This A is for Advent Thursday is brought to us by the letter Bb.

In my preAdvent reading by Emily Lund and Shannon Dackus, I was inspired to rethink the words we use for Advent.

Faith, Hope, Love, and Peace are the words we use most often for the four weeks of Advent. These are very good words.

Emily and Shannon offered some new words: Surprise. Await. Remain. Pause. And may I add, today, Beauty.

It’s unexpectedly good to have a pause in New Mexico this Advent. Advent in northern New Mexico was a rhythm of my life so very many years, and isn’t it a gift when we can return to something and see how much we missed it, and, yes, need it for our soul’s health?

Part of the Advent pause in Taos is how very easy it is to find beauty, particularly in pause mode. Beauty is a need for my soul, and so I am filling beyond the brim.

Today we are invited to take an Advent pause and remain in the great beauty that is already about us. Quotidian beauty everywhere.

The retirement travel continues. I was mainly home in November, and it was a good stop. I had time to catch up with my home life, and it was an unexpected joy. I hadn’t realized how much of my brain was filled with working until that spot emptied.

I have four trips planned before the end of the year. This trip is a New Mexico lark. My friend Abby has a gallery opening this weekend, and I’m flying over to celebrate with her.

For years my best friend and I traveled to New Mexico every Advent. When my grandson was born in the middle of Advent, we moved our annual trip to New Mexico until Epiphany. It feels like a reunion of sorts to have a few days in New Mexico during Advent. Although Advent doesn’t begin until Sunday, I’ve transferred the season a few days early.

I’m ending the long green season of Pentecost today. The short blue season of Advent is upon us.

What will this season of quiet, pause, and open ears and hearts bring?

My friend and I learned long ago that we can pretty much expect everything to take us twice as long as it would anyone else. We are professionally pokey and easily distracted when we travel.

Friday we drove from Pittsfield, Massachusetts to Ithaca, New York. When we were planning our fall lark to New England, we discovered that Shawn Colvin and Mary Chapin Carpenter would be on tour, and on the night we were to leave to come home, they’d be four hours away in New York. Tickets were bought and plans were changed. Ah! The ability to be flexible.

We knew that we had time to choose a scenic route and so expected a slow day. True to form, eight hours later, we arrived in Ithaca.

I arrived at our hotel with my heart full to the brim with God’s beauty. But who knew that slow travel could be so exhausting?

Saturday will definitely be a ten mile day. Meanwhile, the heavens are still proclaiming God’s glory.

One of the things my best friend and I have learned during our over thirty years of traveling together, especially as we’ve moved onto our oldering phase, is that there are days in our travels that we enjoy staying close to where we are staying and explore the near by.

Yesterday was a ten mile day that got up- graded to eleven miles as we circled Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Who could have imagined the treasures so near?

The day began at our favorite local coffee place. The young tattooed barista said, as she brought her drinks to the table where I sat knitting, “I’d love to be friends with you two!”

A walk in Pittsfield State Park that included time to stop and paint as the leaves dropped around me.

A grilled cheese at a local eatery, Flo’s. This trip has been subtitled the grilled cheese tour as we’ve enjoyed one each day made with the excellent local cheese (guess who tried the onion rings?).

Unexpectedly driving by Tanglewood and stopping for a brief walk there (who knew we were so near?).

A lovely walk through a nature preserve.

Ending our eleven mile travels with ice cream from a local dairy—cranberry chocolate chip for me.

The heavens are still telling the glory of God.