a-soul-journey

There in the reflection

2012-01-09T22:24:00.002-05:00

I take myself out to the woods. I am looking for possibility. I am looking for clarity and a bit of fresh air.

I find the ice formations on the stream intriguing. I notice the lichen on the rocks is growing in a way that I don't remember. I surmise that it is because the rocks are generally covered with snow and that the winter has been surprisingly warm.

I download my pictures and find myself reflected in the ice. It reminds me that life, consciousness, the universe is a hologram and that we are actually reflected in every bit of our life and life as a whole.

Sometimes it's not an obvious as we might like. Mostly, we don't realize our power in our sense of powerlessness. But we're there, just the same.

Message from the left

2012-01-05T22:15:00.001-05:00

Sometime back I read "Homecoming" by John Bradshaw and did the exercise of writing to my "inner child" by using my opposite hand. It had a profound effect on me and accessed a different part of my brain. I have since used that technique to access wisdom that seems to come from beyond me. Here's what emerged yesterday:

When all is lost, go back to basics.
Kiss your husband and children deeply,
Pay your bills; clean your house.
Find a past time you enjoy.
Pray and be grateful for whatever comes your way.

Don't forget to drink water.
Go outside.
Feel the earth under your feet
and breathe deeply.

I continue to get rid of 27 things each day. Yesterday's discards were from my top bureau drawer. Tags from clothing, spent potpourri, vanity handkerchiefs, various odds and end. The cleansing job is not thorough, but there is a little less clutter in the drawer. Today, I sorted through a pile of paper and recycled some 27 pieces. The pile is still there, although smaller.

So when all is lost, keep sorting, keep making room. Keep a practice that keeps you focused on something. Because when you're focused on something, you are focused on something.

Go back to basics: everything is what it is.

A different reflection

2012-01-03T13:10:00.004-05:00

One of my main tenets is that all things lost are found. I can only hope that it is true for me, for all of us.

It's not that I'm physically lost, it's that I'm emotionally adrift. It may or may not show to the casual observer, but it's apparent if you look closely into my eyes. It could be the continuing grief of the loss of my younger brother this past fall. Although I think feelings of disconnection has been going on for awhile. Perhaps a lifetime. Perhaps all of our lifetimes.

Maybe we are all becoming aware of it because the human world itself is adrift, floating in some space of unreality, caught in its own manifestation where truth is untruth, and what's good for one is not good for the whole. For in the detail is the whole, a natural hologram that seems, in this moment, to me, to be spiraling downward.

Perhaps it is just darkest before the dawn.

Certainly there are those lucky ones who find some sort of sustenance in the art of daily living, the pleasures of family and the comfort of home. There are even those that are sparked by the challenges that this world adrift offers.

And in the new year there are lots of thoughts of new beginnings and hope. I, myself, harbor the hope that this year will be year of coming together, a time when all of our uniqueness will coalesce into a beautiful symphony that is each and every one of us, revitalized.

So I begin. I'm on Day 2 of getting rid of 27 things, thinking that as I lighten the load, I will lighten myself. Today I discarded unused and half-burnt candles and at least four power supply cords. Lord knows what I will do when I find the appliance or gismo that needs the power supply -- add it to the next 27 things to get rid of, no doubt.

I also am committed to a bit of exercise. While weight is not a problem, my mid-fifties body is in need of some tuning, as is my mind, as is my spirit.

So here's to the journey. To celebrate each day and to connect with myself in a positive manner is my goal. This blog, here, now, is that commitment actualized.

Perhaps you have your own journey that you will share in this space.

Everything has a pattern

2011-10-01T03:38:00.000-04:00

There are patterns in everything based on their inherent qualities.

They change and they stay the same.

Mary of the woods

2011-09-27T11:50:00.002-04:00

It was there in the woods on the side of a small road that borders the west branch of the Ten Mile River. A small shrine, a Mary figurine. I discovered it when I was driving the back roads of Tusten following Hurricane Irene.

I stop there everyday now and sit, waiting for inspiration, guidance, and a bit of solace. Generally, there is some thought that comes to mind.

Yesterday, it was the paradox, "Something there is nothing but the breath; the breath is everything." It is not lost on me that everything is broken in that shrine: Mary is cracked, the vase has no bottom, the candles, spent and chipped. Much like me. Perhaps like you.

Still, despite the brokenness and perhaps because of it, the shrine is sacred and brings me peace when I sit and listen.

Happy Anniversary

2011-08-24T08:51:00.003-04:00

Twenty-five years ago today, my house burned down. I remembered and did the math while listening to a story about a church burning down and a button box lost. Told as part of UULTI (Unitarian Universalist Leadership Training Institute), held in Ocean Grove this past weekend, I think the point of the story was to reveal a truth that historically our institutions have collective treasure and knowledge that we would do well to remember.

Perhaps it was a tale about resilience.

For me, it struck a chord of loss and tears streamed down my cheeks and touched a well of sorrow that I was unaware existed at the core of my being. Perhaps like some are unaware that there is a button box in some church corner somewhere.

This morning, the smoke alarm sound three times.

Funny, no?

There are so many unexplained happenings. Lives change in an instant and, at the same time, imperceptibly, we find ourselves 25 years later thankful for the gifts of the day.

For my grandchildren

2011-07-30T18:38:00.005-04:00

I miss you.

I miss you and I think of you everyday when I am in the garden. I snap pictures of the broccoli growing or the cauliflower and I think about how you could watch how my garden grows. I think about how I am happy that I get to watch you grow.

It's summer; and the gardens here in Upstate New York, where I live, grow and grow. I know (because I had the opportunity to live with you when I worked in Tampa General Hospital as a chaplain) that it's too hot in Florida in the summer for gardens, even though I and your dad tried to grow tomatoes.

Tomatoes, here, grow just fine. (Mine are still green and small.)

Here's some pictures from my garden.

My best head of lettuce, ever. It's hard to tell, but this is a very nice head of Romaine lettuce.

I took this picture of a banana pepper because it reminded me of a Pinocchio nose pepper. I think the peppers are going to grow really well and I am happy that this one is yellow. It goes well with the green lettuce.

Here is one of the broccoli; its the fastest one and it will be ready to pick before the others.

Here's another one that's not quite as far along.

Finally, here is an "art shot" of my herbs that I am going to use in the salad with chili rellanos that I am cooking for a party for a friend of mine who is visiting from Texas.

I'm sit here smiling as I picture your faces and hear your voices in my head. Even though I'm far away, it's nice to remember my love for you on this summer evening.

And you know what? It's hot here too!

Rabbit

2011-07-28T10:34:00.005-04:00

A rabbit was on the inside of the fence when I approached the garden this morning. I watched as it slipped through the bottom of the fence where the chicken wire had rusted away. A moment later it ran from behind the bale of hay and paused some 10 feet away. I yelled at it, just to be inhospitable, and Dodger took off after it. "You get 'em," I called as after my 15-year-old dog took chase.

Once in the garden, I looked around for what it might have been eating and didn't see any nibbling. Later, when I saw this pathway through the green beans, I realized that left unchecked, or on the wrong side of the garden fence, that we and that rabbit would be fighting over the beans. Stepping back, I took a picture of bed and a closeup of the plants.

While I am really not willing to share, I see that there is great abundance.

And that there will be a great crop of beans this summer.

When I'm ready to return to the house, I reinforce the chicken wire that the rabbit had slipped through with a piece of hogwire fencing, and vow to mention to husband Stephen how the rabbit is keeping pace with his efforts to keep him out.

In the eye of the sunflower

2011-07-25T20:42:00.004-04:00

I stood naked in the rain today and honored the four directions and the old rose bush in the side yard. Acknowledging that the generations before lived with the same knowledge that this precious piece of earth sustains us, I hoped it would always be so.

Second story flowerbed view

2011-07-22T10:43:00.001-04:00

From my second story window, my tangle of a front flowerbed is a garden of life abundant. (If you click on the picture will will make it larger) Look for the bees on the lavender lemon mint, (at bottom center, and imagine more bees, look at dark spots) and check out the humming bird on the lower left, drinking the nectar of the bee balm.

I appreciate the varying heights of the perennials and am thankful that I let it rest for long enough for it to reveal itself. I begin to scheme how I can co-create with its vision.

The pause.

A cauliflower grows

2011-07-22T09:51:00.001-04:00

A cauliflower grows in my garden.

I say that because 1) the cauliflower is, indeed, growing in my garden; and 2) because it reminds me of the Joyce Carol Oates book "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." I don't remember much about the story. What I do remember is that it was one of those books that I was sorry when it ended. I actually liked all of the books that we read in elementary and junior high school and find it fascinating to think about iconic books that we read as a culture. (I know, I know, it's not happening as much now and we have pause to wonder what the world is coming to.)

Still, because it's all about me (are we really so different from the 'me' generation?) and I'm enjoying looking back/reflecting on my formative years as insight for the present, I remember not liking the process of the school reading and I am wondering whether it was the outcome that I didn't appreciate. Was it that everything in the '60s was focused on the written word, the testing, the book report? Was it having to talk about it in class? Might I remember more of the story if I had incorporated what I knew in the arts?

Of course, I remember that sometimes I made a diorama and I don't remember that being engaging or inspiring either. Perhaps I was put off by the evaluation. Perhaps I was just shy. Perhaps I just need to re-read "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and get reacquainted with the story. I imagine that it's even a movie I could watch.

Getting back to the cauliflower: in my garden there are four. And fortunately at least one of them is way behind the others. (Meaning it will be ready to eat after the others, thereby stretching the cauliflower season a bit.)

I love garden abundance!

I've been changing my screen saver for the past months, updating it as the season progresses. This is the one I be using for a couple of days. Lemon mint. It's doubly lovely because it is attracting the bees, a species that I worry about as it has been in decline, getting lost from their hives in the commercial world.

I'm hoping the screen saver picture reminds me that it's not necessary or even helpful to worry. Rather I move to revere, savor and shepherd our universe of expanding consciousness.

Last thought: if earthworms have consciousness, so do the bees. How about the mint?

Earthworm consciousness

2011-07-21T20:48:00.000-04:00

This morning, with my overall's getting longer and longer as I worked, I reclaimed the bed where the peas had been growing. I pulled the diseased vines and placed them carefully in a heavy plastic bag. I don't really know what was wrong with the peas; it could have been mosaic or maybe, as my sage farmer friend Greg Swartz put it in a recent email "Peas don't like having wet feet for extended periods of time, aka this season!")

Rolling back the newspaper and hay that I had mulched the peas with (yep, the same newspaper/mulch combo that could have contributed to the right conditions for those wet feet) I uncovered a couple of earthworm. I noted how the soil was fluffed all around.

I always feel rich when I uncover earthworms in the garden. Efficient filters of soil, I celebrate them whenever I come across them. Sometimes I move them from one bed to another, and once moved canfuls from one compost heap to another. They had fled from me then. I have wondered whether they understand I'm after them. I try to tell myself that they are just sensing the light and retreating and not that they are sensing danger and acting according.

From there I wonder if there is any real difference between retreating from the light or reacting because you feel threatened. Aren't they both some form of consciousness?

I asked Nathaniel Whitmore, of the Upper Delaware Mushroom Society, when we were out on an impromptu mushroom foray in Honesdale's Cliff Street Park last week, whether he thought earthworms had consciousness and he related how he never liked to put worms on fishing hooks because they always resisted. Made sense to him, he said.

From there, I wonder if the world is fundamentally changed by actually allowing, by empirical knowledge, that earthworms are a part of the web of consciousness?

It's a curious and quirky thought that makes me joyful.

The real estate is reclaimed, the garden in renewed.

Now you see 'em ...

Now you don't.

The pause

2011-07-20T23:36:00.001-04:00

I hurry out in the morning; I have no time to work my 30 morning minutes in the garden. I take a quick picture just to remember.

I read the second installment of my Spirituality and Practice e-course, "Pausing with Terry Hershey" and he talks about how there are two spaces in our lives. One for hurrying and accomplishment; one for reflection and silence. Check out this video explanation.

The pause

The wisdom stays with me through my busy day, and in the middle of the hectic, hurrying energy, I remember the pause. I breathe and sink into the energy of the earth.

With cookies in the oven for refreshments for an evening forum on letter writing, and being focused on finishing my Riverfest poster, I celebrate the refreshing pause awareness.

Garden potential

2011-07-19T23:18:00.001-04:00

Pumpkin pie

eggplant parm

dill pickles

What we tend to

2011-07-18T10:58:00.002-04:00

I am in the garden early this morning, working in the cool of the day. On my mental list is the tying up of the tomatoes.

I flit from one task to another and am sure that I have attention deficit disorder. Chastising myself for thinking too much, I tie up some of the tomatoes, side dressing them, and the cucumbers with lovely sheep manure that Stephen picked up for me from Fallsdale Farm last Wednesday. I pull weeds, transplant a volunteer tomato plant into the last empty space I just couldn't deal with last week, and create a pot with extra basil plants for a friend. I am aware that, while not staying on one task until it is finished, I am accomplishing things and moving the garden along in spurts. I recall a friend telling me yesterday that I am too hard of myself. Mostly I desire to be meditative in my garden work.

I'm getting better at being clear about asking for help and explaining why it is that I need whatever I am requesting. For instance, I would really like a dump-truck load of manure from a neighboring farm. I talked with someone with a dump truck who said that they would help. Talking with Stephen, however, it seemed that really pulling that off right now will be difficult. When I told him what I really needed was just a few buckets for side dressing the plants, he was able to get that accomplished when he was doing other tasks on Wednesday.

We were efficient together, and the plants grow lush with the extra nutrients.

My summer is made more lovely in remembering last year when I was in the Florida heat while doing my Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) at Tampa General Hospital. Then I went from air conditioning to air conditioning and rarely stepped outside. In contrast, I am in awe of the Upper Delaware and its pastoral and greening landscape.

The lawn in hardening under foot, but the garden beds where we tend and water remain soft.

A deepening web

2011-07-15T16:29:00.002-04:00

I spent the first hour of my day composing a blog post that talked about the three New York Times articles that I read this morning, which had me marveling at how many less-than-adequate decisions, particularly concerning asset use, that we could possibly make. And while I was jumping back and forth to retrieve the links, so that you could read the articles if you were so inclined, I jumped off my blog input screen without saving and lost it all.

I decided to go into the garden after that.

In the garden, I side dressed many of the plants, peppers, onions, zucchini, eggplant, swiss chard, with some beautiful aged sheep's manure. I work around the peas, which I believe have Mosaic, and am moving closer and closer to pulling them out and planting something that will grow for the fall.

There are a few peas on the vine, but it is a tortuous existence for them. I try to convince myself to give up on the small handful of peas that I will pick and value the garden real estate that pulling them will create and plant again.

It's hard to give up on things -- even when they're not working. Perhaps that is something that I have in common with my standout stories of the morning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/science/earth/15frack.html?src=recg

In this story, Joe Martens, new DEC Commissioner says that produced water from hydro-fracking can be treated in our non-hazardous wastewater facilities with minor modifications; the gas industry is concerned that local zoning would actually deter gas drilling in some areas of towns, and that it is estimated that there will be 75,000 wells drilled in the next 30 years.

The next story that caught my eye was http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/science/earth/15herbicide.html?_r=1&nl...

This story explains how Dupont came up with a new herbicide, Imprelis, that landscape companies are using to kill invasives in grass. Unfortunately, it also disturbs the conifers, which are dying by the tens of thousands. For some of us in New York and California, which has its own review process, the chemical hasn't been used yet because it has been found not to attached to soil, and therefore runs into the groundwater. Additionally, the chemicals do not break down so if you happen to put your grass clippings in your mulch pile and then use it on your flowers and vegetable garden, it will kill those as well.

Lastly, I read about food companies that are making a bit of a fuss about not advertising non-nutritious foods to children and a move to make children's menus more nourishing. The argument centers around whether Goldfish are junk food, but I'm not buying that the argument actually is about nutrition.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/15/business/food-makers-push-back-on-ads-...

Now hours later, from that morning post, I find myself wondering why it is that we have such a hard time cutting our losses and admitting that we can't control and harness the universe for our own self-interest, however benign or not!

Is it the same reason that I cannot give up on my peas as the corporations cannot give up on fossil fuels, manufacture of chemicals and looking at children as the newest marketing group to go after?

Same, perhaps, and different.

Bottom line? the peas have got to go; and the corporations have to start applying themselves to fostering healthy living.

Conscious men

2011-04-06T08:28:00.001-04:00

I found this video intriguing and inspirational.

The third way

2011-04-05T07:47:00.007-04:00

My morning musing has led me to the writing of 12 luminaries on on how to stay grounded in the midst of turmoil, and how we can all help the people of Japan during this difficult time. I especially like this passage:

There are three ways to deal with a negative situation. The first is to condemn it. The second is to attempt to fix it. The third is to create a new vision that renders the old problem obsolete. Always aim for the third way. Condemning a problem or working to fix it causes you to focus your mind on the problem. But what we focus on, we magnify. The third way forces you to work towards a positive new vision.

Enjoyed this video as well.

To the waters -- a prayer in major and minor

2011-04-03T17:55:00.001-04:00

In this morning's multi-gen service at the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship called "Helping Hands," I used the major version of Prayer for the Water of the World and the minor version to illustrate that the tone of our communication makes a difference.

Prayer for water

2011-03-31T21:23:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to my water prayer. Check it out.

http://www.uduuf.org/ministersblog/waters-world

Stations of the breath

2011-01-19T18:55:00.010-05:00

It sounds like it’s raining when I step outside in my snow boots and long raincoat. There is a crust on the snow and I make way to the woods to the right of the house. I choose that direction because I assess that there will be less resistance in the snow that is under the canopy of the white pines.

I stop and look closely at the ice-covered branches. I contemplate that while the outside of the pine needle is frozen, on the inside there is energy and warmth. I enter the woods and gaze at the snow covered branches and underbrush and think about my breath.

Today is the third day of an online retreat experience called Seasons of the Soul. Provided by the Abby of the Arts, this first week’s lesson and the 10-minute meditation that I listened to this morning urges us to contemplate our breath and how it is a continuous series of four: the moment before the inhale, the inhale itself, the pause between the inhale and the exhale, and then finally the exhale.

I think about that exhale as I see the underbrush overwhelmed with the weight of the snow. I ignore the urge to lie down, knowing that all that will happen is that I will feel the cold and the wet.

I muse on surrender, and think that while we resist this giving up because it seems like some sort of failure, when we do give in, we quit the struggle, accept, become lighter and unburdened.

As the ice falls to the forest floor, I notice the light changing in the expanse of the wetlands and hurry to the edge to capture the image. The blue peeks through the flat white sky and I know, in that instant, that the warming air is melting the tree’s burden.

