I wish all days started like today—with purpose and darkness and quiet and productivity. Just today, I feel somewhat akin to the monastic life; I feel connected to all the others awake right now in the world—working in quiet—its not just about waking up early—its about getting to work, about the ritual of living in these divine early hours.

Today, I will pray the hours, connected with the monks and restless morning pilgrims. Today I will not just intend it, I will do it. I will remember. I will stop. I will allow moments to be holy.

Today I will write. I will pray for inspiration. I will ask God for help. Today I will let it come. I will not be in a hurry. I will move through this work as if my life depends on it, and it does. Today I will not be afraid. Today I will believe for myself what I believe for others. Today I will show up and do the work.  Today I will be a professional writer, even if I have to pretend. Today I will turn off my phone, today I will listen to silence. Today I will light candles. I will burn Fir Balsam incense and smell the air. Today I will look at what has been left undone and leave it undone. Today I will not be lost in distraction, in necessity that does not involve words. Today, I will listen to words; I will listen inside of my head. Today I will not use my ears, today I will not use my eyes. Today I will live in my spirit. I will condition my mind. Today I will work until the moon rises. I will pray the hours before I sleep.

An invitation to pray the hours during Lent, and maybe not during Lent too: 

http://www.explorefaith.org/prayer/fixed/

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Michelle Metcalf feels inspired today because the sun has finally started to shine in Cincinnati, OH, where she lives with her husband and dog. She lead a writer’s group this morning, just like she does every Friday. That’s her favorite part of the week.

On the side table by the couch in the living room of my childhood, a small, engraved photo album. On the first page, a photograph of oil-stained window panels on an office building in Clearwater , Florida, that looked remarkably like a profile of the Blessed Virgin. A miracle on display wasn’t at all strange to my devoutly Catholic and generally superstitious family—why shouldn’t heaven and earth somewhere converge?

Once a year, we made it a family pilgrimage to gather with hundreds of people at the Holy Spirit Center just off the Norwood lateral about twenty minutes from our house to say the Rosary from lawn chairs on a hill while waiting for Our Lady of Light to make her midnight appearance.

Skeptic’s Dictionary: Apophenia (n): the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data, the “unmotivated seeing of connections” accompanied by a “specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness.” May be linked to psychosis or creativity.

2005: Hundreds gather at the Fullerton Avenue underpass on the Kennedy Expressway in Chicago. They’ve come to see the Virgin Mary in the salt run-off. That same year, a pregnant couple sees the face of Jesus during their ultrasound at a hospital in Toledo. A concession clerk sees him in a nacho pan. He also appeared on the tinted windows at a hardware store in Rio Grande Valley, Texas, and, shortly before that, in a pecan tree to a Louisiana man who was barbecuing in his backyard.

We are programmed, Carl Sagan says, born with a propensity to identify the human face. It’s for evolution’s sake, so that we can make out faces from a distance using only minimal details. This is why we can recognize faces before putting in our contacts in the morning.

At the stroke of twelve, church bells rang, cameras flashed, we waited and waited.

But I saw nothing.

Type I Psychological error: (false positive, false alarm, caused by an excess in sensitivity): Often used as an explanation of some paranormal and religious claims, and can also be used to explain the tendency of humans to believe pseudoscience.

I saw nothing but the moon.

I saw nothing but the moon hanging heavy in the sky, so full that it made a glow behind the backs of the pine trees on the horizon.

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Michelle Metcalf does believe in miracles, especially moonlight illuminating the trees. She lives in Cincinnati, OH and sometimes still prays Hail Marys out of habit, even though she is no longer a practicing Catholic.

Michelle Metcalf

Relief welcomes new blogger, Michelle Metcalf. Today’s entry is her first in a series titled “Among the Irreverent.”

On my first day of ballet class, I showed up in a bathing suit and pantyhose. My mom didn’t get around to ordering a black leotard beforehand, and I don’t think we had the extra money anyway. I was four, but I distinctly remember anticipating what it would feel like to take off my coat and to not look anything like anyone else—the bathing suit was a white one-piece with bright blue, green, and red almost Aztec looking patterned lines of dots and zigzags. My pantyhose were also white, thick textured wool—the kind of pantyhose that little girls wear to church with dresses and black patent Mary Jane shoes in the winter, not the thin pale pink tights that ballerinas were supposed to wear.  I remember crying on the couch that was in front of the window at our new house while my mom gathered her purse and keys to leave. I still can recall the wet spot on the olive-gold velour saturated with snot and tears, and how I pressed my face into the cushions to muffle my sobs of dread.

Our first ballet lesson would be a lesson in leaping. The ballet term for this is grand jeté, “big thrown step”. The instructor, Miss Beverly, had this oven mitt with eyes and teeth and short little legs that looked like an alligator, which she placed in the center of the studio. We lined up against the dance bar along the back wall each waiting for our turn to make a running jump over the oven mitt. She called this activity, “the swamp” and I quickly got the gist: run and grand jeté, or be eaten.

Suffice it to say I am feeling faint echoes of the aforementioned experience as I begin this first entry, maybe even about writing in general. Full disclosure: there has again been some crying on the couch. Not to mention recurring fears of being devoured alive.

Mostly, I fear that I don’t or won’t have anything interesting to say. Should I be funny? (I can be funny, but should I be funny? What if it is perceived as snarky? So should I be more serious, reverent? Like, should I throw in some Bible verses as epigraphs and quote Thomas Merton and Wendell Berry a lot? I can do that. I can. But do I have to?) And what kind of impression do I want to make for my first impression? (I mean, you never get a second chance to make one right? How’s that for pressure?))

One would think that my graduate degree in creative writing would somehow be serving me right now, at least in terms of providing some sort of it’s-just-a-blog-not-a-thesis- kind-of-confidence as I begin.  OK, and for the record, I just want to say that I absolutely did NOT Google “How to Write a Blog Entry” or scan eHow articles for instruction. (And even IF I did do this, it would have most likely only been helpful in the form of procrastination time disguised in the name of “research”.) More importantly, you would also think that, by now, I would’ve already incorporated the ballet class metaphor: the predictable tie in to the grand jeté, the lesson in leaping as perfect segue into leaping into the world of blogging. I could, I guess; but I just can’t.  You won’t find any of that here. Turns out, I showed up then the same way I do now–dressed should I accidentally fall in.

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Michelle Metcalf often wonders if her hesitancy to dance wildly at weddings with the rest of her friends is somehow linked to the alligator in ballet class, but she’s not sure. She’s also become slightly more accustomed to not always dressing like everyone else. She lives in Cincinnati, OH with her husband and dog.