to-do lists, lists of books I want to read and have read. However, the sermons can be recreated from audio (thank you, Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto, for recording and posting your services), old to-do lists are unimportant, and as for journal entries, when do I ever reread them? I did manage to recreate a lot of my books-read list by looking up what I borrowed from the library, though, so here they are: most of the books I read in 2025. NF = nonfiction.
Old Babes in the Wood, Margaret Atwood
System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries), Martha Wells
Everyone This Christmas Has a Secret, Benjamin Stevenson
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
Uprooted, Naomi Novik
See No Stranger: A Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, Valarie Kaur (NF)
A Sinister Revenge, Deanna Raybourn
The Author’s Guide to Murder, Beatriz Williams
Noor, Nnedi Okorafor
Transcendent Kingdom, Yaa Gyasi
The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer (NF)
The Kaigu Preservation Society, John Scalzi
One Way Witch, Nnedi Okorafor
On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz (NF)
Fire from Heaven, Mary Renault
All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr (reread)
Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Marble Hall Murders, Anthony Horowitz
Everything is Tuberculosis, John Green (NF)
What It Is, Lynda Barry (NF)
James, Percival Everett
The Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood
Kills Well with Others, Deanna Raybourn
My Murder, Katie Williams
Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison (reread)
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, Alysia Abbott (NF)
All Over Creation, Ruth Ozeki
Everyone Is Lying to You, Jo Piazza
The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey
If You Leave Me, Crystal Hana Kim
Asta’s Book, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
Grasshopper, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell)
A Dark-Adapted Eye, Barbara Vine (Ruth Rendell; reread)
The Face of Trespass, Ruth Rendell
Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens
The Time of Five Pumpkins, Alexander McCall Smith
The Rose Field, Philip Pullman
The Bonesetter’s Daughter, Amy Tan
The Impossible Fortune, Richard Osman
The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan
Purple Hibiscus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
Ten Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World, Elif Shafak
Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
Sing, Unburied, Sing, Jesmyn Ward
Love Marriage, Monica Ali
And Then There Were None, Martha Noyes (NF).
Forty-eight books, three of which were rereads. I won’t try to rate them or summarize them or even start my favorites, but I’m happy to say more about any of them if someone asks.
What’s a book you read this year that stuck with you?
The latest Ask Isabel column answers a parent whose child has learned about a heavy topic–from a church Sunday school.
Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed and Vexed
By the way, if you enjoy Ask Isabel, two things you can do to support it is subscribe (it’s free) and share the column on social media, or with any friend who might take an interest.
Why I carry my sketchbook and notebook with me. When our feet get tired and it’s time to sit and rest, I can write or draw, which makes the extra several ounces in my backpack very worthwhile. Yesterday, when the heat and elevation forced a rest, this nopal cactus across the street from the Santo Domingo church caught my eye.
I think I’ve probably adjusted to the elevation now. I used to dream of going to Macchu Pichu, but I don’t know if I could now. A jump from sea level to a mere 5,800 feet–Oaxaca’s elevation–takes me a couple of days. As with so many things, sufficient water and sleep help a lot.
I was headed to a café several blocks from our place, but gave up–I think Google Maps is out of date–and went to the local huge supermarket for oat milk and other necessities.
We had breakfast at the house and then headed to the centro. Altars and special decorations for the fiesta are everywhere.
What pictures can’t capture are the smells, like the heavenly scent of tortillas cooking all through the neighborhood. The feel of the round bumps of paving stones underfoot, and the necessity to duck now and then where a guy wire crosses the sidewalk. The sound of the very annoying truck driving all around with a recording of a woman speaking that was loud yet unintelligible. When the truck passed close by me as I explored, I realized she was listing all the tamales the truck driver sold. Yum. Maybe tomorrow I’ll flag it down, though I hate to reward such an obnoxious method of advertising. And then there were the sounds of dogs distantly barking, roosters crowing, people chatting with their neighbors. It all adds up to a place so familiar and beloved, I can’t believe we stayed away for six years.
Can you picture this?: A member of your family, or a dear friend, has been taken by ICE and locked in Alligator Auschwitz. Do you have someone specific in your mind? Okay.
You’re incredibly worried about them, of course. You get a lawyer, and you check the ICE database every day to see if there is any news of them.
Then, one day, they aren’t in the database. You check to see if you had a typo. No. They just aren’t there. You call your lawyer. The lawyer can’t get any more information than you can. This person you love has disappeared. Been Disappeared by the US government.
You are desperate for someone to help you–to do something–to force the administration to tell you where they are.
Now what happens? Either thousands, millions, of your fellow-citizens demand answers, pressuring their representatives and senators to demand hearings and ask the administration tough questions, keep shining a light into this dark corner of the country until whatever is hidden there becomes visible–
–or they don’t. There is no help. You and your beloved family member are left to suffer alone.
We’re not going to let that happen. We’re calling our members of Congress, now (or using the contact forms on their websites). We’re doing it again tomorrow, and again the day after that. We’re putting it on our to-do lists, and we won’t stop, because the life of someone’s father, sister, husband, best friend, child, grandson is at stake. And we know if one day it is our beloved who disappears, we will need the solidarity of our sibling-citizens to save them.
The Arts Praxis course I took last semester at the United Theological School of the Twin Cities culminated in a group show called Nexus and a gallery talk by all of the artists, some of whom made visual art and others of whom did music or theater. I kept checking for the video for a while, then got distracted by the rest of life, and just discovered that it has been up for a while. My part begins at 1:25:00, though I certainly recommend watching the whole thing to take in some beautiful work by other students. Our professor and the presiding genius of the Arts Praxis–and of the Theology and the Arts concentration–was Dr. Jennifer Awes-Freeman.
Sermons in Stones 
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