First morning

I think about habits and spiritual practice as I mentally prepare for my first day of a 12-week Clinical Pastoral Education program. At 6:30 a.m., I will be ready to leave my children-in-law's house, jump on the highway and make my way to Tampa General Hospital. After taking husband Stephen to the airport early yesterday afternoon, I took the Route 295 Downtown West exit and found my way to the hospital and back.

My summer here will give me a taste of the world that I have studiously avoided by living my entire adult life in the Upper Delaware: a daily interstate highway commute, parking garages, large organizational entities, a landscape of big box stores and chain restaurants. And it will provide me with a hands-on education in a regional hospital and trauma center of how to pastor to temporary strangers and accompany them through days that they may experience as nightmares.

I'm told it's an intense experience and that I will be able to deal with it if I am careful about my own spiritual practice and mentally letting go of the hospital day's reality when coming home.

While I know that I will miss the details of my life in the Upper Delaware: watching my garden grow, the daily harvest ritual as Stephen and I prepare our summer dinners, the sweetest of the intimate Fellowship Sunday gatherings, the intellectual debate around covering the news at The River Reporter, I am happy for this time of establishing new habits and spiritual discipline, tools that will help me be able to traffic my way through this time, this world time that I might easily describe as a collision between consumerism and corporate hegemony (dominance) and the values of the earth.

There is a balance necessary, a combination of habit and spiritual practice, that might allow us to stay involved and not be swallowed up in disgust and despair. It is a way of being, of taking care, developing habit and spiritual practice, that this new schedule, that this CPE experience might afford me a chance to develop.

This thought, it is enough for now, as it is time to get ready and go.