All my life, I have heard the adage: “Count your blessings.” It works for me. And our friends at Grateful Living offer myriad ways to cultivate gratitude. Romanian novelist Petru Dumitriu witnessed and did some terrible deeds in his life. Yet he was still amazed by a beam of light striking a staircase or a jumble of kittens playing on a...
In our second Fire and Light podcast, we explore the beauty of candlelight and the Feast of Candlemas. In honor of Black History Month we reflect on the spirituality of the late civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis. We celebrate the universal appreciation of candlelight and blessing candles in spiritual ceremonies. We suggest a...
I grew up in a Protestant family, so I learned about Roman Catholic feast days such as Candlemas when I was in college and began going on retreats at the Spiritual Life Institute’s Nada Hermitage in Sedona, Arizona. I discovered the feasts that followed Christmas and loved the reading from Isaiah that accompanied the Epiphany mass. With its...
In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr. marched in Chicago in support of fair housing. As about seven hundred people joined him, the march was threatened by angry white people, one of whom threw a rock at King, hitting him in the head. He dropped to his knees, got up, and resumed marching. I heard this story from Eboo Patel, the founder of...
We are very excited to announce our first Fire and Light podcast. Head over to tessabielecki.com to listen. Just click on the host of your choice and you’ll be directed to our list of episodes. Here’s what to expect in our...
Christmas will be all the merrier this year because our little “community” of four in what I call the...
Two Prayers for Hanukkah Hanukkah focuses on the miracle of the oil, which allowed Jerusalem's Jewish community to keep the Temple candelabra burning for eight nights while having barely enough oil for one. The feast commemorates the rededication of the Holy Temple (the Second Temple) in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt against Greek oppression in the 2nd century BCE. During each evening of Hanukkah, a candle is added to the menorah. Here is the blessing over the...
Our December 2022 Caravans newsletter is now available here. Catch up on our fruitful autumn and the vision behind our new web sites. We offer a lovely...
When I think about the weeks preceding Christmas, I feel a swell of gratitude for the years I spent in wilderness monasteries, keeping still in Advent starlight or bundling up in Nova Scotia to venture out into the silent moonlit snow to walk beneath towering white pines and...
Tessa Bielecki is happy to announce tessabielecki.com, her new web site. “Such a fruitful harvest for me,” she says. The words from a song Tom Renaud wrote for her decades ago at Nova Nada in Nova Scotia set the tone for the new site: “The seasons surround me like a circle of friends.” Four seasons expressed in four...