The super bowl really didn’t hold my attention, so I headed off to bed early. But now, in the middle of the night, the meatballs and bean dip sit uncomfortably in my gut and I cannot sleep. After tossing and turning for a bit, I get up and try to write.

I don’t have a burning desire to write, like I often do. Instead, I am writing simply because it is what I do. Not only was it Super Bowl Sunday, but it was the last Sunday of Epiphany. We had a Baptism and our Annual Church Meeting.

The priest did a great job of tying the Baptism to the readings about transfiguration and focused on our own individual transformations. The annual meeting was upbeat and we all ate together afterwards as a church family.

I chatted briefly with our Seminarian. She spoke about how different Ash Wednesday was after she had started her discernment process. I commented about how even the Baptism felt very different. I looked at the child being baptized. I wondered what his life would be like, how God would touch him. I thought back to my own baptism, when I was a child. What was it like? For me? For me mother? For the minister? For godparents? What did they think would be come of me?

Phrases like “Changed from glory into glory” and “if anyone is in Christ they are a new creation” come to mind. I think back to my poem about Lent, “You have entered unchartered territory”.

I have not settled on my Lenten discipline for this year. Will I try to write a poem a day? What will I do with my personal devotion time? How do various study groups fit in? I keep stumbling into a few different ideas that seem at odds with one another.

One is the ‘Rule of Life’. It keeps coming up in different Lenten studies. I’m eager to jump into this, but waiting for Lent and for the studies to begin. Concurrent with this is my interest in the unknown, the unknowable, the unexpected, the unchartered territory. I think back to my readings about rhizomes, connected learning, and digital pedagogy.

Where does the Rhizome and the Rule of Life meet? How do I hold Saint Benedict and Gilles Deleuze in my mind together? It stirs a longing in my soul, to bring together these two thoughts in the midst of daily life.

I stumble across Deleuze’s essay Immanence and start reading the introduction. How I long to spend time reading it and finding others to discuss it with, in the context of the Rule of Life. Yet in a few hours, I will need to get on with my daily life.

I spend a little more time, looking at audio files I could download and listen to on my commute, but now I must try to get some sleep.