I contemplate the irony that I headed for the woods for shelter, and found that that was the only place it was storming. I make my way back to the house, maintaining a path on the edge of the wetlands. I try to discern where to step, seeking solid ground while knowing that at any moment I could step into unfrozen water. The trees are thick, and I cannot return without going once more into the rain.

I surrender: there is no way out but through. I duck through the branches: to the field, the icy snow and the warm house beyond.

Frosty morning

2010-11-29T22:14:00.007-05:00

The dew was already frozen on the grass when I went out last night at 5:30 p.m. to pick parsley and beets for last night's dinner. Stephen was fixing a baked chicken, stuffed with rice, apricots and some of our dried apples and peaches. (I don't know if meal choice was because we spent Thanksgiving in New York City with some 25 relatives of our respective families, and had no Thanksgiving-like leftovers, but the small stuffed bird, the roasted potatoes, onions and beets were a wonderful end to the Thanksgiving holiday.)

The pine trees were frosted this morning. I watched as the sun was turning the tips green and melting the thinning ice. I had the desire to go out and photograph the fleeting moment but an impending phone appointment made that impossible.

Now the frost is gone and the trees are totally sunlit. I imagine that there are spots in the woods yet that are hidden from the light that remain frozen still. I think about how that mirrors the hidden places in our hearts: the self doubt and the limiting beliefs that remain frosty, cold and barren.

How fortunate for us, as humans, that our inner life force is strong and that with each breath we have the capacity to open our hearts and let in the warming light.

After my call, I notice that there are places where the frost exists still, and I make my way from my the house into the morning's chill and back again.

From my bedroom window

2010-11-24T08:10:00.003-05:00

The wind blows and the pine trees sway in the side field, just beyond my bedroom window. Sitting in bed, propped up with pillows, I watch as the branches dance, each one to a slightly different rhythm. I note that they move with the wind and always, always, come back to stillness. With a large gust, I imagine that the truck of the tree sways as well.

I remember being in the woods last week and listening to the sound that the trees made when the trunk was moved. At the time, I imagined that it was the tree speaking. It seems meaningful in this moment that a tree emits sounds when buoyed around and is silent in tranquility. I think about how a baby cries when it is unhappy. How often we are moved to speak when we have objection.

Additionally, ironically, thought my eyes this morning, I hear them speak to me of silence. In their movement, they teach me about rest and stillness.

On this morning, the day before Thanksgiving, I am thankful for these paradoxical lessons.

Getting creative

2010-11-19T17:44:00.004-05:00

Often, in the face of conflict, I can become quiet. So happy to know that some get creative. With family flying in this Thanksgiving week, I find this video heartening.

Tree Wisdom #3

2010-11-08T13:52:00.000-05:00

Sometimes we just get caught -- no fault of our own.

Tree Wisdom #2

2010-11-02T14:30:00.002-04:00

I have seen many years, but before me was the forest.

A mirror for gratitude

2010-11-01T21:48:00.006-04:00

As Stephen and I drove to the Fellowship on October 17, I saw this view and wanted to stop and photograph it. But alas, I was the service leader for the morning, and I felt that I had to pass the still pond by.

So you can imagine my delight when the following Sunday, driving in two cars, with Stephen ahead of me (because I had a meeting that I needed to get to following Skip Mendler's fabulous presentation on the Quaker response to global change), that I noticed that the pond was still and reflective again. A quick u-turn at Three Wishes brought me back to this image, with permission to seize the moment.

Undoubtedly, the view had changed. Undoubtedly, between the week I didn't stop and week I did, the details of the image have altered. Still, and I mean still in a different way, the reflection speaks for itself. And I ponder about how, when our minds and our spirits are still and calm, we embody the universal truth first put forth by Hermes Trismegistus "As above, so below," and gain a certain perspective on life, and stillness, in the midst of the everyday confusing realities.

Mostly, I was grateful that Pat and Jim had the key to the Fellowship, and that I could follow my intention to stop and capture the fleeting.

Speaking of gratitude, I just came across this blog about practicing 30 days of gratitude and it seems like a good idea. I'm going to do it, how about you? www.thirtydaysofgratitude.blogspot.com

Tree Wisdom #1

2010-10-21T13:54:00.006-04:00

Injury doesn't mean you stop growing.

It means you grow stronger.

Making things soft

2010-10-20T11:14:00.005-04:00

In my neck of the wood, the landscape is made soft by nature. Tree trunks are covered with green moss and rock sport mini environments of moss and pine needles. The leaves, falling silently, now brittle will soften and deteriorate as winter progresses.

It is quiet and the sound of running water is a hushing backdrop to the bird calls in the distance.

I think about last Sunday's Bud Rue Walk for Social Justice and when walking with Barbara Leo, president of the NEPA Audubon, how she would often remark, "Did you hear that? That's a cardinal calling its mate. It's somewhere in there." And sure enough, as I stood, scanning the branches, I heard the call and saw the bird, it's red feathers bright among the green pine.

It was the first bird that I had ever consciously spotted and I think about how so often if we don't know what we are listening for, we don't hear it.

Unrecognized bird calls break the silence, just as the blue green pine diffuse the bright blue sky. And the moment in the woods softens my soul.

Emerging out of impatience

2010-09-28T17:30:00.001-04:00

I take myself out of the house and into the moist woods, and unfortunately I have brought my impatience and bad humor with me. I photograph carpets of green lush moss that covers tree stumps and trunks. Its lushness seems in contrast to the very low water in Grassy Swamp stream.

A two-tone green toad hops across the path in front of me and I am sure that he is simply enjoying the dampness and not fretting that yesterday it was dry. A low-battery light in my camera blinks orange and, of course, that adds to my frustration. The tapping of a woodpecker breaks through my litany of complains and I stop to hear more. Perhaps he or she is onto me, because as I stand quiet and still underneath the trees all I hear is the wind. Thankfully, the moment cools and calms me.

I have come to the woods to see if yesterday’s rain has popped up any mushrooms. I ask myself if it is actually mushrooms I am after but rather peace of mind and centering. I balance my journal on my hip and write. Slowly the other sounds of the woods overwhelm my impatience.

I know that what I am bucking against is my distance from spiritual peace and daily practice. Somehow, I allow my daily activities, current affairs and the variety and multitude of things that I want to get done, convince me that somehow I don’t have the time or the energy to apply myself to stillness.

Still the landscape revives me and I remember that I need to make time for reflection, that I have made time for reflection, and for listening to peaceful and soothing voices.

After I finish writing, I head back to the house. I am tired and thirsty, and I have more editing work to do. As I reenter the side yard, I realize that even mushrooms, which pop out of the ground with great haste, take a little bit longer to grow than overnight.

I can only hope that that is true for me.

Meaning in a secular world

2010-09-17T14:35:00.001-04:00

I wake and read about James “Guadalupe” Carney, an American-born Catholic who becomes a Jesuit priest in order to serve the poor in Honduras. At first, his work is pastoral and sacramental. In the end, he becomes a revolutionary, an agent for radical social transformation. On September 16, 1983, he is thrown out of an airplane by the Honduras army, alive, to die on the mountains below.

It is the Spirit of Jesus who inspired his work.

I am taken by this thought, this allegiance to embody the spirit of an exemplar, and search my own heart for such an example. But in my Unitarian Universalist way of putting together a living faith, I find that I am moved to social action and right living by the moral compass of being human. I am moved to passionate justice by an ethical upbringing and an innate sense of compassion and empathy. I am living out my faith because I am an inspired being (sometimes), in gratitude for life.

So what do I worship? What do I make more important than my own secular desires? What guides me to think beyond myself?

I believe what guides me is the need and the desire to find meaning, the need and the desire to find connection. I do this in a secular world that seems to have outgrown the need for religious living.

Sallie McFague writes, in her book “Metaphorical Theology,” that we are no longer people who live with the understanding that the sun rises and sets and that the seasons change because there is a God who is pleased or displeased with us. We have traded a sacramental way of living for a secular one. We make God a personal one, a force that we call on when we are in trouble. Interestingly, with this personal one-on-one relationship, and without this sense of mystery or awe surrounding existence and a lack of connection with everything around us, words that surrounds God “inevitably go awry either in the direction of idolatry or irrelevancy or both.” (p.2)

And it seems ironic to me that we live in our secular world, with ironclad beliefs and great ties to our pain filled connections in the world, and yet we are blind to their influences on our lives. We give recognition to science and hard facts, all the while being buffeted around by our core beliefs.

But what of Father Carney? For him, the living essence of the Spirit of Jesus filled his life and gave him strength. In the manuscript he handed to his brother and sister, Carney had written, “Since my novitiate, I have asked Christ for the Grace to be able to imitate him, even to martyrdom, to the giving of my life, to being killed for the cause of Christ. And I strongly believe that Christ might give me this tremendous Grace to become a martyr for justice.”

Certainly most of us don’t aspire to be a martyr for justice. In my own life, I aspire to embody a strong and calm spiritual essence that illuminates a truth and a loving presence in the world. Taking conscious steps, I begin my day with the stories of saints, prophets and witnesses who embodied that faith and lived their inspiration. And it is my desire and intention that this inspiration will bring a religious focus to my day and make living in a secular world relevant.

A guest in our own lives

2010-08-24T22:15:00.004-04:00

I am back in the Upper Delaware. Back in the climate where the night breezes are cool and there is relief from the day’s heat. People ask me about the Florida summer and I tell them that I ignored the weather and that the hospital was always cool. In fact, if I had known what I know now, I would have packed more long sleeves rather than the sleeveless dresses that hung in my closet all summer.

And the experience is not without its residual effect, as I have been cleaning and putting away, since I arrived home on Friday.

It was an interesting experience to be a guest in someone’s house for all summer, where one is obliged to put away cookware and empty the dishwasher, to be mindful of a different level of orderliness than that of our own. And I found that I liked the mindfulness, I liked the neat appearance of uncluttered kitchen counters, and a scrubbed and empty sink.

And that is what I am trying to do here for the past four days. Stephen said that he had caught onto my new intention, when I explained to him that I now understood that dish drainers were for drying dishes and not necessarily an ever changing dish shelf.

Today, with cookies (Son Zac is in residence for the next five weeks, while working on a feature film, and that homemade cookie mix from at least three Christmases was crying to be used up), onion broth (I never did use those cute colored mini onions, and it was a choice between the compost heap and onion broth.), white zucchini pizza, zucchini-feta pancakes (to freeze for later use) on the To Do List, the dish washing was rather relentless. (Even though Stephen asked folks to pick the zucchini when he was away for some 10 days, driving me back from Florida, there were some that got away, and the large mini baseball sized zucchini yielded some 10 cups of grated zucchini.)

As I step more fully into a life where we grow more of our own food and live mindfully on these acres, I can see that there is a busyness that is necessary to achieve the intention. And for now, it feels like a coming home, like a coming back to myself.

Thirty-two years ago, I used to make my own bagels, sprouted wheat bread, and my own clothes. I used to have a lot of people to dinner and always cleaned my house in preparation for their arrival.

I don’t know what happened in the meantime. Some might say that I became more relaxed, that I became okay with messiness. But I am unsure that that would be the proper analysis. More apt is that I became tired and a bit overwhelmed with all that was to be done and forgot that my priority is my relationship with myself and my surroundings. For better or for worse, I think that is most easily manifest in how we keep our spaces and how me make time for our family life and relationships.

I know that I am extremely privileged to have this cooling down period to get ready for the next part of my life. But I wonder, isn’t it possible to be focused on that one thing that we want more than anything else. For me, it is a mindful life, of living and creating a calm, peaceful and mindful experience no matter what is happening.

It reminds me of the advice that I gave L. when he was faced being released from the hospital, with nowhere to go, no money, no job, family or friends, that the scope of his situation was too vast to grasp and that the only thing he could do was to find the one thing that was the most important. If he could hold onto that, the rest would fall into place.

For him, it was a powerful addiction that he needed to resist. For me, it’s more simple: I need to treat myself and my surroundings with the same amount of respect that I would if I were a guest.

In one sense, we are all guests on this precious earth. And our lives are actually one holiday, or holy day, after another.

Hope and recovery?

2010-08-01T19:53:00.003-04:00

My day at the hospital starts with morning report, where the night chaplain explains what has happened the night before. I was intrigued when I saw the name of one of my patients on his list, and shocked when he said that he had coded and died.

When I had entered the patient’s room some 12 hours before, he was eating his breakfast and had offered me oatmeal and applesauce. I teased that he wasn’t offering to share his eggs. His wife, perched cross-legged on the bed, joyfully announced that he had had his best night yet. We talked about when they would return to their home.

The night chaplain had said it had been a tense three hours as the patient suddenly become unresponsive and could not be revived. His daughter had been with him, and was feeling remorse that she had sent her mother to the nearly motel, where they had been staying. Totally distraught, she could not drive the family car to pick her mother up, and the chaplain had to arrange for a taxis to bring the grieving wife to the bedside. The family had been in the hospital for 12 days and they and I had been celebrating this man’s apparent recovery from pancreatic surgery as a miracle. No one expected that he was cured, but it was expected that months had been added to his life.

“God led us to this place,” his wife has told me, following the successful surgery.

And all I can think of now is how do you recall a miracle. How can you celebrate survival from the surgeons’ scalpel only to code an die on the way to recovery? How does one find meaning in that?

Ironically, I had been thinking about death on the way into work that morning and come to the conclusion that life and death were a continuum, and that whatever happened would be okay in the end. I think now of my patient’s teenaged son the day before his father faced surgery. Teary and worried, he cried with the thought that he could lose his dad. I can only imagine his anguish tonight.

I had visited with the family some five or six times, generally playing my harp and singing, which calmed and relieved the patient's anxiety and pain. One day, when that I had entered the room, the son was lying in the bed as his dad was in the chair. I remember how happy he was with my confusion. I only wish I had had him walk me out of the room that day. It was an opportunity to check in with how he was doing. But I hadn’t taken it and was seemingly content with the family telling me how much they appreciated my visits and how much the patient loved the music that I offered.

I wonder now whether I was really doing good ministry, or whether I simply wanted to indulge the vision that we were all part of a miracle and that there was always hope and recovery.

We were all in collusion on that one, and I wonder where we go from here.

Dual Realities

2010-07-27T06:40:00.001-04:00

I am feeling comfortable with my patient visits. On call on Friday, Saturday and Monday, with no morning classes, there was a lot of time for orders and a lot of time for other visits.

I like the role of chaplain. I enjoy the patients. I enjoy learning about their medical challenges, what keeps them going, what brings them down. I am developing my own style. I listen closely to people, initially echoing back what they are saying. Sometimes I paraphrase and check out if I have done it correctly. I move the conversation and thoughts along. I celebrate the small steps that they are making. I honor their pain and troubles. I point out dualities in their stories.

One woman told me yesterday, “I have always been the rock for my family, I have always supported them through their crisis, and now I can’t do that anymore. A little while later, she said, “I’m just thinking about all of the gifts that God has given me that I haven’t used, and I realize that I’m just so selfish.” I reminded her to the two thoughts and asked her how she reconciled them. She said that she didn’t know. I think I probably responded, “Isn’t that the way with most situations, everything is itself and its opposite. “I have no doubt that you have always been the rock of your family helping them through crisis, and that you have gifts that were given to you by God and that you have not taken full advantage of. Can you think of ways that you might want to take advantage of some of those gifts now?

People have been responding favorably. They seem to enjoy the probing questions. It’s so amazing to me that they would talk so earnestly with a stranger.

A man on Saturday was taking himself to task about this worry. He quoted scripture that said that he shouldn’t worry. I sympathized with him that he had a lot on his plate in terms of his medical condition, and noted that his situtation was made even more difficult because his worry was seen as a crisis of faith. We talked about how in God’s world we don’t have to be perfect and how scripture points us to a more Christlike existence that asks us to always be striving toward a goal to be forgiving and trusting in God, but not one that demands that we always achieve that goal. It’s the striving that’s important, we agree.

Many of the lessons explored in the patient’s rooms are ones that I need to take to heart. I don’t know if that because it’s a collaborative process, or whether, like that woman who was the rock, that I, too, am selfish at my core. “Aren’t we all,” I probably replied when she made the remark. In my understanding of the world, we are selfish and we are generous all in the same moment. It is the yin and yan of life, of human existence.

I think that’s one of the reasons I like this hospital work. It’s all pretty real here. People are stripped of their possessions, their clothes, their familiar surroundings. They, and we who walk with them, maneuver in the realm of the spirit, in the region of the heart, in the midst of high tech reality. It is the ultimate duality: it is complex and simple this healing of body and heart. The lessons and the healing are personal and universal.

I am learning about all that I don’t know. I am seeing that I know what I need to know. I am becoming differentiated from my emotions. I am learning about choice. I am seeing that we have to deal with what we have to deal with and that sometimes that dealing is surrendering to the situation, sometimes it’s diving in.

I am learning how different people are and how alike we are at the same time.

These are things that I share with the patients I visit. We fill each other’s days and for that, we are both grateful.

Legacy of the Heart

2010-07-23T06:16:00.003-04:00

I was disappointed that D. had been discharged from the hospital. I wanted to give her “Legacy of the Heart,” a book by Wayne Muller about the spiritual advantages of a painful childhood. If anyone could use the soothing voice which tells us that we can use painful childhood experiences to grow more fully into ourselves, it was this 18-year-old. With no money, abandoned by her mother as a young teenager, she was proud that she was the first of seven children to graduate from high school.

Joyfully, and a bit defiantly, she told me that she graduated at the top of her class. She had been accepted in a university and was on her way to the first of five degrees that she wanted. The only thing that stood in her way was a strange pain in her abdomen. Perhaps it was a problematic gall bladder, the medical staff didn’t know.

She also knew that she had closed her heart and that it prevented her from getting close to people and would hold her back.

“How can I trust having been through the experiences I have lived through?” she asked.

We laid my Reverie Harp, a small lap harp that produces a beautiful sound no matter how you touch it, on her chest. I asked her to strum the instrument, feel the vibrations in her body and just listen playfully to see if it spoke to her.

She was silent and thoughtful, her fingers brushing the strings gentle. After a few minutes, she stopped, smiled and opened her eyes.

“Well,” I said, “Did you hear anything?”

“It said, “Listen to your heart, your heart is trustworthy,” she replied.

“Wow!” I said.

We talked about intention and affirmation and how it can be helpful to find a four or five word positive phrase and repeat it over and over. She liked the idea.

“I’m going to write this down,” she said. “So I don’t forget it.”

We worked on another affirmation, which she wrote down as well.

I am glad that when I promised her that I would see her again, I said that it was contingent on her being in the hospital. I am glad that I was true to my word.

