Home > What I Do > Writing / Speaking
Drawing from 35 years of experience in nonprofit management and over 25 years as a choral conductor, I write and speak on a wide range of topics from creativity and music improvisation to program design/evaluation and effective collaboration. I’ve presented for congregations, neighborhood associations, women’s groups, professional associations and conferences, and more. Contact me for more information and see my writing here.
“Mining, Minding, and Making Stories” is an essay included in “In the Interim,” a book on the unique challenges and opportunities for both congregations and ministers during interim ministry, edited by Keith Kron and Barbara Child, and published by Skinner House Books.
A contemplative worship service and homily created for the NOVO worship series at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis.
I love trees. I love them in every season, and particularly now in the winter, when we can see their naked supplication. How I marvel at their beauty … the bark smooth… or rough and deeply grooved … the branches uniform and orderly like the yellow wood … or like the sycamore, whose splotched limbs squiggle with random abandon. Since I was very small, trees have been teaching me, guiding me … talking to me. I would spend hours finding, climbing, and sitting in trees on the campus of Franklin College, in Franklin, Indiana.
A sermon presented in January of 2012 to the Abraham Lincoln Unitarian Universalist Congregation.
“We are one. We are always one when we sing together. There are so few opportunities to sing together these days.”
“And we WANT to rejoice, we WANT and NEED to liberate this wholeness … and whether your sense of that invisible world is dreams and visions or the it’s heart of God , we crave an embodied encounter with it.”
Homily presented at a worship service.
A quote by Alice Walker got me thinking…”They don’t come to church to find God,” she says, “they come to church to share God.” But how can we share God, or our ideas of the divine (or lack thereof), if we don’t talk and explore these ideas with each other? How can we find the common ground between us if we don’t articulate this particularity to one another, heart to heart? How can we effectively bridge these four camps of thought and practice when we gather as a whole community for work and worship?
Homily presented at a worship service.
“There’s plenty to worry about on the sound front. The cacophony created by polarizing public discourse is deafening and it’s poisoning the public square. Music itself is now too often a soulless commodity, sold to us in numerous forms, mostly for our entertainment and amusement. ”
“Remember that there is creation at the edge of every breath. Find your breath, connect to it before you make a sound. And then consider: What is the spirit in your sound? What is the spirit in other sounds? In the sounds we make together? What do you want to create with our sound today?”
A contemplative worship service and homily created for the NOVO worship series at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis.
“The ouroboros is a symbol of life’s perpetual cycle of life, death, and rebirth. I wear it to remind myself that creation and destruction exist in balance. To remind myself that I must let go of things in order to make room for new growth. I love it so much that I’m actually considering getting it tattooed on my inner arm. I haven’t quite worked up the courage yet.”
A short piece suitable for use in a variety of settings.
Use as an invocation in worship.
Use to call the directions in ritual.
Use as a spiritual opening for celebrations.
Originally written for an evening healing service.
