Books by Dale Harris

Books by Dale Harris
A Feast of Epiphanies

Though I Walk, A Novel

Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, a book of poems

Second Wind

Second Wind
An album of songs both old and new. Recorded in 2021, a year of major transition for me, these songs explore the many vicissitudes of the spiritual life,. It's about the mountaintop moments and the Holy Saturday sunrises, the doors He opens that no one can close, and those doors He's closed that will never open again. You can click the image above to give it a listen.

The Song Became a Child

The Song Became a Child
A collection of Christmas songs I wrote and recorded during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020. Click the image to listen.

There's a Trick of the Light I'm Learning to Do

This is a collection of songs I wrote and recorded in January - March, 2020 while on sabbatical from ministry. They each deal with a different aspect or expression of the Gospel. Click on the image above to listen.

Three Hands Clapping

This is my latest recording project (released May 27, 2019). It is a double album of 22 songs, which very roughly track the story of my life... a sort of musical autobiography, so to speak. Click the album image to listen.

Ghost Notes

Ghost Notes
A collections of original songs I wrote in 2015, and recorded with the FreeWay Musical Collective. Click the album image to listen.

inversions

Recorded in 2014, these songs are sort of a chronicle of my journey through a pastoral burn-out last winter. They deal with themes of mental-health, spiritual burn-out and depression, but also with the inexorable presence of God in the midst of darkness. Click the album art to download.

soundings

soundings
click image to download
"soundings" is a collection of songs I recorded in September/October of 2013. Dealing with themes of hope, ache, trust and spiritual loss, the songs on this album express various facets of my journey with God.

bridges

bridges
Click to download.
"Bridges" is a collection of original songs I wrote in the summer of 2011, during a soul-searching trip I took out to Alberta; a sort of long twilight in the dark night of the soul. I share it here in hopes these musical reflections on my own spiritual journey might be an encouragement to others: the sun does rise, blood-red but beautiful.

echoes

echoes
Prayers, poems and songs (2005-2009). Click to download
"echoes" is a collection of songs I wrote during my time studying at Briercrest Seminary (2004-2009). It's called "echoes" partly because these songs are "echoes" of times spent with God from my songwriting past, but also because there are musical "echoes" of hymns, songs or poems sprinkled throughout the album. Listen closely and you'll hear them.

Accidentals

This collection of mostly blues/rock/folk inspired songs was recorded in the spring and summer of 2015. I call it "accidentals" because all of the songs on this project were tunes I have had kicking around in my notebooks for many years but had never found a "home" for on previous albums. You can click the image to download the whole album.

Random Reads

The Simplest of Delights (Introduction)


The other day I was listening to an episode of a podcast called “The Awesome Project." It’s a series produced by a Canadian Positive Psychologist named Louisa Jewell which explores various topics related to human flourishing. Flourishing is what positive psychologists call it when a person is experiencing “positive mental health and overall life well-being.”[1] When we are living our best and enjoying positive well-being as a result, we are flourishing.

The whole series has been fascinating to me, but this particular episode was exploring the impact of positive emotions—things like love, gratitude, pride, or excitement—on our overall well-being. It cited studies that suggested having daily experiences of positive emotion improves our resilience, helps us recover physically from the effects of stress, and guards us against depression.

The podcast referred to the work of Barbara Frederickson, who found that “the difference between people who flourish and those who don’t, lies in their ability to generate everyday pleasant moments at a ratio of [up to] 5 positive experiences for every 1 negative emotion.” That 5:1 ratio—she called it the Frederickson’s Positivity Ratio—especially gave me pause. The brain, you might say, is like Velcro for our negative experiences and Teflon for our positive, and in order to build the resources we need to come through negative experiences with resiliency, we need intentionally to work into our routines experiences that generate these positive emotions on a consistent basis.

Psychologist Michelle McQuade uses the term “positivity hygiene” to describe all this. Just like you work regular showers and brushing your teeth into your daily schedule, because you know how important these simple acts of self-care and personal grooming are, in the same way you should work regular activities into your routine that generate positive emotional affect. These activities do not need to be intense or elaborate (this is another finding in the research). Petting the family dog could do it; listening to some favorite music could; a 15-minute walk in the woods. The key is knowing what puts you in that happy place, even if its just momentary, and becoming intentional about building those things into your day.

I’ve been mulling over these ideas for a few weeks now: the positivity ratio, and positivity hygiene, and human flourishing. It occurred to me as I listened to the podcast that I’m not really all that clear on what experiences generate positive emotion for me. At least, not in the way the podcast was talking about it, I’m not. I know in broad terms what brings me joy and what steals my joy. I have a good idea of what my idea of a “perfect day” would be. But if I were going to try to be intentional about building such moments into my day, like the way I take a shower every morning, I’m not sure what exactly I’d include on the list.

Have I been walking around, the “positive psychology” equivalent of an unwashed slob?

Like I say, it gave me pause.

It also gave me an idea for a new series here at terra incognito. Over the next few months, I’m planning to take some time to explore the simple pleasures of life, examining some of the every-day experiences, objects, encounters, or activities that serve as unrecognized sources of positive emotion for me.

This is not just for the sake of cleaning up my act, so to speak, when it comes to my personal positivity ratio (though hopefully it will help me do that). It is, more importantly, to help me remember that the Lord’s Creation is, actually, crammed full of things to take delight in, if only we took the time to savor it. To paraphrase C. S. Lewis: judging from the way he wired to be able to take such pleasure in even the simplest of things, you’d have to think the Lord was a hedonist at heart. And perhaps he is. It’s just that we’re so often like fishes, swimming in the sun-warmed water of his grace and goodness and never even realizing we’re wet.

Who knows what we might discover if we took some time to ask the Lord to help us see just exactly how wet we really are?

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