It is cold and rainy in London. Yes, it is July. Yes, I brought my umbrella. And yes, I’ve been walking everywhere or taking the buses. Yesterday I wore my “conference flats“ which are great for walking many miles in city streets. My day was ending with a visit to the theater, so I thought perhaps an upgrade from my sneakers was in order.  My trusty flats have never given me blisters. That is until yesterday. Fifteen minutes into a twenty minute walk to the Underground the back of my heel was hot. By the time I got to Russell Square for a lunch meet up, it was raw. I grabbed a bandage fr ..read more

My maternal great-great grandmother, Leah Lopes Dias Mercado, is buried in London. She rests in the Sephardic Jewish cemetery at Mile End, or what is left of it after much of it has been taken over by Queen Mary University’s expansion in the 20th century. One of the buildings that was erected is the chemistry building, which now abuts the northeast edge of the cemetery. I wonder if my great great grandmother would’ve been pleased to discover that her great granddaughter and great great granddaughter were both university trained chemists. I visited her grave this week in between London rainst ..read more

From Give Us This Day for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Written last fall! Readings are here.) Last week a colleague welcomed a new baby. Her good news meant I abruptly acquired two extra classes to teach and fifty more students whose names I have yet to learn. My husband had surgery, so I am caretaking. Dear God, I prayed, no more thorns this week. I grabbed the laundry basket and opened the basement door to find water lapping at the steps. Oh, God. As I reached for the mop, I prayed for just enough grace to get through the day. What was I expecting of this just-enough, just-in-time grac ..read more

Michael Peterson OSB, a monk of St. John's Abbey in Minnesota, had a reflection in Give Us This Day in April that has stuck with me. He writes of the monastic practice of "statio", where the monks line up two by two to process in to the church proper for a liturgy. It is, he says, a chance for a sacred pause, a chance to stop and collect oneself to be sure, but also a chance to reflect on what God is calling you to do, here and now, to consider what you believe and why. A full intentional stop. I'm at the very start of a sabbatical leave. An intentional stop, a full year pause in my teaching ..read more

I am currently reading "Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair" by Christian Wiman. It is part poetry, part lyric essay, and part commonplace book. In the third entry he quotes Imre Kertész, "under certain circumstances... words lose their substance... they simply deliquesce..." Kertész is, I think, referring to grief, but I was struck by the Dali-esque image of melting words that deliquesce implies. It is originally a term from chemistry, referring to the process by which a salt absorbs water from the atmosphere and turns into a solution. Looking for all the world like it is meltin ..read more

One of the delights of graduation is standing in line, well not the standing-in-line part, but the who-I'm-standing-in-line-with part, sometimes with colleagues I haven't seen since last commencement. I am privileged to work with some pretty amazing people, and this year stood across from a colleague who is an award-winning poet (she won a Guggenheim!). We chatted about the moon, its moods and modes, how it can seem to loom so large in certain places. Her students, she tells me, are in love with the moon. My students, I confess, not so much. We wondered what it might be like to swap classes ..read more

One of the questions I’ve often been asked in the interviews I have done around the tea book has been, “Have you read the book Lessons in Chemistry?” and when I acknowledge that I have, the logical follow up:“What did you think of it?” The first time the question arose I was surprised, and had to scramble for an answer. I shouldn’t have been. It is a best selling book, it has been made into a series. It has chemistry in the title. The interviewer is fishing for a bridge to what’s in the current cultural zeitgeist.  But for me the answer is, as the kids say, complicated. Even though the ..read more

"There is a mysterious woundedness that somehow goes with great blessing. When we truly encounter the night in all its beauty and terror, we have no assurance whatsoever that we are going to come out unscathed." — David Steindl-Rast I came to upstate New York, to Canandaigua on the Finger Lakes, to give a retreat around the theme of the solar eclipse, and then stayed to experience totality. The weather forecast oscillated for days, partly sunny to mostly sunny and back to partly sunny and finally to mostly cloudy. And mostly cloudy it was. We had a single glimpse of the s ..read more

Tomorrow is the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, the day protesting American colonists dumped 42,000 kg1 of tea into Boston Harbor. That's enough to make about 21,000,000 cups of tea. While that might sound like a lot of tea, several billion cups of tea  are drunk across the world  every day2. Each year humans drink enough tea to to fill Boston Harbor end to end. That's a bit less than half a cubic kilometer (which in those terms I confess does not sound like very much - but Boston Harbor). The tea, once dumped in the harbor, was unusable due to contamination not only by ..read more

On Tuesday morning I had a procedure on my eye which left me as sensitive to light as a vampire and with very blurry vision.  I came home and spent the afternoon like a Victorian lady with the vapors. In a dim room propped on many pillows, eyes closed while someone read to me. It lacked only the cool compress on my forehead and some smocked white lawn dress to be a woodcut right out of a 19th century novel, well that and my intrepid book reader was not the vicar's daughter but my iPhone.  No email, no desultory browsing the news, no list of household chores to get through, I drifted ..read more