This week’s Angelus News column is called “Against Ease” (or was, before they changed the title to “How Much Failure and Suffering Must One Endure for a Good Life”).

Anyway, as Flannery O’Connor observed: “We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we allow ourselves to be.”

Here in the Sonoran Desert, the high yesterday was 113. The whole last two weeks it’s been well above 100 every day. The effect is kind of like an extended snow day back East. You’re excused from just about all activity. Noon Mass is fun cause the thermometer in the car will say like 121 degrees when you come out afterwards and till the A/C kicks in you have to handle the steering wheel like a hot potato.

One plus is that you can wash your clothes, drape them around in the back yerd, and within half an hour tops, they’re bone dry. Another, if you can hack the fact that it’s still over 100 at 7:30 pm, is that the sunsets have been spectacular. Also it’s quiet, partly becuase the U of A students haven’t quite yet returned and also most sane people simply stay indoors for the duration.

I wouldn’t want that kind of heat all the time but there is something appealing about the extreme weather. The diehard walkers are out early morning and for a shorter time at night…Lots of time for reading, playing the piano, housecleaning, and writing.

Also, I’m going to Amsterdam for a week next January where it will be FREEZING COLD. So enjoy things while you can, I say.

I’m getting excited about the Memoir Writing Workshop I’ll give at Kylemore Abbey in Ireland starting September 7. Sprucing up my Power Points, discovering all over again that there is so much more I want to say than there is time to say it in.

I am on a Sister Wendy kick–ordered a bunch of used books–she has trillions–where she talks about art. But also, or more to the point, Sister was a hard-core prayer. She rose at 1:30 in the morning and prayed for seven hours–or maybe she put in five hours in the morning and then went to Mass and then did two more hours throughout the day. Worked for a couple of hours, attended Mass of course. Was not only cloistered but a hermit and thus did not speak to anybody other than I think her caretaker or some person who helped in her later years. This kind of life sounds more and more appealing…

She also has a few books on prayer, so I am reading and digesting slowly.

I didn’t get around to making a video this week…has anyone been watching the Montreal Open? Allez Vicki Mboko!