She had trusted me with her story, her emotions, and had opened her heart to me. She had also given me her wisdom that when we don’t know what to do or how we are going to do it that we can listen to your heart and know that it is trustworthy.

In our moments together, she found her own way to use her painful childhood. She named her own legacy of the heart, and with it I am sure she will be empowered to accomplish all that she desires.

Discerning my tears

2010-07-17T15:45:00.003-04:00

My mother tells me that I cried for the first two years of my life. She says that all I wanted was to be held, and being a infant in the mid 1950s, when baby rearing protocol insisted on a feeding, changing and putting a baby down in the crib, I cried most of the time. At the age of two, I simply stopped.

I cry a lot still.

I cry in joy, I cry in sorrow. Sometimes I grieve.

Generally my crying is not a prolonged affair, a tear here and there, a quiet sob, which racks my body with four or five involuntary utterances. I cry in sympathy with others, holding and responding to emotion that is not even mine.

Sometimes I clearly understand what I am crying about, sometimes I do not. And I feel an underlying expectation that I know what I am crying about. In our group sessions, when someone starts to cry, the question is often asked, “what are those tears about?”

When I answer, “I don’t know,” I feel that I am admitting that I don’t fundamentally know what is going on. I feel inadequate in the explanation. I judge myself for not knowing what I am feeling. I imagine others around me silently clucking their tongues and saying, “Geez, she doesn’t even know what she is crying about. How am I supposed to react if I don’t know what is wrong?”

I am coming to realize that maybe nothing’s wrong. Maybe my crying is a coping mechanism, just like coughing clears our throat or our eyes tearing washes away impurities.

I generally shed tears in my individual supervision and yesterday my supervisor commented that there is so much pain that I carry around. I tried to explain that I thought pain and joy happen simultaneously. I related observing a dying patient receiving a phone call from his brother. The patient cried tears of joy, and that joy was tinged with great sorrow. He was so overjoyed to hear from his brother, he was so sad as he anticipated his impending death.

By my observation, he feels this because his days are limited. I feel this duality of joy and sorrow because I am alive and sensitive to my surroundings. In some ways I am coming to realize that I live in a world of emotion, and I surmise that others do as well. But this is not something that is a problem. This is something that is a gift.

Our universe and everything in it, including plants and non-verbal animals, respond to emotion. Not surprisingly, there are some noetic scientists who put forth the concept that the fabric of the universe is a hologram that responds to intention and emotion.

I understand that in our world of stoic and intentional distance holding up emotion as positive runs contrary to the internalization of dispassionate living as facing a sober reality. But I believe that if we were actually to understand that our emotions are buffeting us around, whether we acknowledge them or not, we would find that we have more choice in our reactions.

In chaplaincy, we are urged to connect heart to mind and compassion with assessment. We are being asked to participate in the peeling away of defenses, to become in touch with our emotions and our past hurts so that we can know ourselves better and by extension be better ministers.

I have found in this process that I have a great capacity to feel. And for that I am grateful.

A second chance

2010-07-13T06:17:00.002-04:00

My day began and ended with families where the second chance for living was coming to an end.

In the first visit, a woman in her late 50s asked to fill out a Living Will and a Healthcare Surrogate form. She was realistically preparing for open heart surgery, said that she had almost died three times in the last year, and was thankful for decades of remission from Hotckins Lymphoma. At the time, she said, the chemo-therapies had not been so gentle and all of the medicines from that time, which she recognized gave her 30 years of living, were the cause of her current medical crisis, and could kill her this week. She said she was desensitized to the drama of it, and simply wanted to make sure that if she was put on a respirator due to her impending surgery, that it not go on for more than three months.

“I will not be a Terry Schiavo,” she said simply.

She had an amazing sense of balance, and was not angry or seemingly sad at the prospect of her death.

“I learned that each day is a gift,” she said.

The visit at the end of the day was not so cheery. Here gathered a grieving family, as their husband, father and uncle, lay dying of liver failure. He had been a transplant success story for some 15 years and, up until last week, was on the list to receive a new liver. But had he had taken a turn for the worst, and his liver and his kidneys were failing. He was on comfort measures only, and according to the palliative care technician would probably die within 24 hours.

The room was darkened and his wife and his sisters were weeping. Undoubtedly, their grief would carry them to gratitude at some point down the road. They would remember the joy of the 15 extra years that a transplanted liver had made possible. But today, it was about loss and sorrow and saying goodbye.

There is no real comparison between the first and the last visit of the day. Grief and reconciliation are not constant. There is no right way or wrong way to let go of life and loved ones. There is no sure way to maneuver through our painful experiences.

It is this lesson that seems most poignant to me at this stage of CPE: how important it is to meet people where they are with compassion and a curiosity to learn more about the what’s really happening for them. It’s not about fixing the situation; it’s not about providing comfort; it’s about walking together through hard and at the same time ordinary human situations.

Wayne Muller, in “The Spiritual Advantages of a Painful Childhood,” explained that we all want to consider ourselves extraordinary – we want to see our problems, our struggles, as being amazingly more complex and difficult that anyone else’s. He comments that we make ourselves significant by our magnitude of our troubles. Really, though, “none of us is more special than anyone else. Each of us was given a particular combination of wounds, gifts, talents and imperfections that merely give texture to the quality of our experience.”

It’s comforting to understand that our lives are ordinary and that we are uniquely ordinary together. Each day we get to face our particular challenges. Each day, we have a second chance at living. While not as dramatic as the two families that I visited with yesterday, we have a second, third and fourth chance to experience the wonder of human life from our very unique perspective.

Ambassador of God

2010-07-10T09:06:00.003-04:00

There's is a awful lot of praying that happens in the Pastoral Care Department and in the work of the chaplains. Our morning and afternoon report begin with a prayer. Most pastoral visits either begin or end with a prayer.

I like prayer, and see it as praying to that small wise essence in ourselves. Another Unitarian Universalist chaplain colleagues describes praying for another as connecting his wise essence in himself, to the wise essence in the other. He prays across to the other person, as opposed to up to an outside entity.

Many of the prayers offered during our routine reports are "He" focused, complete with "You" pronoun that is responsible for all. A common prayer might be: "We thank You, God, for the gifts that You provide for us. Help us to ever grow closer to You and to do Your will in our work today."

It's a cool prayer and I have do a bit of translating to find connection in it. God for me is not a being, it is an ever present life force. God, for me, is the fabric of the universe. And as beings in the universe, that life-force is in all of us, and it plays out in our lives all of the time.

I hear the voice of God within me and that voice guides me always. But it is not a person and "He" does not exercise "His" will. I connect to that life-affirming energy and depending on my connection, it meets me where I am.

It is mystical, it is ancient, it is intimately connected to everything. We function in its presence, and we create its presence by our attention.

I'm happy for this exploration and I'm content with the time that I have to explore this spiritual connection in my life. In our initial orientation, we were told that we were the ambassadors of God. And that being that ambassador, it wasn't a question of our relationship to God, we were to meet people in their relationship to God.

Interesting though, in order to meet people where they are, you have to know where you stand.

Redemption and forgiveness

2010-07-08T06:56:00.001-04:00

I asked a patient the other day about his concept of redemption and forgiveness.

“I don’t go to church much,” he replied to me.

“I’m not asking about church,” I said. “I want to know whether you think that there is redemption and forgiveness in the world. Because what happens next in your life depends on whether you think you can be redeemed and forgiven.”

We had seen each other in the elevator, and I had been asking someone else how they were doing, or how the patient they were calling on was going. Some of the most effective chaplaincy work is done relating to people in the corridors and the elevators.

“Are you a chaplain?” he asked. “Can you come and visit with me?”

I wrote down his room number on my client tracking sheet, and his name, just in case, he had said. It was good thinking for him to give me his name because he was unsure whether he had the room right, and that way I could look him up.

He told me that he had taken a bus to Tampa from Connecticut and that he had no money and no place to go. “I really need to talk with someone,” he said.

“I guess so!” I responded, smiled and told him I would see him later.

When I met back up with him, he told me, after I asked a couple of times, (“So you got on a bus in Connecticut and came to Tampa, how was in that you ended up in the hospital?”) that he had been doing cocaine for the past 30 years. He had no family, no place to go, and was looking to finally changed up his life. That’s why he came to Tampa, in one sense to thrust himself into a place which was new and where he knew no one, and where it would be very difficult to get high.

We talked about how huge his situation was: no place to go, no money, no family, no friends. He told me he was embarrassed, shamed. I talked his intention to begin anew; and that what he needed to hold tight to was his desire to not get high. There was this one thought, albeit a huge challenge, that he needed to stay focused on. The rest, I said, would fall into place. And this, holding onto the thought that after 30 years of bad choices he could begin to make new ones, healthy ones, was dependent on his belief in forgiveness and redemption. The forgiveness and redemption of himself.

Wayne Muller, in Legacy of the Heart, writes that forgiveness can set us free and that our fears and our rage, our reaction to our childhoods and our current situations, need to be nurtured and invited, and never pushed away. We have to embrace all of the pieces of ourselves, and in the embrace—of the bad thoughts, the awful experiences, the deep hurt, the betrayal, the abandonment away—a space will open up and a reconciliation can occur. The ancient Greek language, he writes, has two words for time: chronos, meaning chronological time, the measurement of minutes and hours and years and kairos, a sense of time that describes the deeper readiness of things to be born. Kairos is a time when an opening appears and an opportunity for a healing, a redemption and a forgiveness can occur.

Crisis, whether they are medical or whether they are impromptu urging to get on a bus and begin life anew, open a space for kairos and an opportunity for us to recognize and honor the painful pieces of ourselves, to hold ourselves and others in compassion and empathy. And I believe that in exploring our connection to the spiritual values of salvation, redemption, forgiveness, we may get a glimpse of the underlying values that we will hold ourselves and others accountable to and for. This kind of reflection opens up a space that cleanses and becomes expansive so that joy, wholeness and health can come in.

“I saw a lot of chaplains today, in the halls, around the hospital, and I just felt that I wanted to talk to you,” my patient told me.

“You have a lot, an overwhelming reality, in front of you,” I told him. “But you only have to think about one thing,” I made a small circle with my forefinger and my thumb and pointed to it, “which is totally within your control,” I said. “And that is that you are making the change in your life that you desire, a change that you set into motion when you got on a bus in Connecticut.”

In one sense, it’s the choice that we each have, each moment, to be the change that we desire in the world. So often we look to your circumstances, to all of the people who have hurt us, to all of the situations that we have had to face in what is often a terribly unfair world.

And we need to remember one thing: that we are worthy, that no matter the choices that we have made, we have the opportunity to begin anew and achieve the peace and love that we so clearly deserve and desire.

This is what I told my patient from the elevator. This is hopefully why the patient chose me: to affirm and support his new beginning and to offer him unconditional redemption and forgiveness.

May it be so.

Hunkering down

2010-07-05T12:19:00.001-04:00

With nearly one half of my time in my Pastoral Care Education (CPE), I feel compelled to become more serious about using my time well. I am looking to hunker down, I write in my journal. I look up the word to be sure.

Figuratively speaking hunkering down means to apply oneself seriously to a task; which is what I feel I want to do with my learning. However, hunkering also means to crouch down low and take shelter in a defensive position, which is actually what I would like to avoid. In fact, it is important to give up one’s defensiveness and to move from a critical mind to one that is curious. But giving up critical mind is very difficult and abandoning one’s shelter in a defensive position seems like a scary proposition.

In the end, what is required is not to become more serious, but rather to develop more faith.

According to Wayne Muller, in “Legacy of the Heart,” faith is a way of being. It is a spiritual practice, a way of discovering what is reliable and true, a way of expanding trust in our inner wisdom. It is a place inside where we are in compassionate relationship with what is strong and whole within ourselves, where we listen to the still, small voices of our heart and soul.

It’s hard to have faith in still small voices. I think our culture encourages us to have faith in strength, to exude confidence, and to never admit when we don’t know what to do or what to say. CPE teaches that expressing the inability to offer any relief in the face of the pain and the questions, is actually something that is helpful to say. It’s kind of ironic that when you don’t have anything to offer, you can offer that you don’t have anything to offer.

It’s kind of the like the idea of hunkering down and being serious about letting go and being open.

Or put another way, I seriously have to lighten up.

To sacrifice and make sacred

2010-06-28T21:11:00.000-04:00

I have been musing on the word sacrifice since I received it as part of a worship service last Tuesday. The worship leader asked us to contemplate how the word that we picked out of a basket might be a potential route that God wanted us to ponder. Besides the fact that I don’t view God as exerting a particular will over my life, I have been wondering what a thorough thinking of the concept of sacrifice might yield for me.

I have always thought that sacrifice was to lose oneself or to give away something most dear. Looking it up in the dictionary, I find the word comes from a Middle English verb that means "to make sacred." The term is also used metaphorically to describe selfless good deeds for others or a short-term loss in return for a greater gain, such as in a game of chess.

If I, indeed, have to embody sacrifice, I prefer to think about making something sacred than subjugating myself. I think that this is an issue that I struggle with when faced with what I perceive as unfair situations or other forms of painful interactions. I have trouble thinking that I deserve to be treated poorly, or that by letting insult go unnoted, I am accepting that the painful situation is somehow justified.

In reading the first pages of “Legacy of the Heart,” I was intrigued by the concept that the pains of our childhood are healed by our recognition that we are hurting. Rather than saying “I am hurt because of …,” author Wayne Muller writes that it is more helpful to simply acknowledge that we hurt. If we can cut the attachment to the why of our hurt, we are set free from the cycle of suffering.

Today, I spoke to a woman who said that she had been abused as a child and violated as an adult. In order to ease her pain, she had turned to drugs. Now straight and clean, she wondered why life was so hard. Additionally, she understood what she had been running from. She said that she had tried to talk with her abusers but that it only seemed to become more painful. She said she had taken the abuse from her male relatives with the idea that she was saving her younger siblings from the same treatment.

She had sacrificed her innocence; she had made herself victim. As some of the abuse was from family members, she she did not want to deal with other family members about it. Feeling alone, she was fearful that if she was to talk with her family, they would attempt to take action against the victimizer and she thought that she would become even more vulnerable and that her troubles would intensify. She was trying to convince herself that her only option was to forgive and forget, although that was extremely difficult.

We spoke about counseling, which she said had not been helpful so far; we talked about a physical kind of counseling or therapy, noting that we store much of our pain in our bodies. We talked how she might honor and name the pain in her life, and wondered aloud whether embracing the pain, rather than fending it way, or attempting to move beyond it without recognition might yield some sort of peace.

I am wondering if we can truly honor our pain and suffering—not that we deserved it and not that it is a blessing in disguise, but that it is, that it happened and that it has shaped us—whether treasured and grieved, it might be sacrificed.

Transformed and made sacred, perhaps it might release its grip on our psyche so that we may be restored to well being.

The conch shell

2010-06-25T13:22:00.002-04:00

The conch shell sitting on my grandson’s shelf catches my attention and reminds me of the one that I had when I was a child. I am surprised that I didn’t notice it before. I have been living in this room for some three weeks now and remembered my own shell just in this moment. I wonder about the timing.

I notice it just as I am searching for a metaphor, a thought that encapsulates the idea of faith and the notion that if we succumb to grief, it is actually a crisis of faith. C.S. Lewis in “A Grief Observed” muses about his own faith and wonders if it is a house of cards or a rope that seems to remain strong in our minds but becomes questionable and fragile when we find we need its support.

A young woman I visited last week was struggling with a similar question. Racked by an unexplained and undiagnosed pain, she worried most that she was losing her faith. She questioned why God would put her through this pain, and worried that she would cease to struggle to be a good person. I tried to comfort her with the though that our faith, not unlike our muscles, is made stronger by exercise and that questioning God or our faith can often facilitate and stronger connection to it.

I am reminded again of the conch shell that seemingly appeared at just the moment that I needed inspiration and I think about the emerging neuroscience that explores whether human beings are hard-wired for some kind of belief in a reality outside of ourselves. Humans, it seems, are hardwired to find meaning or explain that which cannot be explained.

I muse on the conch shell. Is our faith the outward manifestation of the shell, the temporary house that we pick up and carry for our protection?

Is the shell the symbol of the inner spiral that we travel, making our way down smooth cylindrical pathways, up and down in the dark, before finding our way into the light?

Does it represent the more transient reality of memory, the fleeting connection that we have to our past and to our family?

Or is this faith a mystical experience of inspiration? Is this hard wiring a reminder of the interconnection of wonder and awe as it manifests itself in the universe of being?

In this moment, all of these worlds collide and I am content, touching that which I cannot explain, and feeling connected to my sense of faith. My house of cards, my rope to salvation seems many threaded and strong.

synchronistic-music-making

2010-06-21T19:41:00.000-04:00

Today's post and audio is available at

http://www.uduuf.org/ministersblog/synchronistic-music-making

After hours

2010-06-19T00:58:00.004-04:00

I worked the 2:00 to 10:00 p.m. shift tonight. I enjoyed the morning – and driving without morning commuter traffic.

The pace of the work in the hospital was kind of slow for a while. I helped another chaplain facilitate a group discussion on the psych ward. The seven people who participated, while obviously hovering on the edge of cogent reality and fantasy, had just as much insight and inherent wisdom as my IPR (Intrapersonal reflection) group.

This Intrapersonal Reflection, group work, as it is called, is actually more challenging than visiting the floors or even being witness to traumas. The “red” trauma tonight was a young man who hydroplaned his pickup, sheared off a mailbox while travelling 35 mph and ended up with a shard of glass embedded in his neck. He was lucky, he said, this time, not like in 2006 when he fell three stories off of a roof and spent one month in a coma and six months in the hospital. His mother was driving in from an hour away.

“Does your mother know that you are okay?” I asked him.

“I don’t have any cell reception,” he replied.

When I reported this interaction to the chaplain who was supervising me, he handed me the trauma phone. “It’s a hospital phone,” he said, “It has reception everywhere. Go back and talk with him again and get him to request that he use the phone to call his momma.”

I did as I was told and moments later this grateful son told his mother that he was okay.

This is the work of chaplaincy. This and listening to people talk.

Mostly they talk about how their family doesn’t understand them. They often start the conversation saying that they are having a spiritual crisis; generally that crisis is underpinned with a disconnect to family.

And people want to pray and be prayed for. This evening, I prayed for three people, yesterday it was two. I’m becoming comfortable with it and the last woman I saw tonight told me that she thought my prayer for her was beautiful. I’m not sure that I am talking to the same God that they have in their minds, although I believe that prayer is universal. And in the end, it is the human connection, the desire for love which is inherent in all of us, which we seek through the divine.

Tomorrow I will rest to prepare for an 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. shift on Sunday. The hospital is becoming a routine and while I still walk up and down hallways finding units and rooms, I am slowly finding my way.

