Twenty-five years have passed, give or take a few, since I chanced on this little gem for my tin collection. Doing errands in bustling downtown Santiago, I ducked out of the drizzle and smog into a recently discovered “treasure hoard” of a store. Todo A Mil (“Everything for 1000 Pesos”—the Chilean equivalent of a dollar…
“Would you be willing to endure four months of isolation on a small rocky island if you knew you would not only survive the difficult experience but would come away from it with an unwavering core of self-confidence and spiritual awareness?” The late, great Luci Swindoll throws out this journaling prompt in her inspiring book…
Ten, nine, eight… Less than 24 hours before lift-off and Destiny at Dolphin Bay goes live in Kindle and paperback versions on Amazon. Here at Seaglass Sagas I’m celebrating the launch of my first book in the Desert Island Diaries series during the month of August. What’s all the hype about? To learn more, you…
Whatever Thomas Jefferson meant by “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence, I equate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of purpose, the pursuit of a place of usefulness and meaning in the world. You might say I’m searching for my happy place. I know. For some of us,…
In 1986 our family attended a Christmas Dolphins show at sunrise. While the military dictatorship in Chile hastened to its eventual demise, I was then a young mom living in a seaside hamlet where we still didn’t have telephones (or a bank, gas station, or pharmacy either, though that doesn’t enter into this story). But…
My writing ministry file, labeled 20:24:28, holds almost 400 digital pages right now. The other day, as I finished my blog series on story motifs, I scrolled back to the beginning of the document and discovered some interesting points that I should review more often. In a lot more areas of life, it’s a good…
Among the many themes in my books, the motif of HOME—or perhaps more precisely, houses—surprises me most with its broad-spectrum presence. I never planned to weave those ideas into the writing, was hardly even aware of them. But in this homesick world, maybe that’s not unexpected at all. Recently I suffered an attack…of nostalgia. Did…
“Do you believe in destiny?” Nicolás Serrano, up to his elbows in apple mash, asks halfway through my first book Destiny at Dolphin Bay. His friend Melissa has questioned his self-identification as a Chiloé islander, knowing he grew up a city boy. As she watches him make cider in an antique press, she sees him…
The glory of God’s created world—the birds and beasts, flowers and trees—glistens as one of my favorite story motifs. Along with the sea and sky, I’m enchanted by mountains, meadows, and woodland marvels. As the hymnwriter Maltbie Babcock told his wife when heading for a walk along the Niagara Escarpment and Lake Ontario, l just…
Moving toward the climax of our whirlwind tour of Chile’s Region of Aysén, we continue to follow in the steps of the Patagones, South America’s “Bigfoot” people. With rain threatening for today, I’m pretty sure we’ll be leaving muddy footprints everywhere we go. But we awake to an almost-perfect, almost-summer morning at Mallín Colorado Lodge…
