Author: Vivian Bikulege

There is no use abstaining from food if you do not abstain from selfishness.- Fr. Garrett, “Tour Guide,” Mepkin Abbey On the first Sunday in March, I went on a mini-pilgrimage with my mother and two dogs to Mepkin Abbey in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. It was sunny and crisp, lodged between days of insistent Lowcountry rain.

Everyone has a spirit that can be refined, a body that can be trained in some manner, a suitable path to follow. – Morihei Ueshiba On New Year’s Day, I took a longer than usual walk along the Coosaw River with my beagle Toby. My mother was sick with that bronchitis-type bug that seems to have invaded Beaufort County, if not the entire country, so a trek down to Hunting Island wasn’t really in order.

When I was a senior in high school, I was captain of the rifle team.   Practice was held in a rifle range carved out of concrete under the swimming pool in the physical education building. Four team members – Fred, Jack, Glenn and me – went on to win the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic state championship in 1976 at the end of the season.  

  If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. – Meister Eckhardt As Sandy passed by the coast of South Carolina, crashing into the northern seaboard and clearing the way for her wintry, nor’easter sister Athena, I was awestruck by the damage the storms left in their wake, and yet grateful that our Lowcountry was spared once more. However, I am not proud of this kind of gratitude. All too often, my gratefulness is of the garden variety, “there but for the grace of God go I” type, and I wonder if that is really any form of gratitude at all.

A Mind is a Terrible Thing to Waste. – United Negro College Fund, 1972 One thing no one can ever take from you, once you have it, is your education. I believe my father was the first person to teach me this lesson, and he sparked an insatiable appetite for learning in me. I ponder this tenet as a new school year begins for children, teenagers, college freshman, and graduate students.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed. ­– Mary Oliver, It Was Early   Summertime is a season like no other. Hot – hotter than ever – it speaks the language of fresh vegetables, ripened fruit, popsicles, and ice cream cones. In Beaufort, we find ourselves turning from Fourth of July fireworks to our annual Water Festival celebration. All are blessings as we cautiously move through months marked in a countdown toward the end of the hurricane season.

Many people… want to move the mountain in one week. We have to move it bit by bit and start with ourselves.   – Chen Guangcheng, Chinese Civil Rights Activist I am a different American today than I was three weeks ago because I visited Asia. What changed? I have a new appreciation for my freedom.

“I want Lea to hear the story from you.” A few weeks ago, I gave my goddaughter a ring my mom...

While I waited for a flight to Savannah, a pigeon walked the perimeter of the gate area inside the Newark airport. He was cautious, doing that bob and weave thing with his head, his beak and shoulders always preceding his prominent breast. From a distance, he appeared to strut between the rows of airport seats, stopping briefly to pick up stray bread crumbs from sloppy travelers too harried to notice or care about wayward grains from crust. I found beauty in his presence, and yet I was saddened to think that he might be a prisoner in a cage of endless corridors and moving sidewalks.

On a Delta flight from LaGuardia to Savannah, sky sailing over the Atlantic Ocean, the water as smooth and muted as a fresh coat of gray-blue paint on the plank of a new house, I read Citizen Conn, a short story by Michael Chabon published in a February issue of The New Yorker. I was not far along into the piece when I read the sentence, “I tried to think about what I was going to say to this elderly stranger with bone metastasis.”