Lost in the hallways

2010-06-12T06:29:00.000-04:00

I am lost in the maze of hallways. Trying to find my way to the NICU unit because I heard a Code Blue announced over the loud speaker, I am standing at a crossroads wondering which way to turn. A woman approaches and tells me that the unit is in the opposite direction.

Everything in the hospital is unfamiliar and I have just learned that NICU stands for Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit and that a Code Blue is respiratory failure. It is not imperative that I get there, as the call will go out to the chaplain who is carrying the trauma pager for the day. My instruction in that moment is to take the next hour and a half and visit the units that I have been assigned and ask the nurses whether anyone wants to be seen by a chaplain. Cold calling, my supervisor says. I have already been to two and no one is in need of a chaplain.

The woman, who turns out to be a nurse although she isn’t dressed in the customary dark blue scrubs, asks me about the music case that is on my shoulder. “Is that a harp?” she asks me.

We talk for a few moments about how her daughter played a large pedal harp for eight years and then lost interest. Then she tells me that she has a patient that might really enjoy a bit of music if I have the time.

The invitation feels like a Godsend.

Her patient is a 14-year-old girl who is receiving dialysis.

“She doesn’t look 14,” she tells me in preparation. We enter the unit and approach the bed of a girl who looks about eight. She introduces me and I take out my Reverie Harp.

I sing what is becoming a standard, “The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the light is yellow.” She joins in and after it is done, she suggests that the sun is yellow. We sing again, changing the words up, singing about the colors of fruit and end up naming items around the room. “The bag is blue, the trash is green, and the gown is yellow.” We are playing. I sing the first part of the sentence; she fills in the color at the end. She tells me that she is going to camp. She has gone for the last four years. The morning is spent in dialysis, the afternoon is filled with archery, and arts and crafts, all the usual camp stuff.

I hand her the harp and she strums it, plucking each string and then touching it again, deadening it. She compliments herself on her song. After a bit, it is time for me to go; there is a didactic scheduled with a local priest who will explain what the Catholic ministries do in terms of administering sacraments and how to get in touch with them. I make my goodbyes and as I am walking past the nursing station at the door the nurses thank me and tell that they have never seen the girl enjoy something as much or been so engaged. They invite me to come back.

“She’s here every Monday, Wednesday and Friday afternoon for three hours,” they say.

I ask my supervisor in our afternoon session, whether it is appropriate to develop regular patients. He assures me that it is fine. My group congratulates me on a successful encounter.

When I am leaving following afternoon report, I see a little girl in a wheelchair waiting by the front entrance. I had noticed her before, the small blue wheelchair catching my attention. As I walk by, I look at her and, to my delight, it is the same girl from dialysis. She introduces me to her mother and I sit and show her the instrument. The girl relates the story of the harp, “Her husband made it for her,” she tells me. The two of them discuss an uncle, now dead, who was a good woodworker. She seems 14 in that moment, and it is obvious that she has told her mother about our visit.

The encounter, all of the pieces of it, seems to contain a divine intention.

I cannot really imagine the life of that mother who needs to get her daughter to dialysis three times a week without the aid of a car. But I am becoming aware of the heroic lives that people lead, just below the surface.

I am also aware that when we find ourselves to be lost, we are often found.

Meaningful moments

2010-06-09T06:59:00.001-04:00

We have begun shadowing the resident and staff chaplains as part of our daily schedule. Yesterday, I tagged along with Chaplain N. as she made visits to the palliative care patients. I had brought my Reverie Harp to the hospital; I was planning on calling on a person I had met at the Tampa UU Church who is scheduled to have open heart surgery this week.

I watched how N. washed her hands before and after every visit, sometimes with soap and water, sometimes with foam cleaner from dispensers that are both in the hall and in the patient rooms. I played for B, who is suffering from advanced cancer and was having a bad day. As I sang, N. stroked her hand. She seemed to relax into the soothing sound. As I the simply words, "the sky is blue, the grass is green and the light is yellow," I concentrated on soothing my voice, communicating through sound all the love and good wishes that I could in the moment.

N. closed her eyes and listened. After a bit, the palliative care nurses came into the room to do their assessment. They asked me how they could reach me and I gave them my pager number.

We moved on to the next order, a request from a man who was feeling depressed and had requested a Spanish-speaking chaplain. N. asks him if he wants to listen to some music. The man opts to talk. Our visit is interrupted by a team of two from the psychiatric department. Rather than tell them to come back, N. encourages the man to speak with the doctor, that they can help him and that she will return in the afternoon.

We continue from there. We visit a woman who is in restraints and is agitated. After a bit, when she understands that we will not untie her, she asks her to leave. Another palliative care patients declines an initial visit, saying we should come back when he is further down the line.

We go back to the pastoral care office so that she can file her notes on the visits. It helps with closure, she tells me, categorizing the visit.

Chaplaincy is a series of small interactions that occur throughout the day. Sometimes they are connected, sometime not. The point is to have them all be meaningful. Even if it's someone asking you to leave.

Chaplaincy: working in paradox

2010-06-07T22:02:00.000-04:00

Beyond the 300 hours of clinical work that is expected this summer, there is classroom instruction, individual supervision, peer group work and writing assignments in the form of verbatims and weekly reflections.

The following in my first weekly reflection.

The CPE experience is a multi-layered paradox.

In one sense, it’s about providing spiritual care for a hospital patient that is unconditional and flexible care, geared toward the patient’s needs and desires. At the same time, CPE is a process of opening ourselves to our own learning and using our very individualized human experience as text. It is a training experience to become reflectively analytical and intuitively aware of our limitations, intentions, assumptions and motivation. It is an opportunity to live into our ministerial authority and pastoral role.

And for as much as this relationship is human focused, existing in a human-made environment filled with human-made invention, it is actually a relationship rooted in the spirit world. In all of the situations facing a chaplain and the people we serve, the ultimate question is “Where is God in all this?”

Finding God at a time of crisis and in the midst of suffering and pain, offers another layer of paradox. This paradox forms itself in the question of theodicy or how evil and suffering exist in the realm of a benevolent and omnipresent God.

Not surprisingly, while the situations facing the chaplain are often complex and intense, what is often called for is relatively simple: deep listening and knowing and trusting ourselves.

Of course, deep listening is not something that most average Americans are encouraged to do. Our culture revels in the quick comeback and the ability to respond quickly going so far as to cut someone off before they have finished their thought. We often only listen long enough to formulate our response; sometimes we don’t listen at all.

Our culture also seems to encourage quick analysis that has at its root the blame of others. Rather than being reflective about our own contribution to a situation, we stop our thinking by immediately concluding that everything has happened to us and that we had no role in determining the outcome.

However, the chaplain must be able to look at a situation critically; they must be able to understand their own bias and have a firm understanding of their own personal history. Despite our religious upbringing, it is that history that provides our basic theological framework. Additionally, the chaplain must be willing to meet people in weakness and not in mastery of the situation.

The last bit of paradox is that for as much as a chaplain may be firmly centered in self-knowledge, we are attempting to be in a deep relationship with someone who may not be aware of how their own story colors their impressions and their expectations for a religious leader or chaplain.

On first impression, it is in these currents and undercurrents of paradox that we will need to learn to maneuver. With the pastoral care department, its policies and procedures as the boat, and own hearts as a beacon and map, I imagine we’re in for an exciting voyage through a sea of being: theirs and ours.

Personal story

2010-06-04T06:11:00.001-04:00

The alarm rings and I immediately turn on the light. Yesterday, I fell back asleep for an additional 1/2 hour and felt a bit rushed to be out the door at 7:00 a.m. I have a window of about six hours to get done what I want to get done: spending time with my extended family, daily writing, practicing my harp and getting a bit of exercise. I have scheduled my daily writing for the morning. It might not be the most opportune time to do it as there is limited time between getting up and out the door.

This morning, I need to add the creation of one, two or three learning goals that I will be working on for the summer.

Yesterday we broke into two small groups and shared our personal stories. I started by saying that this is the first time that I was stepping away from my newspaper work, a vocation that I fell into some 32 years ago. There was a timbre of emotion behind all parts of my story as if all of the elements of my growing up were painful and unresolved. We had 20 minutes to relate our story and it wasn't until I got the three minute warning that I included anything from my recent past.

The experience has me feeling a bit vulnerable, although what others shared was equally as revealing. Perhaps it is just that I wasn't in control, that I demonstrated that I haven't created neat little boxes to put these essences of personal development. These are the fodder of our perception in the world, these intimate details, these formative stories. From these deep places, we connect to each other.

And it is in this fertile soil that I will work with my reflection group. With a compassionate supervisor, the five of us will help each other discern when our pastoral care work touches our vulnerabilities and colors our judgment or our action. We will hold each other accountable to work deep in these places of personal story.

The head of the Pastoral Care Department, Rev. Dr. Bill Baugh, spoke with us yesterday and explained the who, what, when and why of pastoral care and ministerial formation. He said the most important thing that we would be doing is musing and wrestling. It's not about pinning someone to the mat, he said, it is about considering a variety of ways to look at a situation: challenging ourselves and our assumptions, trying to discern an additional way of understanding something.

This musing, this wrestling, offers the possibility of an "aha" type of moment. A moment where pieces of story take on different meaning, become a different metaphor.

With that in mind, my storytelling yesterday provided fertile ground, well-tilled loose soil for me to work. I understand now that I will have a garden this summer, not my beloved patch of ground in the Upper Delaware River Valley, but the inner ground of my being.

I am the garden; we are the garden. This is the ground we tend.

Action and Reflection

2010-06-03T06:37:00.002-04:00

A chaplain's day begins and ends in the same way: with a group meeting where the events and the cases of the previous shift are handed off to the next. Yesterday, we hear about TGH David, a young man who was brutally beaten by a neighbor. The perpetrator is still at large, so that the real name of the patient is not recorded.

The young man, who is still a bit confused having received a big injury to his head, says that he does not want a police escort home or to change his locks. The Pastoral Team does not think he understands. I wonder how this young man could possibly get his locks changed as it is already 4:15 p.m. "Can't they just let him stay another day since he still in confused," the team wonders. One of the resident chaplains, who has been working with him over the last few days, says he will see what he can do before leaving for the day.

They discuss that there has been a breach in security with someone in the ER not following all of the procedures of patient confidentiality in giving out the TGH label. The resident says he will research what happened to see that it doesn't happen again. (Generally, it is the Pastoral Care Team member who makes that TGH designation, but procedure is changing to include other staff)

The talk is reasoned, the emphasis is on changing the outcome in the future. The bottom line is care for the patient and the staff.

I am told that this emphasis, the connection of head and heart, the development of empathy and emotionally mature behavior will become ingrained in me this summer and become a part of my personality going forward.

I hope it will be so.

Supervisor W. started his lecture on crisis ministry by telling us the classic story of the five Chinese brothers, quintuplets who each had a unique gift. After a disclaimer about racial sensitivity, he explained how the five brothers, the one who could swallow the sea, the one with the iron neck, the one with the stretchy legs, the one who could not burn, and the one who could hold his breath indefinitely, were able to escape the wrath of an angry village but impersonating each other and using their unique gifts after being unfairly accused of a crime.

All these gifts had a connection to the skills necessary for pastoral care: understanding that there are limits to our capacity (and the people we will serve) to hold the complexity of an unfolding crisis, keeping our head and body connected, keeping our feet on the ground and our head above water, the ability not to be consumed, and to understand that life is the spirit and the breath that connects us all.

At the root of this CPE is the concept of action and reflection. It calls on us to use our experience whatever it may be, successes, mistakes, heartaches, a less than adequate follow through of procedure, and reflect on it and make the necessary adjustments so that the outcome will be the best it can be.

It calls on us to remain always connected to what is going on. As I hear the news that the Gulf oil spill is nine miles from the Florida coast and that the Upper Delaware River tops the list of the rivers in America most endangered, action and reflection seem like tools that are useful beyond pastoral care.

As I ready for the day, I hope that during the morning report, we hear that TGH David had a restful night in the hospital. Otherwise, I have a feeling that we will hear about him again.

Day One

2010-06-02T06:17:00.006-04:00

The afternoon tour of Tampa General Hospital (TGH) lasted two and a half hours. By the end, I and my other eight classmates, the Summer CPE Intern Chaplains, understood that the hospital was huge and did everything there is to do medically in that facility and that we were an important part of the care team. Our minds boggled, we knew that we had maybe seen a 10th of the hospital. We joked that by the time we actually knew our way around, the 12-week training program would be over.

We learned that it is the chaplain's job to help identify the trauma patient's name, find out their next of kin, and call them. We learned that it is our job to arrange for the family to view the body if the person doesn't make it through.

We understood that we were going to be trained to support people who were in a crisis situation both spiritually and emotionally. Personally, we were there to learn how to connect our hearts with our minds and become more firmly rooted in our ministry. Professionally, we were there to provide support and to listen, to be an advocate for the present moment.

Our supervisor, Rev. Celillon Alteme, was warmly greeted every where he went, and as we were introduced as the newest Intern Chaplaincy team, the staff beamed at us and thanked us for the time that we would spend with them.

Our badges, emblazoned with the title Chaplain, open a multitude of wings and doors. And while it seems strange that that invitation is offered to our little of group of nine upon arrival, I can't help but think that hearts open whenever we are in the present moment, available to support each other spiritually and emotionally with deep listening.

First morning

2010-06-01T05:59:00.004-04:00

I think about habits and spiritual practice as I mentally prepare for my first day of a 12-week Clinical Pastoral Education program. At 6:30 a.m., I will be ready to leave my children-in-law's house, jump on the highway and make my way to Tampa General Hospital. After taking husband Stephen to the airport early yesterday afternoon, I took the Route 295 Downtown West exit and found my way to the hospital and back.

My summer here will give me a taste of the world that I have studiously avoided by living my entire adult life in the Upper Delaware: a daily interstate highway commute, parking garages, large organizational entities, a landscape of big box stores and chain restaurants. And it will provide me with a hands-on education in a regional hospital and trauma center of how to pastor to temporary strangers and accompany them through days that they may experience as nightmares.

I'm told it's an intense experience and that I will be able to deal with it if I am careful about my own spiritual practice and mentally letting go of the hospital day's reality when coming home.

While I know that I will miss the details of my life in the Upper Delaware: watching my garden grow, the daily harvest ritual as Stephen and I prepare our summer dinners, the sweetest of the intimate Fellowship Sunday gatherings, the intellectual debate around covering the news at The River Reporter, I am happy for this time of establishing new habits and spiritual discipline, tools that will help me be able to traffic my way through this time, this world time that I might easily describe as a collision between consumerism and corporate hegemony (dominance) and the values of the earth.

There is a balance necessary, a combination of habit and spiritual practice, that might allow us to stay involved and not be swallowed up in disgust and despair. It is a way of being, of taking care, developing habit and spiritual practice, that this new schedule, that this CPE experience might afford me a chance to develop.

This thought, it is enough for now, as it is time to get ready and go.

Reflection rewrite

2010-02-15T20:55:00.001-05:00

Sometimes my writing goes easy, and sometimes it is a torturous affair. Writing a reflection about collaboration this afternoon for an independent study on eco-theology was an experience with the latter. Not only did my musing take what seemed like forever, I am convinced that when it was all said and done, I got caught up with the details and skimmed through what might have been the depth in the exploration.

I concluded that collaboration was staying balanced on ever shifting ground. It is a concoction that is forever changing.

Now, I’m thinking that it’s a bit like playing volleyball. With volleyball, at least the rules that I played by in high school and briefly in an adult league some 16 years ago, is that the ball had to be touched by at least two people, optimally three, before it could be hit over the net. So even if there was good shot that would send the ball to some unguarded spot on the court, you had to set up the ball for another player. You had to risk getting the ball over the net, by placing it where another could hit it.

That’s collaboration. It involves trust in your teammates.

Second, collaboration demands that you put aside your own ego and need for control, accomplishment and distinction. Consider the volleyball shot again. Can you really take credit for the point if your contribution is setting up the spike for someone else to nail down? Not really. You can say that you assisted, but that’s the extent of it. Can you really be assured that your teammate will get the job done? Letting go is a really hard thing to do, especially if you feel you are responsible for the win or for getting the job done.

So collaboration is about teamwork, placing the responsibility on the team as a whole and runs contrary to our postmodern individualist mindset of “I am all I need.” It involves creating a mechanism for shared leadership and working toward a shared vision. It involves trusting the collective process and letting go of the final outcome.

It’s actually pretty scary stuff, and terribly exciting when it works right. It’s exciting when it works right because it is new and uncontrolled. It’s invigorating when it works right because it is at its root an act of creation and innovation. It’s satisfying when it works right because it has the capacity to be complex or amazingly simple in ways that reveals themselves as subtle transformation of thought or action.

It’s amazing when it works right because it’s a paradigm shift that speaks to a more inclusive whole that has at its root space for all. It’s a methodology that, quite simply, we need to practice.

Not unlike redoing or rewriting a reflection.

Snow day

2010-02-10T08:27:00.001-05:00

The predicted snow has begun. I ask Stephen how much will fall, and he tells me that the accumulation for our area will be four to eight inches. It doesn’t seem like much in relation to the big hoopla about the storm’s immensity, although meteorologists are undoubtedly looking at the larger cumulative effects across the Eastern seaboard.

My younger brother grumbles last night on the phone that the Philadelphia school systems announced that they would be closed today before so much as a flake fell. Knowing my brother, I can only imagine that he is annoyed that our technology can, more or less, accurately predict snowstorms, and yet we are not unable, or unwilling, to effectively harness our collective wills or our technology to not continue to harm this precious world that we have gotten pretty good at listening to.

Earlier in the day, I laughed out loud, snorting in a cynical kind of way, at this week’s River Reporter story about how Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection is essentially putting a moratorium on subdivisions due to a new ruling that will safeguard the high quality streams in the area by insisting that developers and homeowners submit a sewage management plan for new construction before permits will be issued. It seems ironic that the environmental agency will allow thousands of natural gas wells to be hydrofracked, each leaving up to 2.5 million gallons of water that has highly carcinogenic substances added to it deep underground, while worrying that human excrement cannot break down in cement holding tanks.

“It’s the DEP way,” a colleague commented.

Undoubtedly, it’s easier to instruct municipalities to figure out a system to require homeowners to pump their septic tanks every three years than it is to balance a nation’s insatiable energy needs and our developed palate for turning natural resources into financial fodder. Undoubtedly, the DEP is relying on the concept that the toxic water is separated from our fresh water sources by thousands of feet of dense rock layers, rock layers some of which get fractured in the process. But unlike sophisticated satellite imagery that now allows our meteorologists to see and track a developing storm, we have no science on hydro-fracking. We actually don’t know what will happen decades to come to our water supplies. Interestingly, we are starting to track how a deteriorating planet affects our psychology and sense of well-being.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/magazine/31ecopsych-t.html

The snow is graceful this morning. The branches on the white pines across the side field are now dusted in white, like a sweet confection. The snow will assert itself on our day today, allowing many of us to stay home and contemplate how we are dependent and interdependent with the nature outside our doors. And while we might think that we gain some measure of control with our accurate predictions, the earth’s system will be the final arbiter of today’s activities, which is, in my mind, makes perfect sense.

