Melinda Emily Thomas

Category: Meditations and Reflections

  • How to Build Core Strength

    While teaching a private yoga lesson last week, I was paid a compliment I never thought I’d hear, “You have one of the strongest cores I’ve seen. I want to know what you do to strengthen your core.” Truth is, because my abs are not ripped, I don’t think of myself as having a strong…

  • What the Jedi Get Wrong

    Master Yoda says, “Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.” I say, How you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. As much as I adore Star Wars, the one thing about the Jedi that bothers me is their refusal to create space within themselves…

  • Surprise

    In my outdoor storage closet sit six containers of Christmas decorations: a tall tree, a set of Alpine trees, a set of wreathes, a box of ornaments, a box of miscellaneous décor, and a box containing my Christmas village. For the most part, everything gets used. I’ve donated or gotten rid of the excess. The…

  • Fill Your Hands with Mud

    I’m feeling ambivalent about the holidays this year. Until a few months ago I thought ambivalent meant not caring. But then, while watching the Daniel Tiger episode “Daniel’s Day of Many Feelings,” I learned that to be ambivalent is to have mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about someone or something. In stressful years past, by…

  • Love Song

    Today I offer a post from the Householder’s Archives. It’s a little fiction/poetry I wrote a couple of years ago and thought, in light of my recent musings on faith, vision, and traveling into the unknown, this would be an appropriate transition piece as we prepare for Thanksgiving and Advent. Enjoy.  It begins in the dark,…

  • The Mountain is Detail: The Tension of Faith and Vision

    A friend who spent most of his life in the mountains and now lives in the Piedmont recently said to me, “My only beef with North Carolina is the tree canopy. You can’t look out over things.” He has a point. In New Mexico, you can see everything. The land is BIG. The sky is…