Sometimes life’s pace leaves me breathless and a little bit grieved at how much happens without my ability to appreciate it or get mindful of what it is I’m learning or feeling or coming to know. This was particularly true during my second child’s infancy and toddlerhood, when every day was a kind of fight (I rarely use that metaphor, so it’s weighty here) to survive. I remember being asked during that time, “How are you?” and stopping, bewildered, not knowing what to say. Was I fine? Was I near break-down? Were my clothes even matched or on straight? I honestly didn’t know. The motion, the giving required in that season, were that huge.

The Meditations category on this site is meant to be a contrast to that way of life. It’s a place where little things get noticed and talked about, where inner check-ins are encouraged, where books are not only read, but the insights they inspire put into image and word.

And the content of it all, as you might imagine, relates to tending trust.

In all honesty, when I was in the deepest thick of my life’s fray (to date), posts like you’ll find here would not have appealed. I didn’t have an ounce of extra space for people trying to think deeply or meaningfully about anything; they only made me angry and frustrated by how trapped I felt by the unavoidable pace of my life. So if this is you, by all means don’t read here! Your needs probably have far more to do with rest or silence or meandering walks alone.

It may be, though, that there is something in you that starts to sing a little bit when little things get noticed. When time slows down long enough for the lessons of bugs and trees and family and friendship and books and reachings out for meaning – for all of these to get pondered and put into words and images.

If this is true for you and you want to read on, yay! I’m glad you’re here! I’m glad for company in my own imperfect efforts at living the pace and mindfulness and wonder for which I yearn as I go about my work and play of tending trust.

Like many, my earliest years of life were some of my dad’s most stressful years of work. He spent a lot of time at the office establishing a career that would provide for our family, and when he was home, his head was, by necessity, often still there.

Saturday mornings, however, were different. Saturday mornings were when Dad’s attention was turned toward family and home. Yard work, gardening, car repair, plumbing and the occasional fishing trip filled most of them. It was a day when weekly cares felt far away and some of my greatest joys with my dad – lighthearted togetherness, apprenticeship to work with my hands, trips to the hardware store – close enough to link arms with.

It isn’t any wonder, then, that our Saturday breakfast ritual became charged, for me, with all of that feeling. Within an hour or two of my sister’s and my rising (the rule in our home was “must stay in bed until 6:30”), Dad would be up making coffee and readying to relieve my mom of weekday breakfast duty. Dancing, singing, and laughter often accompanied the sizzle of food and the background din of cartoons.

Together, we lived and ushered in Saturday joy.

This childhood ritual does a nice job of demonstrating what, for me, rituals have become: symbols and enactments – both – of something important. That “something” might be an emotion or a person or a quality worth honoring. It might be a type of growth or change that one wishes to pursue or recognize as already having happened. Or, it might be a set of thoughts and accompanying feelings that are destructive and need to be put ceremoniously to rest.

In all cases, rituals are a way of mindfully symbolizing and acting out the honoring/growing/letting-go/inviting-in that we recognize as important.

In the Rituals category of this site, I’ll be exploring how we can design and practice rituals that bring healing, seed joy, or embrace grief, all with the aim of tending trust. These rituals will take many shapes and forms; some are lengthy and ongoing while others will be brief, one-time events. It is my hope that you will find the use of rituals to be as transformational for your life as they’ve been for mine.

If you have stories, suggestions or book recommendations that relate to trust-tending rituals, please feel free to send them my way! ( kristin t noelle at gmail dot com ) What’s meaningful for one person may not be for the next, so the broader the base of ideas here, the more likely we’ll all find something we’re drawn to embrace as our own.

Yay rituals! Yay trust-full transformation! :)

Dry kindling on the flames of my fears tends to include things like:

- feeling like I’m alone or abnormal
- being in the presence of others who are afraid
- noticing how blocked or stuck I feel but not knowing where to turn for help
- hovering around the websites of people who appear to “have it all together” in the ways I most wish that I did

Any of this sound familiar?

The goal of this site is to have the opposite effect of the list above, so in addition to trying to share honestly about my own humanity – my joys and struggles, hopes and fears – I want to find lots of ways to reassure all of us that

- we aren’t alone
- our uniquenesses aren’t reason for shame
- we’re far less “abnormal” than we think
- together, we can find the help that we need
- nobody “has it all together”

I can’t think of a better way to communicate such things than through interviews of people who in big and small ways are using their lives and work to tend trust. It’s one thing to find isolated instances of trust, but quite another to see those instances situated inside a massive crowd of people from across spectrums of age, race, income, education, and spiritual traditions, each tending trust in their own beautiful and beautifully imperfect ways.

I hope we’ll all be struck by the company we’re in, and by a growing trust that the insights each of us needs to move in the direction of the lives we most want are actually all around us.

The questions I ask in these interviews are intended to elicit glimpses into the “realness” of interviewees’ lives – to take down veils of “having it all together” – as well as to shed light on some of the ideas and practices that people have found helpful in their work of tending trust.

If you would like to be interviewed, or know of someone else who tends trust in some big or small way, please be in touch: kristin t noelle at gmail dot com.

Here’s to good company, and to the trust that such company makes possible!

Playing the piano was my very first love. I fell hard for it, and spent 12 years of childhood and adolescence practicing daily at 6:30am.

My morning trysts ended when school and sports and a boyfriend filled life up, and then later, when two marriages did the same – one to a person and the other to words. In addition to my husband, most of my 20s were spent wedded to the idea that words would save and heal me, would solve the riddles that left me most perplexed, would bring me longed-for peace. Music, throughout this time, roamed lonely (and I have to think lovingly) somewhere nearby.

Recent years have me convinced, however, that words are only one of many ways a person can learn and grow and heal, and in fact may not be the most potent of them all (parts of me just fainted at the scandal of it!).

So I’m on a mission – with this site and otherwise – to round out my tools for growing trust. Visual art is integral on this site for this reason, and therefore, too, this category of Songs. I’ve learned that music has a way of doing things inside of us, inside of me, that nothing else can.

My intention is to post songs here that in some small or large way contribute to the growth of trust. Some of them will be original compositions of my own, some will be from professional artists, and, I hope, some will come from you who have originals or good leads to share with us all. (In terms of originals, it’s rarely slickness and professionalism that nourish trust most; homemade, on this front, and even not always on key, will likely warm our hearts best. :)

If you have trust-nourishing songs you’d like to see posted here (with credits, of course), please feel free to send me original mp3s or recommendations. I’d love to hear from you! kristin t noelle at gmail dot com

And as a gentle start to this category, here is Elizabeth Mitchell’s cover of Three Little Birds, from her album You Are My Little Bird – a song that brought good tears to my eyes on more than one occasion during one of my life’s most stressful seasons. The whole album is really sweet, and one I highly recommend.

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