Water flowing

2010-01-26T12:14:00.002-05:00

I live on this earth
with humility
for all that I cannot accomplish
in service to its magnificence.

In small pools of
winter runoff
I find places
of reflection
and energy to
mourn and rejoice
in this strange
state of life.

Life and Lemmings

2010-01-05T11:27:00.002-05:00

The natural gas news today is all about investment and money making as the third-largest European energy company has announced that it will spend $2.25 billion to gain new access to deep natural gas fields in Texas. “Total SA, like Exxon (who announced in December they were buying XTO Energy Company in a $41 billion deal), will take what it learns in the U.S. to natural gas fields across the globe.” (Business Week, 1/4/10)

One can only shutter to think of what that could conceivably mean.

The process of hydrofracturing, the technology that these large corporations want in on, uses millions of gallons of clean water, to which resin-coated sand and a mixture of extremely toxic chemicals is added, to fracture the shale some one mile below the surface. Beyond having no way to dispose of the “produced” water and no science as to the affect of leaving anywhere from 30 to 70 percent below the surface, (now with a fractured shale layer between it and the fresh water aquifers), I cannot really imagine what kind of horrors applying this technique around the globe where there may be no regulation in terms of on ground storage of the waste water, and specific cementing of the casing, might unleash. The idea that clean water will be squandered for fuel is crazy.

Lemmings running off the cliff is the image that comes to mind.

Theoretically lemmings don’t actually commit mass suicide. According to some very quick Internet research, they are solitary beings that only get together for mating and then go off by themselves. (There may be more similarities than we know!) Not surprising, they breed quite rapidly and often have large population swells. As food gets scarce, they migrate, sometime jumping into the Norwegian waterways where they live to seek out new sources for food. Some aren’t able to make the crossing and, with their demise, the population stabilizes.

In the woods on New Years Day I was struck by the life apparent in the dead standing trees. In that moment, I understood life as a constant that exceeded human activity. It was simply a gift to experience it, however long or short. Each day, each moment, was its own opportunity that needed no other to support it. Life would continue, always.

I remember that as today's news asserts that money is the final reality. That and the myth of the lemmings, rushing to their own demise.

Here's hoping

2009-12-31T18:45:00.000-05:00

Outside, there is the sound of thunder.

And while I always enjoy a good thunderstorm, I wonder about what cold air is hitting what warm air at 6:20 p.m. on December 31. My first thought, it about global warming; my second thought is that the nearby ski area is shooting off fireworks and it’s not thunder at all. Either thought is discouraging and interconnected to my basis premise that we need a new vision for 2010.

As a child, my first experience with fireworks was arrows of light being shot off from barge in the middle of the Navesink River in Red Bank, NJ. The soundUpon moving to Morristown, in my pre-teen years, I was shocked and disappointed to see fireworks shot off in a field. There was no reflection on the water, there was not water sound, lapping up against the pier. And by the time I moved to Narrowsburg, and could once again experience the explosion and colors reflected in the waters of the Upper Delaware, my awareness of environmental degradation spoiled my enthusiasm for their display. Burning up chemicals, for sheer enjoyment no long held the same allure. In fact, it was a proof point for me that we humans have no idea the havoc that we cause to our planet for our entertainment and lifestyle.

It is this awareness, and the thought that I simply cannot become a doomsday maniac that I consider this last day of the decade and say hello to 2010. It’s going to be tricky to wake up, see the world for what it is: a culmination of centuries of belief in progress and growth that is imploding on itself, and still find wonder and awe in daily living.

It’s going to be tricky to not become strident but rather continue to work to bring disparate voices together. As the stakes become higher, and the challenges become much more personal how will we, individually and collectively, rise to be our best selves.

I hope to continue to embrace growth. I hope to learn to keep myself in control, to become more introspective and retrospective at the same time. And I hope that projecting this peace and awareness that I will expect from myself will encourage others around me to the same.

And I hope to meet you there.

Lessons of lemon bars

2009-12-19T13:13:00.002-05:00

Suspending the menorah gently above the fire box in the wood furnace, the last remnants of the beeswax, which had provided light for eight nights, dripped into the fire below. A quick flame leaped up as each drop fell on the burning wood. Carefully handling the hot metal, I removed the last thin coating of wax with a paper towel. I ignored the timer signaling that the bottom layer of the lemon bars was ready to take from the oven, thinking that an extra couple of minutes would make no discernible difference.

Returning upstairs, I was surprised to find the crust much darker than what it is supposed to be. I understood what had happened when I saw that the oven temperature was set for 450, instead of the prerequisite 350 degrees. (The temperature gauge on my antique cookstove is on the side, and it is generally set for 350 degrees.) In hindsight, my misstep was not letting the bars go a few minutes longer, it was that I hadn’t checked the temperature setting. Having not changed it; I didn’t think to check whether it was set for what it always usually is.

After lowering the gauge, pouring the lemon custard layer on the over-browned crust, I turned my attention back to the menorah, still warm, but not hot, from the fire. I polished it carefully, sitting quietly on the couch in the living room with one of my grandmother’s kitchen towels. The red and white linen cloth, embroidered with initials and made ready for her wedding in the early 1920s, is in remarkable great shape given that it is nearly 90 years old. It had remained unused in her linen closet for nearly 75 of those years.

My grandmother gave me the towel sometime in the mid 1990s, as I helped her sort through a closet full of linens, complete with belted ties, which she had brought by boat from Berlin in 1938. She was getting ready to move from the apartment that had been her home for over 50 years to a retirement complex in California. She had left Germany, with her furniture, her linens and two young daughters after reading Adolph Hitler’s book. She came to New York to start a new life. She never talked much about being Jewish, and I, being raised Unitarian Universalist, and perhaps because she was not much of a cook, have no connection to Jewish cuisine or Jewish tradition.

Some years back, I was given a menorah. And while I have celebrated the Festival of Lights off and on, this year the tradition of lighting the candles and setting aside of few minutes to reflect has been an important part of this past week. It was precisely because the activity had been a chance to touch reverence in the midst of everyday life, that I had been prompted to figure out how to create closure.

Once polished with the last of the wax removed, I carefully wrapped the menorah in paper and placed it, all shiny and ready, into the bureau in the pantry for storage until next year.

I’m not much for holidays these days; the lemon bars being the first of the holiday baking. Caught in a strange place of wanting to avoid all connection to our consumer world, I am unsure how to reconnect with holiday spirit when it isn’t centered on energy consuming decorations and abundant gift giving, although the overly browned lemon bars might give me clue.

One, we can make no assumptions that the details of our life will be as they always have been and we do well to periodically check the temperature of our relationships with all those beings and non beings that we encounter in our lives. Two, we can be surprised and comforted by reviving or creating traditions and time in reflection. And three, we find meaning when we look for meaning.

May your day be filled with holiday spirit and meaning.

Incremental changes

2009-12-14T13:08:00.002-05:00

I’m not sure if I like this new routine, but I have been starting my day reading emails with my morning cup of coffee. It used to be that I would ponder the day's realities by gazing out the bedroom window into the deep white pines across the side field. Now, my first thoughts are filled with national and local natural gas articles, the compilation handiwork of Upper Delaware Council Senior Resource Specialist Dave Soete.

These daily missives cover the gamut of natural gas drilling news throughout the country. I scroll through them, sometimes reading deeply, sometimes just getting a flavor. Lately, Dave’s begun to add reader comments to the news articles and I get a glimpse of the schism that exists between those who are in favor and those who are against. Most often there is little middle ground and I find myself reacting from my own bias.

The articles has gotten repetitious as more news sources are picking up the story and there’s an extra step in figuring out what’s new and what’s a rehash of old information. I’ve been amazed at how the overall story is changing, and feel rewarded for the time spent when I see something new and comprehend something differently.

This morning, while reading a piece on the Hewitt State Forest in Cortland County that has been leased, I realized that the state, hungry for dollars, is doubly invested in gas drilling moving forward. Not only will it get revenue, theoretically, in regulatory fees and taxes, the state itself, actually all of us, is a leaseholder. Of course, I already knew this, but what I didn’t understand was the amazing conflict of interest that is created by this dual role. This was further complexified by another story relating a lack of communication between the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and the Town of Dryden over the issuance of an assessment that there would be no environmental consequences for a natural gas well within the town’s borders. The municipal officials wondered how the DEC could have come to that assessment, without talking to them.

In this scenario of complexities, the two-time investor has now also become the regulator.

Incrementally, our landscape is changing as we become further and further immersed in our consumptive use of resources and information, both as a society and as individuals.

It used to be that I would ponder the realities of the day by gazing out the bedroom window into the deep white pines across the side field with my cup of coffee. Now, my early morning thoughts are filled with national and local natural gas drilling articles.

Onset of winter

2009-12-12T07:40:00.001-05:00

I don’t know how it happened, but it has become winter.

Just a week ago, I was watching the sumac leaves turn from yellow to deep red and the golden leaf laddened Bradford pear trees on Bridge Street in Narrowsburg become less dense with each passing day. Now the ground is white, and more times than not when I look out the window, a small snowflake drifts downward.

I don’t mind the coldness, probably because I’m simply not dealing with it, ensconced in my warm house, bundled when I walk from the house to the car.

I’m isolated, caught up in my own world, my own individual journey. I imagine that you are too. Your world might not be one of final papers on the theology of consumption or considering what multi-generational ministry looks like. It might be one where you’re figuring out your relationship to the winter holiday season, or figuring out how you will pay for heating expenses with shrinking resources.

While we’re not functioning in a vacuum, we are revolving in our own separate worlds.

I ponder this highly individualist ethic and consider this post Enlightenment concept that has stripped us all of understanding the import of community values. At the same time, I sense a shift in people’s thinking and the beginning of thinking of the whole.

The shift seems to have manifested rather suddenly, much like the advent of winter this year,. Although I know, it’s all part of an ancient and organic cycle, or layers of cycles, that I can be in tune with, once I get outside my individual world.

Sweet confection

2009-12-02T18:20:00.005-05:00

The bottom layer of my crème de menthe bars are puffy when I take them out of the oven. But, with no leavening agent, I know that they will flatten right out when cooling. And, with crème de menthe bars, this is a good thing because they are a three-layer confection, with a moist (flat) chocolate cake layer on the bottom, crème de menthe flavored icing (hence the name) in the middle, and a chocolate frosting as the final and decadent layer. Cut into neat tri-layered squares, they have become a staple in my winter holiday cooking.

And while I could tell a story about acquiring the recipe from an old Woman’s Day magazine, inherited from Lillian Hector in my early days in Narrowsburg, and how I lost the recipe when my house burned down in 1986 and recovered it again when the bars were on a holiday table some eight years later, today I want to talk about leavening, how we puff up with the heat of baking, or in the heat of passion, but how if we have no inner core, or leavening agent as it were, we will not stay puffed. We will not be leavened.

And, at this time where the news is confusing at best, the point that I want to make is that leavening, or some substance of faith, is necessary for our well being.

And in the spirit of not knowing any answers and, specifically, not knowing answers for you, I simply ask you to think about what it is in your life that, when mixed with heat, causes you to rise and to stay risen.

Of course, I can imagine that if you consider yourself to be like the bottom layer of the rich chocolate layer of crème de menthe bars, you might argue that you don’t have to be puffed, you don’t have to find an inner core that stands on its own. You function in harmony with green icing and sweet chocolate confection. And that might be true, too. We all have our part to play.

And with that in mind, I then pass on the wisdom of it's “good to know.” It fits in with the philosophy of the early Greeks and the late Dr. Howard Patton who always told me “know thyself.”

That and passing on this recipe of Christmas treats, lest I might lose it again, undoubtedly, will get us through our day.

Crème De Menthe Bars
Cake layer:
1 cup sugar
1 cup flour
½ tsp. salt
½ cup butter
1 tsp vanilla
3 eggs
1 16 oz. can of Hersey’s syrup
Cream butter and add all ingredients except flour. Mix until well blended. Add flour, mix until smooth. Pour into greased 13 x 9 inch pan and bake for 30 minutes. Cool completely.

Mint Layer
Cream ½ cup butter. Sift 2 cups of powered sugar. Add to butter. Blend. Add 2 tablespoons of crème de menthe. Spread on the cooled cake.

Chocolate frosting
Melt 6 oz. of chocolate chips, (1 cup) with 6 oz. of butter. Cool for 10 to 20 minutes and spread on top of the mint layer.

Cut into small squares and enjoy.

Grateful

2009-11-25T20:03:00.003-05:00

I have a distant memory of having to create a Thanksgiving service, perhaps it was last year, and feeling as if I wasn't sure that I had anything that I felt actively grateful for. Of course, it was an extremely privileged point of view because just the fact that there is no one shooting at me or dropping bombs on my house is cause for gratitude.

We forget, most of the time, that we are among the privileged.

Even as we face devastating news, we are among the lucky.

Even as we try to juggle home, school, work and more work, we have choice. We are not starving; we are not being physically accosted in the moment -- in the moment. In the moment, we are relatively safe, even if we are not happy.

But, this year, I am feeling happy. And grateful. I am feeling amazingly blessed that I have the opportunity to explore that which I want to give to the world. I feel blessed that there are things that I uniquely can see and do and feel that are uniquely mine to see, do and feel.

It might almost be silly. But as I see my limitations and live the realities of my life, I see possibilities that are mine to take, mine to utilize, mine to explore as I make my way being uniquely me.

Uniquely me, who doesn't quite fit with the ways of the world. Uniquely me, who has never quite fit in with the ways of the world. Uniquely me, who seeks to take the ways of the world and infuse them with transformational love.

In this moment, I am grateful for all those who cherish my unique being in the world.

Thank you.

Readying for Ottawa

2009-11-10T23:05:00.002-05:00

I'm off tomorrow for the Unitarian Universalist Ministers' Association Convocation in Ottawa. The five-day event will be chock full of UU ministers, candidates and aspirants for the ministry. With a bevy of workshops, the time spent will give me a good indication of whether I feel comfortable in the company of working ministers.

As I aspire at this point in time to be among their numbers, I'm interested in how it will go, how it will feel. Up to this particular point in time, I have always felt a bit out of place among the ministers of the world, assessing them to be more concerned with the career aspects as opposed to the community service aspects of the role.

Still, I am excited by the opportunity to study in the moment, and look forward to seeing my Starr King School of the Ministry colleagues. I am rooming with a highly accomplished musician and I have packed all of my musical instruments and musical recording equipment with the idea that we will have moments to collaborate, record and orchestrate together.

With studded snow tires newly installed today, my car is ready to go, the check-engine light finally put to sleep with a new sensor. I pack cold sesame noodles, four-grain salad, cheese, salami, bread, bananas to get me ease the pressure of eating out all of the time.

It is a truly privileged life that I lead. And I am thankful for all who support me on this journey.

Rainy day morning thoughts

2009-10-28T10:41:00.002-04:00

There is something highly attractive in this morning’s cool rainy weather. The diffused light enhances the golden color of the maple tree outside my window. The sounds of water falling to earth, dripping off the roof, light and deep, form a symphony. From the patter to the drips to a rhythmic thumping of drops collecting and then falling, there is a peace and a diverse natural order. Somewhere in the side yard, a bird calls out.

I sit, propped up in bed, my laptop invisibly connected to the World Wide Web and read the variety of articles and email alerts that come into my inbox. Sandwiched underneath the relentless headlines is a pervasive theology of consumption and privilege that is contrasted by the free-falling rain. I have become sensitive to these null messages where concern for the other and for the earth is discounted in the face of the economic realities that we face.

I interpret the political maneuvers in Congress about health care reform and big oil company Chesapeake’s announcement in today’s Times that they will not drill in the New York City watershed as strategic moves of a selfish body that are designed to further one’s position and opportunity for corporate gain.

I do research for a paper, “Theology of Consumption,” that I will write as a final requirement for an online class on Unitarian Universalist theology. In it, I will use the exploration and extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus Shale, the huge formation of shale that runs from West Virginia, much of Pennsylvania and into the Southern Tier of New York, as a case in point and explore how it relates to the UU principle that affirms the importance of the interdependent web of existence.

I gather resources including Sallie McFague’s “Searching for a New Framework” in which she espouses that our current environmental crisis creates a need for a paradigm shift from an anthropocentric view of God and our place in the world to a cosmological interpretation and way of being in the world that supports the flourishing of all life. She concludes that changing this emphasis, actually embodying our theology of respect for all life in all that we do, is a form of activism.

My to-do list, which includes a one-page summary of said aforementioned paper, will prevent my attendance at the first public session where the New York State Department of Conservation (DEC) is presenting its proposed supplemental guidelines for the extraction of natural gas to the public. I had wanted to attend so that I could experience first hand the context in which the DEC places this activity and to have the opportunity to hear the various positions, pros and cons and in betweens, held by members of the community.

In a perfect world, I would been prepared with a compelling statement about process theology where we become transformed by the process of our exploration of the issues and how deep listening and not creative positioning yields best management practices and environmentally and socially responsible behavior. Like listening to the rain and simply noting the different sounds that make up the symphony, holding the realities of those whose differ from our point of view, articulating our common interest to not harm the earth or our communities, gives us the opportunity to underpin this potentially life-threatening activity and exploitation to something that is life affirming.

I am hopeful that that dialogue and process begins tonight.

Process theology and fog

2009-10-26T20:41:00.009-04:00

There is a layer of fog that lays over the river as I return from an all day meeting in Pennsylvania on Saturday. Crossing the Roebling Bridge and turning north along the river, the roads are damp, and the orange-red-yellow landscape glistens. I surmise that the river is cooler than the air.

I always like that fog happens, and see it as a magical manifestation that occurs when one reality meets another. Cold meets warm or warm meets cold and something physical is manifested. That same concept was introduced in my reading this week about process theology.

In Henry Nelson Weiman’s article called “The Human Predicament,” he writes that “Jesus engaged in intercommunication with a little group of disciples with such depth and potency that the organization of their several personalities was broken down and they were remade. They became new men, and the thought and feeling of each got across to the other.

“It was not merely the thought and feeling of Jesus that got across. That was not the most important thing. The important thing was that the thought and feeling of the least and lowliest got across to the other and the other to him.

