Laura
My blogs
| Gender | Female |
|---|---|
| Industry | Education |
| Occupation | teacher, writer, photographer |
| Location | Georgia, United States |
| Introduction | I live at the edge of the forest in a little town in the north Georgia mountains. I teach sixth grade Language Arts and am writing a memoir of sorts about family, spirituality, and narrative. I am also exploring a possible writing project having to do with contemporary lay contemplative experience and how it might be informed by the Desert Fathers and Mothers of early Christianity. I am a relatively recent convert to Roman Catholicism and an admirer of Pope Francis, Leonardo Boff, Joan Chittister, and Richard Rohr. I'm a Lay Associate of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Monastery in Conyers, Georgia. I am interested in indigenous cultures, narratives, and spirituality, especially how these can inform my spirituality as a lay contemplative. I write, read, take pictures, play around with creating ephemera from paper and cloth and other organic things. I cook, hike, watch wildlife, and collect random bits of interesting oddness, both tangible and abstract. I am a seer of smallness and a caretaker of ridiculous minutiae. If you want, e-mail me at riverrun67@gmail.com or lksorrells@hotmail.com. |
| Interests | stillness, movement, connection, paradox, Spirit, wilderness, flavor, pedagogy, family, farmers' markets, cicada song, sketching with thick and thin pencils, kirtan, ceremony, reverence, irreverence, photography, anthropology, sustainability, slow food, ecology, social justice, poetry, meditation, sacred fire, the wind in the forest, literature, bluegrass, thrift store plunder, genealogy, obscure old blues recordings, attention, distraction, antique toys, pens, labyrinth walking, Andy Goldsworthy, Dale Chihuly, Vermeer, David Nash, Joseph Cornell, baking, Stieglitz, Edward Weston, Cezanne, Chiura Obata, Romare Bearden, van Gogh, Winslow Homer, indigenous ways of being, film, rust, spiders and webs, raptors and other birds, eggshells, nests, found poems, mindfulness, mindlessness, laughter, dragonflies and damselflies, abandoned buildings in a state of compelling collapse, kayaking and canoeing both whitewater and black |
| Favorite Movies | Akira Kurasawa's Dreams, 2001, It's a Wonderful Life, The Third Man, Ran, Lone Star, Diary of a Country Priest, The Remains of the Day, Atonement, Everything Is Illuminated, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dead Man, To Kill a Mockingbird, Water, Vertigo, The Fast Runner, Spirited Away, Rivers and Tides, Elizabethtown, Whale Rider, Cinema Paradiso, The Last Waltz, Memento, I'm Not There, The Band's Visit, Big Bad Love, I'm Your Man, Dr. Strangelove, The Big Lebowski, Crossing Delancey, Down by Law, The Manchurian Candidate, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Down from the Mountain, El Topo, Badlands, Strangers in Good Company, Ikiru, The Dead, Shadow of a Doubt, Happy Accidents, The Philadelphia Story, Interstellar, Bird, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Eat Drink Man Woman, The African Queen, Matewan, Tender Mercies, Me and You and Everyone We Know, Smoke Signals, Of Gods and Men, The Piano, The Lives of Others, Delicacy, Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, The Last Temptation of Christ, Three Billboards outside Ebbing Missouri, The Mission, Shoes of the Fisherman |
| Favorite Music | J'ai Uttal, Neil Young, Josh Ritter, Miles Davis, Seamus Blake, Townes van Zandt, Lester Young, Bill Chase, Bela Fleck, Richard Shindell, Roland Kirk, Keith Jarrett, David Newman, Sara Tavares, Kaki King, the Waterboys, Alexi Murdoch, Andrew Bird, Art Tatum, Deva Premal, Fela Kuti, Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, Guy Clark, Glenn Gould, Gorecki, the Guarneri String Quartet, Vijay Iyer, Devendra Banhart, Nina Simone, M. Ward, Sun Kil Moon, Iron and Wine, Nanci Griffith, Bob Holroyd, the Healing Music Project, Arcade Fire, Gillian Welch, Boards of Canada, Van Morrison, Brad Mehldau, Decemberists, Led Zeppelin, Laura Nyro, the Rolling Stones, She and Him, The National, Joe Strummer, the Avett Brothers, Greg Brown, Son House, Steve Earle, Rodrigo y Gabriela, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Emmylou Harris, the Neville Brothers, Leo Kottke, Mumford and Sons, Ozomatli, Band of Horses, Dar Williams, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Caroline Herring, Fleet Foxes, Crooked Still, Otis Redding, Al Green, Sam Cooke, the Head and the Heart, Alexander Ebert, One Eskimo, Laura Marling, Bruce Cockburn, Horsefeathers, Jay Farrar, Lord Huron |
| Favorite Books | Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, Jane Eyre, Rilke, Ulysses, The Cloud of Unknowing, A Course in Miracles, A Course of Love, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Absalom Absalom, Anna Karenina, Mark Twain, Michael Ondaatje, Jane Hirshfield, Peter Matthiessen, Barry Lopez, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Naomi Shihab Nye, Judson Mitcham, David Wagoner, Mary Oliver, Charlotte Joko Beck, John Berger, Sylvia Plath, Kay Ryan, Louise Gluck, Thomas Merton, Chuang-tzu, L'Engle, George MacDonald, The Songlines, D.H. Lawrence, Stewart O'Nan, John Fowles, Julian Barnes, The Remains of the Day, The Bone People, Stephen Levine, Soulmaking, Roberta Bondi, Richard Rohr, The Spirituality of Imperfection, Holy the Firm. Galway Kinnell, Jack Gilbert, Seamus Heaney, Cormac McCarthy, Wallace Stevens, Maurice Manning, Gerald May, Walker Percy, Edna O'Brien, Rick Bass, Sherman Alexie, The Master and Margarita, R.S. Thomas, Robert Duncan, Shushaku Endo, C.S. Lewis, Frederick Buechner, Walter Wink, Kathleen Raine, Henri Nouwen, Frederick Franck, Lois Ann Yamanaka, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Black Elk Speaks, Nikos Kazantzakis, Terry Tempest Williams, Philokalia, Julian of Norwich, Mary Catherine Bateson, Derrick Jensen, Harry Humes, Cesar Vallejo, Cold Mountain, Tomas Transtromer, Mircea Eliade, The Little Locksmith, The Shack, Chekhov, Middlemarch, The Delicacy and Strength of Lace, Gilead, Home, Wendell Berry, David James Duncan, Joseph Campbell, Edward Abbey, Louise Erdrich, Andre Dubus, John Irving, John Updike, Luci Shaw, Faith Shearin, Margaret Gibson, The Monks of Tibhirine, Pablo Neruda, Bill McKibben, Rebecca Solnit, Michael Casey, Joan Chittister, Esther de Waal, Mark Doty, Richard Blanco, Marie Howe, Kilian McDonnell, the book of Psalms, Mark Jarman, The Wind in the Willows, Coleman Barks, Hafez, Kabir, Rumi, Great Expectations, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Harry Potter series |