“Not something handed down to them from Jesus but something rising out up out of their midst in creative power was the important thing. It was not something Jesus did. It was something that happened when he was present like a catalytic agent. Something about this man Jesus broke the atomic exclusiveness of those individuals so that they were deeply and freely receptive and responsive each to the other. He split the atom of human egoism, not by psychological tricks, not by intelligent understanding, but simply by being the kind of person he was, combined with the social, psychological, and historical situation of the time and the heritage of Hebrew prophecy.

“But this was not all; something else followed from it. The thought and feelings, let us say, the meanings, thus derived by each from the other, were integrated with what each had previously acquired. Thus each was transformed, lifted to a higher level of human fulfillment. Each became more of a mind and a person, with more capacity to understand, to appreciate, to act with power and insight, for this is the way human personality is generated and magnified and life rendered more nobly human.”

Oh, if we could only remember that when we are arguing with another, insisting, re-articulating our own position, over and over again. Even when we are being semi-respectful, “I understand that what you are saying is …. We generally follow it up with, "But, what I’m saying is…”

Couldn’t we just be like the fog and allow our warm air to meet another’s cold air and have a mist occur because we’re listening? Couldn’t our cold air meet another’s warm air and actually develop more capacity to understand, to appreciate, to act with power and insight?

I think of this deep emphatic listening, this ability to hold another's point of view, as I think about gas drilling.

I attended a panel discussion and reception last Friday afternoon at Grey Towers, and I repeated over and over again to anyone and everyone who would listen that something magical, something creative, and something transformational could occur if we could actually hold the other's position.

The gas company representatives and others said they liked the idea. "Let's draw a line on a piece of paper," one Hess representative said. "I'll list my concerns on one side, you list yours on the other." He was speaking to DRBC Executive Director Carol Collier. She thought the process would be a good one.

I suggested there would be more lines on the piece of paper; I volunteered to be the scribe.

Now there are some who would tell you that someone with an agenda will tell you anything to have their agenda come to fruition.

But I ask you, if having things go better means holding another's truth close to you, so close that you become transformed, would you be willing?

It's amazing how scary that feels. Especially when the stakes are so high.

Especially when the stakes are so high, how can we not try?

Early snow

2009-10-15T23:55:00.008-04:00

Reports of an early snowfall motivate me to put away garden tools and get the space ready for next season. As I pull dead plants and the plot begins to open up again, I am reminded of early July when everything showed itself to be planted too close. Now with a single row of broccoli in the large open space and some carrots, beets, leeks and Brussels sprouts in the raised beds, not surprising, there is plenty of room.

Back in the house, just as the first flakes start to fall, I roast the hot peppers that Stephen had harvested last week. We have been growing this particular variety of “salsa” pepper for some years now. In the past, we found that the raw pepper had a kick but lost some of its hotness with cooking.

This year, the peppers remain hot, no matter the cooking time. Stephen is delighted and can hardly keep a grin off of his face whenever we talk about it. I, on the other hand, liked the flexibility of varying the hotness of a dish by determining when the peppers were to be added.

I roast the peppers slowly and thoroughly, thinking that they might mellow and lose some of their fire. I remind myself that I am making them for Stephen and that my desire for a tender hotness is not the main objective. I am surprised, even with intention, how challenging it is to remove my own likes and dislikes, challenges and motivations as I move through my activities.

I wear a pair of yellow rubber gloves and am aware that the room is filling with a thin haze of smoke as the pepper sizzles slightly against the hot cast iron skillet. I think about natural gas exploration and make a connection between potentially harmful fumes being released by the peppers and being released with the drilling.

It’s not the same thing, of course. I open the door to mix in a little fresh air, something that will not be possible if this region becomes industrialized as planned.

This week, there is news that a Sullivan County economic development agency has new leadership who promise to be more aggressive about advocating for development projects despite environmental objection. The newly elected board chair is quoted as saying that all environmentalists object to projects for their own self-centered motivations and that their dissemination of “misinformation” must be countered. The organization is on record saying that they support gas drilling as long as environmental consequences can be mitigated. I wonder where they will get their “information” and how they will get beyond their own likes and dislikes, challenges and motivations.

Packing the peppers into a jar and covering them with olive oil, I notice that there is a hole in the rubber glove, right at my thumbnail. I wonder whether the hotness burned through or whether I inadvertently sliced through it. I make a mental note to get another pair, as the damaged one will no longer protect me from the caustic oils.

If only other potential hazards were dealt with so easily.

2009-10-11T00:03:00.002-04:00

Address to the Hemlock Farms
Community Association Women’s Club
Steer Barn Meeting Room, October 10, 2009, 10:30 am.

I wasn’t pleased as a teen when I asked my mother whether I was pretty or not and she responded that she thought that I would be a late bloomer and that I would be beautiful and not pretty in a traditional sense. Now at 53, when I am find myself comfortable in my skin, I’m delighted with the idea that, as a late bloomer, there is great potential in this second half of my life.

And while I realize that my question to my mother was about physical appearance—I was a petite, reddish-brown frizzy-haired, shy, artistic adolescent in the midst of a long-legged, blond, straight haired, beach-party stereotyped groupie of the 1970s—I believe my question was about how I fit in the world and how I would make my way.

I come from a line of long-living strong women. My grandmother died two weeks short of her 99th birthday, with her older sister outliving her by a couple of years, dying at age 103. My mother, at 79, swims a couple of miles a week, is working on her abs and declares that she will be contra dancing with her younger partner at age 100.

When I turned 50, I was happy to be on what I considered the right side of the century mark, to put the uncertainty of my teens and the turmoil of my 20s and 30s behind me, utilize what I found to be the centering years of my 40s and bloom into the next part of my life. I thank Jill Barbier for inviting me into reflection about how our lives take interesting twists and turns, always offering the opportunity to more fully find our place in the world, live a true expression of our love and bless the world with our unique gifts.

And while we think we have been meandering through our life in a rather haphazard way, using the metaphor of a stream, I am wondering whether we unconsciously make our way through our landscape, joining with other streams, merging into mighty rivers and finding our way to the wide-open ocean.

Unitarian minister and transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson writes that if you watch a sailboat making its way across a lake, you will see it make 100 tacks, sailing this way with the wind, and then turning about and sailing the other way. And while the details of the experience is a zig zag, if you track the course of the boat, you will find it to be a straight line and that it was always on course.

I’m wondering whether that isn’t the path of our lives? We zig zag here and there and, in the end, wind up where we were going, even if we don’t know it in the moment.

In one sense, we are consumed in the now, distracted by the past and anticipating the future, but still encapsulated in our present. And with that notion of being in the present, I would like share a chant with you, which I will accompany on the Reverie Harp that is based on the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle, who wrote the book the “Power of Now” and “The Good Earth.” Some of you might be familiar with “The Good Earth” as it was featured on Oprah last winter. Eckhart is saying that all we have is the present moment, and that there is nothing that has happened in the past and nothing that will happen in the future that actually has the power to take away our ability to enjoy the moment. In the now, in this moment, this is all we have.

This is all we have. This is all there is.
There’s no place, but here. There’s no time, but now.

When I shared this song yesterday with Helene Langhorst, who said that she used to work in the developer’s office here at Hemlock Farms decades ago, she disagreed with the concept that we only have the now and added that she always had her dreams and that we could always relish the past. We created two more lines in our song:
We can dream our dreams; we can hold and cherish our past.

So how is it that this reddish-brown frizzy-haired, now grey-haired, artistic woman stands in front of you? Briefly, I started my work career as a camp counselor at Camp Speers Eljabar, just down the road. My boyfriend, whom I met at camp, was waiting for me to graduate with a degree in studio art from Douglass College, and had found a free house in Narrowsburg. We fell into the publication of The River Reporter, and after 30 years of work and life experience that could be made into a epic film of survival by my now 26-year old film editor son, and following a house fire and the subsequent divorce that broke my heart, along with my refusal to quit, I found that my newspaper work was a community ministry.

Interestingly, there was be no abrupt change in my life with this discovery and my attendance in seminary, a vehicle to more fully inhabit my transformation into becoming a community minister. But though this awareness, I more clearly name my lie motivation and the place from which I want to speak and relate and that is, and has always been, from the heart and soul, encouraging myself and other to live their own authentic lives.

Understanding that we have a unique place in the world; understanding that at any point in our lives we can step into our potential, no matter what the circumstances, is the message that I bring to you today. As I mentioned, I was devastated by the ending of my first marriage and thought it a great failure. It was not my choice, at least not that I was aware of. And I was sad and grieving for what seemed to be a very long time. (In hindsight, it wasn’t nearly as long as I thought.) But what struck me about the experience when I began a relationship with my now husband, Stephen, is that it wasn’t flawed; it wasn’t tainted. It was new. I likened it to a soccer game where you got yourself kicked up and down the field. In the next game, it doesn’t matter that you lost the previous one; it matters that you utilize your experience. It matters that you were willing to go out onto that field and play with all that the gifts that the previous experience has given you.

We are what we are. We are uniquely ourselves. And before we close I want to sing with you another song and the words are:

The sky is blue, the grass is green, and the light is yellow.

We have our own paths. We are blue like the sky, green like the grass, or yellow like the light. We have our todays, our nows; we have our pasts, we have our dreams. We are our journeys, our accomplishments and our injuries. Some of us know our place in the world right from the beginning; some of us are late bloomers and understand our way only after we have gotten there.

And while we might make a 100 tacks, like the sailboat, and need to make additional corrections to take into account unexpected currents and waves or places we have misjudged the strength of the wind, we move forward, always having the opportunity to more fully inhabit our authentic selves.

The Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, who served as a direct link between the non-violent teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

May it be so.

Damage, skin deep

2009-10-06T19:27:00.010-04:00

You can imagine my chagrin when I looked out the window this morning and saw that there had been a pretty hefty looking frost. I don’t know what prompted me to rise and look out the window since I usually remain facing forward, propped up, nursing, for some 30 minutes, the cup of coffee that husband Stephen brings me on whatever schedule I ask for the night before.

However this morning, I looked out the window behind me, and the sight of the white grass got me out of bed, into my clothes and out, fondling the harvest of peppers, which were quite frozen -- or seemingly so.

What could I do? Done is done.

There would be no sense in complaining. There were no frost warnings: I had asked; Stephen had checked. The meteorologists had failed us. We had failed ourselves. The niggling thought that it was time to harvest everything had been preempted by whatever task I thought I needed to do, then.

The peppers were lost, plain and simple.

I returned to the garden with a basket to salvage what I could, thinking that if I roasted them right away, before they deteriorated into mush, they would still be worth something. Interestingly, while feeling frozen, there seemed to be no damage. Which is what turned out to be: the plants and fruit were totally covered in frozen water, but it had not permeated the surface. It was, as it were, not even skin deep.

Tonight, I collected the bounty of butternut squash and covered the remaining eggplants, parsley, peppers and tomatoes. I thought about how we can be injured skin deep. I thought about how we can be covered with frost, in our relationships, in our sluggish thinking. Yet, we sustain the harvest; we keep on our chosen path with a certain intensity and integrity. We, complete with the plants, ideals, projects, and gardens we foster, survive sudden freezing temperatures that fill the night air. We survive situations that encapsulate us and leave us, somehow, unaffected.

We persevere or maybe we’re just lucky.

Tonight, frost warnings or not, that which I did not harvest is protected from the chill.

May it be so in your life.

Thinking about enough, now

2009-10-02T22:42:00.002-04:00

It is late in the afternoon by the time that I make it to Nathan's room at Wayne Woodlands. He doesn't know that I am coming and when I walk in, he is sitting on the edge of at bed drinking a glass of water. "Look who's here," he says rather cheerily."

"Yes, look who's here," I reply, and ask him how he is.

I have a lot of pain in my stomach, he replies.

It is the aftermath of surgery we agree and he asks me if it is alright if he lays back down. He wants me to help him slide his feet onto the bed and to cover him up. At first I am reluctant, thinking that he ought to be making his own way if he wants to get out of this rehabilitation center, but when I realize that this is an opportunity to have someone carefully help him back into bed, my stance softens a bit.

I ask him if he would like me to play my harp. He indicates it would be nice.

I play wordlessly for a while, his roommate inching closer in his wheelchair. Thinking that he is simply listening, I continue to play. When I finish the song, his roommate asks me if I would mind moving my chair so that he can get out. I am amazed at my self-centeredness and quickly make room for him to slowly pass. He apologizes for being so slow, and I stand and wait, encouraging him that he is maneuvering through a tight spot with great dexterity. I somehow think it best if I not assist him, although I do not ask if my assumption is correct.

When Nathan and I are alone I wonder what it is that he would like to hear and I create a four line chant based on the teaching of Eckhard Tolle, Nathan's hero and mentor.

I sing it over and over again. "This is all we have. This is all there is. There's no time but now. There's no place but here." Nathan closes his eyes and seems to be resting.

When I am done, and he seems to be sleeping, I tell him that I am leaving. He opens his eyes and asks me how the Fellowship is doing. I tell him, that it's just fine and inquire whether he liked my Tolle chant.

"Yes," he tells me.

I ask him whether it was comforting and he tells me, again, "yes."

I ask because I wonder. When lying in a bed, recovering from surgery, in pain, with the concept of recovery seemingly miles away, is it comforting to know that now is all we have, and where we are is all there is?

It is enough that someone visits, sings a song just for you, and then leaves?

And what is enough?

Trusting intuition

2009-09-30T23:15:00.003-04:00

I am in the garden, covering the plants by moonlight. It is 10 p.m. It’s not that I didn’t think of it before, it’s just that each time I thought about it, I asked Stephen, who is the one who pays attention to weather in our family, whether there would be frost.

There’s nothing in the forecast, he tells me, and offers to check for frost warnings on the web. For the third time, he tells me that the low for the week will be 40 degrees.

In and out of the back porch all evening, busy with refreshments for tomorrow’s Upper Delaware River Roundtable meeting, the air feels chilly. I check the thermometer; it reads 40 degrees.

“It’s going to freeze tonight,” I say to myself and I think about how I will feel in the morning, with the whole of the pepper harvest--cubanos, cherry, jalapenos and salsa--damaged. Could I actually stand there and whine, “But you said it wasn’t going to freeze.”

And then as if by magic, I finally heard myself, changed my shoes, put on my coat and fetched the sheets from the laundry room.

“There is too much at stake,” I said to myself.

Some 20 minutes later, with those precious plants covered, I am back inside, thinking about Ralph Waldo Emerson, who I have been reading this week in my Unitarian Universalist Theology class. He puts forth that our intuition is more precious that the wisdom of the sages. The ultimate source, he says, of truth is within ourselves.

His philosophy of a belief in oneself came at a time when he was fighting for his own sense of self-worth. Self-Reliance was written in 1841, three years after a Harvard Divinity School Address where his claims that the doctrine of the God was within had cost him a potential job at Harvard. He had left the ministry a few years earlier, feeling that he was not suited to it and had lost his young wife, whom he loved deeply, to tuberculosis after 18 months of marriage. Deep in a career and personal crisis, he hung onto the idea that his soul, and the soul of every person, would transcend his situation.

In an essay called The Over Soul, he wrote: “We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime, within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty to which each part and particle is equally related; the eternal One.”

I'm not sure exactly how not risking covering the garden plants, because the weather predictors say there will be no frost, exactly relates to the existence of an eternal One, accessed through our souls. But there is something to be said about trusting our intuition and taking responsibility for the decisions that we make, no matter what our technology or our experts happen to be telling us.

Down Day

2009-09-24T14:34:00.011-04:00

I have taken myself and my distraction into the woods behind my house. I walk on ground that seems undisturbed by human activity.

It’s calming in a way and not helpful in another, as I muse over the current gas drilling accidents, thousands of gallons of carcinogenic chemicals, mixed with water, that have spilled onto and into the ground in Dimock, PA. I imagine this ground, this rocky, wet ground, is not suitable for gas drilling, not like those rolling hills, and pristine farmlands in Susquehanna County that are being carved into five-acre drill sites.

Here, it is bumpy and filled with trees and moraines left over from glaciers long ago. No it’s probably not suitable for gas drilling. Of course, no place really is.

And to that end, I can picture that big machinery coming here. Machinery designed to dig up and move earth in a way that is in accordance to the will of the operator. Machinery that supports the construct of human dominion and our absolute right to destroy and use whatever we want.

It’s not that nature isn’t violent and destructive. Trees lie on their sides, rocks under and in between their roots, which reach skyward. But here, there is a balance of sorts, a stillness, a harmony and a sense of peace. Life and death exists in this moment together. With gas drilling, I see no life side to the equation. The opposite of the destruction, or the death, is excessive energy consumption and the distribution of wealth to multi-global corporations and the large land holder.

You might have gathered that I’m tired, kind of discouraged and in a quandary as to how to inject some sort of measure of environmental responsibility into the mix. I yearn to find something that is compelling enough so that, as human beings understanding our humanness, we decide to protect our best interests, respect the cycles of water, seek sensible alternatives to fossil fuels, and live on the land with a sense of reverence and appreciation.

I took myself and my distractions into the woods behind my house today. I walk on ground that seems undisturbed by human activity. It’s calming in a way and not helpful in another.

Changing season

2009-09-17T21:19:00.005-04:00

Grass tips turn yellow. There is a chill in the air. And just as the garden begins to thrive again, recovering and beating the mold that grew with the summer’s rains, I worry about a frost.

I have developed a cold, and I move through my day with sinus pressure on my top jaw and achy, achy muscles. I contemplate whether my body is reacting to the change of season.

Is it human arrogance that causes us to assume that grass would turn yellow and leaves would become shades of color and we, humans in control of our lives, would simply go on, maintaining the status quo, feeling well or ill as usual?

With an amazingly challenging semester that began after Labor Day, I have held myself in a smooth line these past two weeks, moving through a to-do list, reminding myself that if I am going to keep up, I simply need to keep going.

Tonight, after a hot bath with eucalyptus oil, soothing harp music playing in the background and tracing Reiki healing symbols in the air, I realize that no matter how full or busy my days might be, I want to feel the phenomenon of the changing of the seasons and the blessings of a late-summer cold. It reminds me, in my forgetfulness, that I am part of an enfolding universe.

Foraging for mushrooms and meaning

2009-09-14T15:46:00.009-04:00

Today, I am on the lookout for Painted Suillus. It’s a common wild mushrooms that the guide books identify as a good edible that has no look alikes. It is a firm yellow mushroom that seems to have more body that some of the others I have been collecting. Basket on my arm, the folding knife lovingly given to me by D.D. on my hip, I move down the road with a sort of easy concentrated effort. The red convex cap is easy to spot and there are enough of them that I don’t feel compelled to harvest any other kind.

I have been hunting mushrooms for some three weeks now and my pantry is stocked with bags of boletes (mushrooms that have a sponge on the bottom, as opposed to gills) that Stephen and I have sliced and dried. So far, I have used them to make a creamy wild mushroom sauce that I served over cheese ravioli and as a base for veggie burgers. Using my food dehydrator and a wide variety of ingredients, it is my goal to assembly a variety of dried soups and rice/noodle entrees from the garden harvests. So far, I have dried mushrooms, some of which were pulverized into powder, onions, squash, green onions, garlic, peppers, broccoli, tomatoes, cabbage and string beans. I even dried some red-bean chipotle chili and pulverized that for the basis of a sauce.

At lunch on Saturday, in celebration of son Zac’s 26th birthday, I told him about my experimentation and how frivolous it seemed. I said that as a seminary student I ought to be falling in love with the writing of Emerson or the mystics of the 13th century, not investing energy into dried convenience mixes for friends and family.

He said it didn't seem frivolous to him and I am surprised that I think that scholastic pursuit is more justifiably productive than being out in the woods and learning something about the rhythms of nature and food production.

Dodger, my 13-year-old dog, enjoys the mushroom gathering activity as we pick our way through the dappled sunlight in a slow and easy manner. I am aware of his frailty and the limitation of time that we have to spend together. In crossing the Grassy Swamp stream on protruding rocks, I make sure that he sees me move to the other side. He has become nearly deaf and often doesn't respond when I call him. (Sometimes, though, he hears just fine and it’s questionable that he isn’t just taking a privilege of age and ignoring my call.)

I am soothed by this newly discovered abundance from the woods. In the face of shrinking resources and fears of environmental degradation, it is a pleasant surprise to become awakened to a complex, self-sustaining world, which, when careful, we can consume with great delight.

Jean Kerrigan: a master at paradox

2009-07-24T16:46:00.008-04:00

For a woman who had strong family and community ties, with Jean Kerrigan there were no strings attached.

Indeed, Jean didn’t have the traditional family, the nuclear cluster of spouse and child; instead she embraced an extended family, projected that sense of family into her workplace and onto the community at large.

Never giving birth or even owning a pet, she was a second mother to many, especially her nieces and nephews. They say that they wouldn’t have had a childhood, if it weren’t for “Aunt Jean,” as their own mother often took second shifts as a nurse to sustain her large family. But Jean and Marie, “Irish twins” with less that a year between them, always faced life together.

Incredibly rigid about her sense of place on Nobody Road, on the border of Tusten and Cochecton, she was quick to share it. Niece Karen and nephew Jeff say that after painting their initials on Aunt’s Jean’s new roof, they were pleased with her reaction of “that’s interesting.” I imagine that Jean got a kick out of seeing those symbols from Route 97 for years and enjoyed the confusion that a passerby might have when trying to figure out what was emblazoned on her roof.

Those passerbys might have known or suspected that it was a symbol of love, joyfully given and received, that Jean freely broadcasted and that others harbored for her.

But just as she was easygoing and gave everyone no-strings-attached affection, she would, as niece Anita phrased it, “put her finger down and straighten me out.” Indeed, at one time or another, Jean probably straightened a whole lot of us out. For Jean didn’t mince words. At the same time, she did not tear people apart for their limitations, even as she was willing to name them.

Which is to say that Jean was able to navigate paradoxes: no family of her own, large family that was hers and hers alone; maintenance of a solitary existence, in highly significant relationships with hundreds of people and dozens of organizations.

And it is not surprising that with her death, we find ourselves in that place of paradox. We are happy that Jean is safe, not tooling around and insisting on physical independence, teetering more and more every day. Simultaneously, we are unsure how we will make our way without this stable presence in our lives.

When you have talked to someone every day for 82 years, what do you do when they are no longer there to listen? To whom do you turn for advice, when the person who is able to see all sides is now unavailable for counsel? How do you maintain easy family relations, lightheartedness, good humor and positive perspective when the impetus for that energy has moved on?

And how do you gather the gossip, know where the good stories lie or what needs to be investigated or patched up when your source is no longer available?

Those paradoxes, the opposing realities that Jean was able to navigate so masterfully, are the very ones that we now have to navigate alone. I can only think that we will find a path through our loss and grief by recalling how patiently and joyously Jean lived her life and the lessons that she, in her non-assuming way, was present to teach us.

More specifically, and getting right to the point, which Jean always appreciated: we will miss her terribly and, in her absence, in our daily lives, faithfully and always, we will simply and continuously remember. We will remember that she always remembered us.

We will recognize and name a final paradox in her amazing and fruitful life: Jean lived as a humble human being and, at the same time, she was an angel at the heart of the Upper Delaware River Valley, an angel at the heart of us all.

As we bid our final farewell and prepare for her Mass and Christian Burial, we accept the gift of her giving spirit and understand that Jean achieved everlasting life, in our love and in our hearts, for all of our remaining days on earth and forever more.

God Bless you Jean, and thanks.

[Jean Kerrigan, September 26, 1926 to July 19, 2009, worked at The River Reporter for 22 years.]

Connected In

2009-07-16T21:49:00.002-04:00

The garden is lush. And parts of it are definitely planted too close. The zucchini is too close to the broccoli; and the broccoli is too close to the cucumbers and the tomatoes.

Interestingly, there are not too close for their own well being. They are too close for me getting between them for picking. Which is interesting to ponder. Plants, in a garden, can grow in closer proximity to each other, and that the spacing listed on the seed packet has more to do with harvesting than it does with growing.

When the ground was bare I would have thought I was leaving scads of room. Even as I didn’t follow the directions, I simply thought that my perception would be spot on.

I spent the morning reading a historic sermon by William Ellery Channing, an early 19th century Unitarian minister. Taking his cue from Ephesians v.1: “Be ye therefore followers of God, as dear children,” he maintains that “true religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being.” That likeness to God, he preached in 1828 to the gathering at the ordination of the Rev. F.A. Farley in Providence RI, belongs to man’s higher or spiritual nature and has as its foundation the original and essential capacities of the mind.

He maintains that it is only in proportion of this likeness that we can enjoy either God or the universe. “God becomes a real being to us, in proportion as his own nature is unfolded within us.” He goes further to say that the “unbounded spiritual energy which we call God, is conceived by us only through consciousness, through the knowledge of ourselves… God is another name for human intelligence raised above all error and imperfection, and extended to all possible truths.”

Undoubtedly, there are those who might think that this discourse is highly egotistical. Who is this early Unitarian preacher who dared to put human thought, emotion and accomplishment on the same level of God and the complexity of the universe.

Who, indeed? Still, for me there is a measure of truth in the idea that the connection between the Divine in the world and the human being has everything to do with the human being. It has to do with the practices and the devotion that we have to living our lives.

If we functioned in oblivion, which many of us do most of the time, there would be no inspiration and perhaps no revelation. With no time for reflection, how would we acquire insight?

Channing concludes: “There is a spreading conviction that man was made for a higher purpose than to be a beast of burden, or a creation of sense. The divinity is stirring within the human breast, and demanding a culture and a liberty worthy of the child of God."

My garden plants are perfectly spaced for their own growth. They reflect a certain integrity that has nothing and everything to do with me. In my garden, I co-create fertile ground for the abundance and sustenance of my family and my love. It reminds me of the growing nature in all of us and our connection to a living spirit on earth. It gives me the opportunity to remember that it is through my action, my thought and my mind, that I am connected in to a power and an opportunity to sustain joy.

Do you think it would go better if I just followed the directions on the seed packet?

Stormy weather

2009-07-07T11:55:00.001-04:00

There is about three seconds between the lightening and the noise that accompanies it. The thunder is long, rumbling through air. The rain is as strong as my shower and I can remember an adventurous time when I was younger that I would go outside in weather such as this and wash my hair.

With each thunder outburst, spaced about five minutes apart, at least, Dodger, my elderly dog of 13, comes for reassurance. He is bothered by this stormy weather as if he knows that it’s not just indicative of a passing storm.

I think we all know that it is not a passing storm, but as of yet have not reached out for one another.

Weak light

2009-07-07T11:39:00.001-04:00

It dawns a sunny day. Yesterday was clear as well.

As Stephen brings me my morning coffee, he tells me there is a 50 percent chance of rain and I understand that watering the garden will not be necessary.

It’s been a rainy summer with the last three days of no precipitation an anomaly. The garden grows, although I think that the plants, especially the tomatoes and the peppers, look a bit spindly as if they are stretching toward some sort of light that is not there now.

I wonder about a weak light that causes us to stretch ourselves toward it. Usually, that stretching, that reaching, promotes growth, provides inspiration. Although, perhaps not this day.

This day, this age when we have become acutely aware that the potential of great change comes in understanding that our ways and our living has stressed the earth, it yields a counter presence that insists that all things be as they always were.

Take our reliance on fossil fuels for example.

At a time when we understand that we must turn to alternative energy, our area, the pristine place of fresh drinking water, is being primed for natural gas extraction that will not only squander that precious resource, but upset the hydrological balance by taking billions of gallons of water out of circulation, poisoning it as well.

Some people say there’s plenty of water to go around; certainly it falls from the skies this summer. But I can’t help but think that what falls from the heavens is relatively clean and does not cause the skin to burn.

I receive news that the Northern Wayne Property Owners have signed a letter of intent to lease thousands of pristine farmlands to a particular gas company. It has been a long negotiated process and I am sure that those owners feel like they have protected themselves, their land and their livelihood. It is cause for celebration for those large property owners who struggle financially. I cannot help but remember the phrase “they know not what they do.”

And at best, it seems like a weak light that will cause us all to grow spindly.

Want what you have

2009-06-30T12:30:00.001-04:00

The garden grows and is becoming what it is and not what it was.

Memories of last year’s abundance and worries that this year’s crop will not be a bountiful are moving into the background. Now I watch the broccoli, the cabbage, the Brussels sprouts grow lushly with the moist warm climate. The tomatoes start to fill the cages and even if the varieties are not quite the same as last year, I am gaining confidence that there will a crop that I will dehydrate and use throughout the year.

The garden is an example of a continuous giving. Even as we harvest fresh green onions, cilantro, parley, Swiss chard, and spinach, the freezer and the pantry shelves provide grated yellow squash, tomato sauce, blackened peppers and pickles.

David Wolf speaks of reincarnation at the Fellowship this past Sunday and speaks of scientist Ian Stephenson’s documentation of 2,500 children who could recall all sorts of details that they could not possibly know unless they had a past live. He says that those children, between the ages of two and five, become more firmly rooted in their present life and forget the details that they knew when they were younger.

It is the concept that I remember with my garden now, as it becomes itself and not what it was before.

Unitarian Universalist minister Forrest Church gives the simple advice in dealing with uncertain times “want what you have.”

To that I add, let things, people and gardens, be what they are. Take care of them and discover their individual uniqueness. And in that process, I believe that we will find blessings and harvests to appreciate.

Wow!

2009-06-23T21:25:00.004-04:00

Governmental climate change reports.

Higher than expect rainfall in the Northeast, like we have been experiencing.

Loss of maple syruping, some varieties of apple, blueberries and the fledgling ski industry.

And what are we supposed to do? Find some sort of measure of reasonable expectation?

Okay. Behind Door Number I is misery with the way things are.

Behind Door Number 2 is acceptance.
Which do you choose? (Gosh, when you put it that way, which choice is the right one?)

Do I sound bitter, I don’t mean to be?

Do I sound frustrated? I guess that sounds pretty right on.

I guess the question is where do we go from here?

Felting again

2009-06-16T21:56:00.006-04:00

So I thought I was on a roll, with making a couple of felt rounds this afternoon and finishing them up this evening. After processing them a bit, bouncing them around in the dryer, I took them outside and photographed them in natural settings. I was feeling a bit inspired, almost like an artist.

I took the inflatable ball, tightly wrapped with felt all around into my room to use my sharpest scissors. I found the plug, marked a line and carefully snipped through the felt. I heard a hissing sound and knew that I had snipped through the rubber surface.

Annoyed, I pulled the deflated and ruined rubber ball out cavern and was happy to see that the felt was thick enough and would hold its shape without reinforcement. I cut the second one very carefully, making a small hole right over the plug and deflating the ball before cutting.

Artist or not, the only thing I can say it is that it is a good thing that in planning to get started with my felting again, I bought three inflatable 9-inch balls.

The morning's work

2009-06-15T21:34:00.005-04:00

I am late getting into the garden this morning and it takes me a while before I settle down to my work. Some mornings, I know exactly what I want to accomplish – but this morning, with seeds and seedling mostly planted, and feeling like I squandered the early morning cool, I am impatient.

I stop to breathe into my frustration and to let it tell me what needs to get done. I decide that it is time to cover the garden with mulch and choose the Brussels sprouts as the place to begin. A quick survey finds the bed in good shape but takes in the fact that the grass from outside of the garden continues to send its runners into my cultivated soil. In my desire to get rid of those roots, I move outside the garden and begin to pull the grass from the other side. I get a serrated knife from the kitchen to saw away a huge clump of horse grass that grows between the two layers of wire fencing.

The grass is succulent and I think how it is unfortunate that it is not edible. And as soon as that thought pops into my brain, I think of the many meat animals that feed on this type of grass and how this grass and those animals, sustain many humans. I shake my head in the realization that my garden work is all about what I eat – not what the rest of the biosphere eats. Especially not the slugs, which routinely suck holes in my tender plants.

I move inside the fence and pull out more grass. The ground is loose and the roots are quickly removed. Even though I have done this work many times, I have the feeling that I am making progress. That somehow, I will become master over this evasive growth and that I will perfect some sort of method or plan that will keep it out of my garden perimeter.

I cover the damp beds with newspaper and hay, put away my tools and vow to start earlier tomorrow.

Considering theology

2009-06-14T18:36:00.004-04:00

I don’t know about you but I think a lot about God. I think about how it is that people throughout time have constructed stories and whole belief systems that explain the creative energy that they feel is present in their lives, and somehow beyond themselves. I think about how the ancient people needed to explain why the sun would come up every day or be assured that the fertile growing season would return.

Now, we have our science and our meteorologists who routinely tell us the schedule of the sunrise, sunset and the movement of the tides. They predict the kind of winter we’re going to have, as well as the path of an oncoming storm. Of course, there is a limit to their, and our, knowledge and often we can brace ourselves for some sort of natural onslaught, only to have winds blow it in another direction. We are saved, somehow, by an energy that we cannot control. We feel blessed.

And even with our science, we are inclined to attribute meaning to things that are outside of our habituated life patterns. We create stories that give us comfort and explain the unexplainable. Such storytelling took place at Bob Wasserman’s funeral and burial this week.

Bob Wasserman was a lifelong Sullivan County native. He was an activist and he had a lot of friends. In fact, Rasmussen’s Funeral Home was packed this past Tuesday. As Bob did not have an affiliation with any religious congregation, I volunteered, wearing my ministerial hat from the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, to facilitate the memorial stories at the funeral home. And because Bob had been raised in a Jewish household and had requested on his deathbed the assistance of a Rabbi, the burial was under the direction of the Rabbi Michele Medwin of Temple Shalom in Monticello.

The sky was ominous as the long line of cars made their way up Route 97 and across the river to the Milanville Cemetery. The thunder was getting closer and the wind had picked up as the concrete cover was lowered over Bob’s coffin. The Rabbi had said some prayers and had just explained that it considered a mitvah, a good deed, to help bury the dead. People were lined up to shovel dirt into the open grave when the sky let loose.

First, there was rain, and then we were pelted for about seven minutes or so with hail the size of marbles and golf balls. Huddled under umbrellas, the assembled crowd, at first, thought it was funny. But as the intensity increased and we were stung by these bouncing ice crystals, the crowd grew concerned and humbly stood through the onslaught. When it finally ended, the ground was littered with an inch or two of the frozen crystals that had fallen violently out of the sky. The sun came out and the air filled with steam. People made their way around the large mud puddles to shovel dirt, now wet and mudlike, into the grave.

They smiled, joked and came up with their own version of what had just happened. While there were reports of tornadoes in the area, most people expressed the belief that it was Bob’s message from above that had caused the isolated storm.

“It was a reminder from Bob that we needed to look up and see the world around us, and not be concentrated on the ground and the grave.”

“He loved the 1812 Overture and this was his final send off.”

“He loved stories, and he gave us one more to remember him by.”

In determining the message of a common experience, everyone had a different take on the situation, and I wonder, as I ponder our spiritual nature, whether the different stories are a result of our theology, the way that we find meaning in the world, the way we explain feeling connected to something larger than ourselves.

I don’t know.

But for me, standing in that storm, having consciously left my raincoat at home and having no umbrella, I moved closer and put my arm around Valerie Manzi, whose umbrella I shared, so that we could huddle more tightly and keep the warm rain from falling over the umbrellas’ edge and soaking us more completely.

From that refuge, I saw others holding each other: Bob’s beloved wife, Joanne, held in a protective embrace of her son, Justin; Bob’s brothers, Steve, Dan and Tom, with arms around each other, standing close to the Rabbi, who was sheltered by funeral director Patrick Harrison. In groups of two, three and four, under a variety of colorful temporary roofs of man’s invention, I saw a community of people, united by their love and concern for each other, share a common experience on this fragile and unpredictable planet.

In thoroughly soaked, mud-splattered clothes, we shared life.

And it was good.

Fertile ground

2009-06-12T13:27:00.006-04:00

I am here and the next place, while in the garden this morning.

I fill in the spaces where some snap peas didn’t come up. They were old seeds and I guess some were not as virulent as others. I replace them with this year's snow pea seeds. I am thankful for my abundance of seeds and for the warm fertile earth. I think of farmers in other parts of the world who are more dependent on their gardens than I and bless their toil and send prayers of fertility.

There are only two plants in the row of cucumbers that I reseeded this morning. While I am confused why so many didn’t grow, I am thankful that my harvest will be staggered. For some reason cucumbers come on strong and then succumb to a quick death. Staggering the seed planting is always suggested, although not surprisingly it took an act of nature for it to happen in my garden.

I plant beets in two rows about six inches apart. The seed package says plant in rows 12 inches apart. I plant them closer because I figure that if I am not walking between, it is not necessary to have so much room. I have to admit, I have never gotten much of a harvest of beets.

I turn a pile of sawdust and twigs that Stephen has piled on the edge of the mowed grass. It is filled with earthworms churning it into black gold that I will use next year to replenish the soil. I move the volunteer squash plants that are popping up all over the garden, a result of using "not quite done compost" from my kitchen pile as a soil booster.

I believe the plants to be butternut squash and I place them on the sawdust mound with a little bit of extra soil. This method of sending some seedlings out beyond the fence has worked in the past. The deer don’t seem to be able to find the hard squash growing in the high weeds. It’s a risk but it has always increased the harvest.

I pick stones out of the soil. There are so many. I used to consider that some could have been Indian artifacts. Last summer, I took some to Cliff S. at Tom’s Bait and Tackle in Narrowsburg. He’s more or less an expert on Indian artifacts and he told me that my shards, while triangular and sometimes grooved, were just broken rock from an ancient plow.

The knowledge changed how I picked up the stones. For a while, no longer innocent, I didn't look at them much. I understood that my sea of rocks were just that – rocks. Then for a time, when I picked up the shards, I thought about how I used to think that native peoples lived and worked in this fertile ground and that it wasn’t true.

Now I understand that it is important to me to feel connected and while Cliff might be right, I continue to look at the rocks, some of them, as if they were left over ancient tools. I continue my search, even though it may not lead to anything conclusive. It’s an act of imagination. It’s an act of needing or wanting to feel that there is a connection to something else beyond the present moment in the garden.

It’s a meditation, this garden work. An abetting of creation.

Warning signs and boundaries

2009-06-11T21:37:00.002-04:00

My front flower beds have been overgrown with weeds for some years now. I joke that once the flowers are cut and placed in a vase, you can’t tell how many weeds they grew between. I marvel at people who have neat flower beds and finely kept outdoor spaces. I could even add a neat clean house to the list. My vegetables are about all I can keep up.

But, I do love zinnias, as do deer. So it works out that the zinnias can be planted behind the garden fences.

So today in an attempt to make room for some zinnia plants that are growing spindly in little pots on the kitchen table, I worked in the round kitchen garden a bit more, pulling catnip, tarragon, and oregano. These are the herbs that are dangerous to an orderly garden. They are as insidious as grass, with roots that travel horizontally, everywhere. I actually think that garden centers should mark certain perennial herbs with a warning. “Caution: This plant will take over your garden, if not kept within very deliberate bounds.”

Today, I wondered whether caution signs ever deter anyone from getting involved in something. Today I thought that even when we are warned, about people and even perennials (be careful of the mint) we somehow think that they'll stay within boundaries, even as we don’t keep them.

Boundaries are a curious thing and it seems a lifelong learning about how we can maneuver around and between them. How do we keep healthy boundaries and still allow ourselves and our lives to flow with a certain fluidity?

I don’t know the answer. But yesterday, I pulled the volunteer sunflower plants out from in the eggplant patch. There’s nothing that I will allow to get in the way of a potentially productive eggplant.

People are like that, I guess. No limits in some places and very rigid ones in others.

Potatoes

2009-06-10T19:54:00.007-04:00

I planted some purple potatoes tonight in the round garden in the side yard. Undoubtedly in the time that the original owners farmed this land (1905 to 1984), it was the kitchen garden, filled with herbs and things handy for food preparation. When I moved in, it was a rusted fence holding a tangle of grass.

I have wrestled with the grass, planting perennial herbs from time to time since then, and the grass and the herbs have always gotten the better of me. Now, the 12-foot round garden, with a fairly decent fence, holds the chives, rhubarb, and asparagus roots, planted some 25 years ago that throw up one or two sprouts and delicate ferns just to keep me hopeful.

Last year, with my primary garden under relative control, I reclaimed half of the round garden and studiously planted seed potatoes, given to me by John T., in two eight-foot trenches which I filled in as the plants grew tall. I estimated at the time that I would get about 100 or so pounds of potatoes.

When I harvested about 10 pounds all told, I wondered if it was the lack of water that kept their yields low. The two volunteer purple fingerling potato plants in the main garden yielded as much.

So I wasn’t totally surprised to find about 10 plants, potatoes that I missed when harvesting last fall, growing strong this spring. Tonight, I quickly cut up the sprouted purple potatoes from the pantry and threw them into the soil in between the established potato plants.

This year, there are no trenches. This year, there was no research about how to grow tubers. This year, there is no expectation as to yield, or anything really, beyond gratefulness that my hurried harvest left behind seeds for this year’s growth.

Who knows, this year I may get a crop of potatoes--purple and yellow, both.

I wonder if sometimes we spend a little too much energy trying to get things right when actually it's the happenstance of the situation which makes it all work out in the end.

I'll keep you posted.

Wisdom and the Prickly Being

2009-04-23T21:17:00.000-04:00

A tale by Laurie Stuart

There is a being that dwells behind and within whose wisdom and compassion is great. This being is an essence that is, perhaps, neither female or male and who is not connected to linear time.

There is another being, a prickly impatient one, who covers and bullies this essence when no one else is around. This being is like an uncontrolled she-lion, willing to stop at nothing to protect her cubs, and who never misses the opportunity to take aim at the one with wisdom and negate her. They are both housed in the body of a middle-aged woman, a human, who like Job, has been tested over and over again and who has never wavered from her belief that all would be well.

Still, the middle-aged woman is unsure what to do about this war that rages in the privacy of her own mind, heart and home. She does her best to keep it contained, although sometimes, oft times, she is weary and seeks release in impatient words, mostly with herself, and mechanisms to calm herself down.

The essence with wisdom was known and as well as unknown to her for a very long time until one day a bold younger woman called it out of her. The younger woman held the essence in front of the middle-aged one with words and penetrating truth. The middle-aged woman saw it, recognized it, but wasn’t quite sure how it would shine unencumbered through her, knowing of the Prickly Being that keeps it in check.
But the younger woman was bold and she went further to post an image and to name this essence, Wisdom, for all to see. A teacher of sacred texts and all things holy confirmed and testified that she, too, had experienced this essence, Wisdom, when around the middle-aged woman.

The unveiling, a virtual unmasking and naming, made an impression on the middle-aged woman who began to recognize that Wisdom shone through her deep brown eyes, those eyes that, even in her darkest moments, she knew to be her greatest gift and asset.
The named gift, now come into the light, begins to shine in places deep within and illuminates the caverns of the Prickly Being who, truth be known, was very much afraid of the dark. With the inward light, it may be that it is not nearly so scared.

The middle-aged woman is wondering, hoping really, whether Wisdom and the Prickly Being can live in peace, and maintain a certain balance between heart and mind, and she is relieved and grateful.

But mostly she understands that even when she is unsure of the inner Wisdom’s power and consistency, there will be those who are bold and faithful who will shelter her, recognize her, and guide her way home.

There's Hope

2009-04-05T22:36:00.004-04:00

Opening words at the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship service, Hope in Uncertain Times, April 5

Oft times I worry
That I will not be able
To cope with all life that brings.
I worry that I will break,
In the midst of turmoil,
In the midst of the unexpected.

It causes me, this worry, to feel disconnected
Cast off to make it on my own
Like an egg that can be carelessly
Taken out of the carton and placed on a table
And, in a blink of an eye, roll off and fall to the floor.

It’s easily done this rolling off the edge.
Alone, broken, unfixable.

Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Could not put Humpty back together again.

I worry that that’s my lot.
Falling off that wall.

But sometimes I know that I am not alone.
I know that I am connected to a whole that seeks
balance and the still point
where we can stand on the edge
mysteriously and joyously connected

and filled with hope.

A challenge of a lifetime

2009-03-30T18:57:00.005-04:00

News that the land on which the Leisure Time Spring Water has been leased to Chesapeake Gas Drilling Company and that the Canadian company, Boreal Water, to which the waterworks has been sold has no real concerns about the development, has me chuckling in a sinister sort of way. It’s an activity that I really should consider to be a dubious at best and probably not something to indulge in any sort of an active way.

I come to this criticism of my sinister glee by way of Buddhist teacher Sharon Lovich, who teaches at the Kadampa Buddhist Center in Glen Spey and who was the speaker at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship this past Sunday. Whenever she explains the Buddhist practice, in this case of giving and receiving, I am always reminded of my highest aspiration. Specific to this news and paraphrasing at best, it is never a good idea for your own karma or for peace in the world to sneer at people who are oblivious to the losses that they haven’t discovered yet.

It’s an ironic position for a sustainable someone like me to take, this being compassionate for corporations that have no clue of their losses, because the bottling of water, from springs in Livingston Manor as well as everywhere else in the world, into little plastic bottles is about as wasteful, and unsustainable an activity that can be imagined in this post-modern race to oblivion. Still, in my Unitarian Univeralist interpretation of Buddhist practice and ethical principles throughout the ages, it’s probably never a good idea to be smug about what you know to be true. That attitude, as well as other cynical activities, is just the kind of thing that will bite you in the butt when you realize that you probably participate in perpetuating the system yourself.

Like I was never thirsty and never bought a bottle of water? Like it doesn’t drive a stake through my heart to understand that Chesapeake now has access to a pristine artesian well that has the capacity to provide millions of customers with millions of liters of spring water? Like it doesn’t really matter to the economy of Sullivan County that a company, Leisure Time Spring Water, is going bankrupt and has sold its asset of access to spring water to a Canadian company, even if a gas drilling company will vie for the precious resource?

Nationalism and sinister glee aside, there’s a multitude of losses piling up and how we turn them into personal assets, or even a heart of gratitude and goodwill, I don’t know.

And therein is the challenge, dear ones, the challenge of a lifetime.

Perfect cinnamon buns

2009-03-23T20:36:00.010-04:00

So the sticky buns got made. Eleven beautiful roll-ups of sweet yeast dough, butter and cinnamon sugar got laid on the maple goodness, which readers will remember was about five gallons worth of syrup rescued after over boiling, and were baked to golden doneness. In flipping them onto the oval platter, given to me by my dear father, a bit of syrup rolled off onto my thumb. The searing heat burned deep into my consciousness. I thought of it as the final kiss.

But the buns were delicious and I took them to the Fellowship on Sunday, not wanting to invite further wrath of any god who might, or might not, be watching for any sign of hoarding.

It was a good thing to do.

The reaction was one of gratitude. Many had read of my adventures and were in anticipation of the buns' wholesome goodness. Pronounced by some as the best ever, and encouraged by others that if I was experimenting I should bring the next batch, I was pleased to have company on my ridiculous adventure.

I had sent out a notice to some of my friends informing them that I was, once again, continuing my blog. In the subject line was the words, “Misery loves company?”

Amy wrote back, “I like to think it is not just misery that loves company but humanness that needs affirmation/companionship (not to mention a sense of humor) along the way.

I have to agree.

I was so happy, in the end, to have company with my trials with the syrup. Unfortunately, the sap is flowing much slower now with the cool weather, and it’s not nearly as clear. I don’t know if I’ll get any maple syrup and the burning all of my sap could have been, in one sense, a fatal mistake. But sharing the mishap with others brought it to a different dimension.

I guess what I learn from that is precisely what Amy writes: it’s not so much our accomplishments or even our ability to make our own way, or produce our own syrup as the case may be. Rather, our lives are made meaningful by that which we share, and perhaps, unfortunately, our human foibles are the most lovable of all.

Go figure.

The buns really were perfect.

Being me

2009-03-19T21:52:00.009-04:00

Last night, I burned all of the maple sap that I had been boiling down since Saturday. It was easily done. After dinner, I poured the almost one gallon’s worth of sap collected that day into the shallow pan, turned on the two-burner electric stovetop on the porch and went to do my homework. Some two hours later, it was burnt sugar, mostly.

I was furious. Jumping up and down in the kitchen, I yelled to the universe and to Stephen who was standing there, “I AM AN IDIOT.”

“Don’t say that,” he said to me.

I can’t remember if I jumped up and down a few more times, but I know I yelled again, “I AM AN IDIOT.”

He didn’t question my adamancy any further.

And as serious as I thought it was in the moment, the burning of some four days worth of effort, I actually couldn’t muster much more than that.

“I’m just so frustrated being me,” I said to that dear husband of mine.

I imagine that he must have been into conversation because he asked me, “What is it about being you that is so frustrating?”

I never answered his question.

I strained the hot burned sugar syrup through a felt liner, buttered a shallow dish and poured it in, thinking it would form some sort of maple brittle. I chopped up some of the smoked almonds from a tin in the pantry, sprinkled them on top, and left the kitchen to feel sorry for my distraction in the living room.

Again, I couldn’t muster that much ire. This morning, I was thankful that I didn’t start a fire on the porch.

Underneath the loss is the true knowledge that a couple of days ago I saw that I was creating maple syrup. I wasn’t sure whether to pour it off into a jar, to carefully process it on the kitchen stove later, or to pour new sap in. I asked Stephen what he thought and he seemed to agree with me that for the consistency of the batch, keeping the same pan going would be the best thing to do. With the increased sugar content, the new sap was evaporating much faster. But I knew there was the chance of burning – in fact this morning I told Stephen that I knew that the syrup would burn.

So if I had to articulate what it is that is frustrating about being me, I would answer that I am tired of knowing exactly what needs to be done and not doing it.

And why I do that, I have no idea.

Although now I know that the consequence, at least in this particular instance, is the burning of four days of maple sap.

The maple candy I hoped I was making didn’t get hard enough, and tomorrow, when I make a variety of bread for the “Awakening the Dreamer” workshop on Saturday, I shall use that thick, but soft, maple candy with smoked almonds as the bottom layer for the most wonderful sticky buns ever. I know it to be true, because there is at least five gallons of home-collected maple sap in the recipe.

I supposed that if we're not going to listen to that inner voice of wisdom, we just have to keep on going and it all, surprisingly, turns out in the end.

The late Dr. Howard Patton used to say, "It is what it is," and I have to admit that's my experience being me.

Meditation on spring

2009-03-18T18:29:00.007-04:00

From the March 15 Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship:

I. Opening Words: By Wendell Berry

Through the weeks of deep snow
We walked above the ground
on fallen sky, as though we did
not come of root and leaf, as though
we had only air and weather
for our difficult home.

But now
as March warms, and the rivulets
run like birdsong on the slopes,
and the branches of light sing in the hills,
slowly we return to earth.

II. Meditation: By Laurie Stuart

Indeed, slowly we return to earth.
We breathe a sigh of relief as winter
unlocks its grip from our landscape,
from our footpaths,
from the fear in our hearts that somehow
the cold and the snow will spin our lives
out of control,
leaving us
with the wreck of the world,
without the ability
to make our way,
to feed ourselves, clothe
ourselves, fend away doubt
and all of the niggling details
that are sure to be our downfall.

Indeed, slowly we return to earth and to this
community which has the ability
to support us, despite
the world economy, despite
environmental degradation, a haven
of spirit and love available always,
as long as we remember.

Remember that it is available to us.
Remember it is available for us.
Remember that we can equally be
the source as well as the culmination,
part and parcel of the ebb and flow.

Remembering that we are
ourselves a part of some whole
that exists beyond us,
through us
giving to us, and receiving from us
our thanks and blessings.

Guaranteed sweetness

2009-03-16T21:01:00.002-04:00

On Saturday morning, the silver maple that I planted in the side yard some twenty-three years ago got tapped for the first time. I’m not sure what made me think to ask whether a silver maple could yield maple syrup and the question could have easily come in the form of a regret: “I really wish that I had planted a sugar maple instead of the silver one.”

Nonetheless, once spoken then answered.

Silver maples can indeed be tapped in the spring for their sap, but the sugar content is not as high as a sugar maple and, therefore, takes a bit more boiling down. More Internet research yields the equation that sap needs to boil down at a ratio of about 40 to one to get to the sugar content and consistency of fine maple syrup.

So what that means is that with the three gallons or so of sap that have flowed into the bucket since Saturday, it would boil down to about one cup of syrup. As Stephen reminds me that one cup of syrup is no small amount, I realize that getting a huge amount of syrup is not my goal. Being able to create some sort of sweetener is more to the point.

The Internet also relates that a tree can give anywhere from one quart to one gallon in each sap run, meaning the time between when the sap starts to flow with the warmth of the sun to the time that the night chill shuts it down. My tree is yielding at least a gallon each day. The run will last for two to three weeks.

We had squash soup for dinner tonight, using a few of the butternut squash that has been wintering in the basement. As they were starting to get soft, we cut the remaining ones up and processed them for freezing. I imagine these frozen quantities will get us through to August, when a new batch is ready for harvest.

I am thankful for the abundance of the land and feel satisfied with this home-grown sustenance.

The sap drips into the bucket one drip at a time, and I marvel and take comfort in knowing that over time all of our mini steps, starts and stops bring some measure of sweetness into the world.

For sure.

Life's weavings

2009-03-13T17:10:00.009-04:00

My office floor is littered with books--poetry collections, anthologies of wisdom stories. Small white cards poke out of the pages, a road map for finding my way back to pages, poems and readings that will be woven together into Sunday's worship service at the Upper Delaware Unitarian Universalist Fellowship on giving and receiving.

While I wish I could work a little bit more in advance, I like this process of going through resources, immersing myself in the wisdom of others, and mining bits and pieces that will make up a new whole. Sometimes I think that it would be a joy to write all of the pieces of a particular worship, from opening words, prayers, homily and benediction, but I am equally attracted to the process as a weaver, threading words, thought, story and song together through a warp of a particular topic and a specific lens of meaning.

I always find useful pieces in the story collection in the “Kitchen Table Wisdom” by Rachel Naomi Remen, and this afternoon I was touched by story about Rachel herself. She tells of a time when she needed to make a choice between accepting a promotion through her hospital work where she is feeling alienated and following her instinct to go into a less conventional form of healing. She receives the gift of “The Prophet” from a new friend and finds herself taken by one of the illustrations of an eye in the middle of the palm. It seems familiar to her.

She learns that it is the traditional Hindu symbol of a healer.

Soon after, on a visit with her mother, she hears that as a child of four, she would take her father’s fountain pen and draw eyes in the palms of her hands. Then she would hold her hands up on either side of her face, palms facing forward, close her eyes and say, “Now I can see you,” and laugh.

“Sometimes you wouldn’t let us wash your hands for days,” her mother tells her.

Rachel realizes that in her role as a pediatrician she washes her hands thirty to forty times a day and surmises that she has long washed away the healing symbol. Soon after that, she quits her hospital job to find her lost eyes.

While the story seems to mimics my own journey right now, and I spontaneously sob for a few moments, it is not apropos to the topic and I move on.

Sometimes we have a plan and collect the pieces that we weave into our endeavors or into our lives. And sometimes, we simply stumble upon the treasures that we didn’t know of before and a whole new form takes shape.

Musings on the day

2009-03-12T18:19:00.021-04:00

Looking out my home office window, with the sun shining and the wind moving the upper branches of the white pine trees that surround my three acres of paradise, I thought it was a whole lot warmer than it actually was.

Yesterday, it was about 60 degrees, and somehow I thought it was the same today.

I could have easily looked at the thermometer--a Christmas gift from my dear father in Vermont, which is digitally and wirelessly connected to a sensor on the back porch whose counterpart sits upon the upright piano-in-need-of-tuning in the living room and displays the inside temperature, the outside temperature and the time--and seen that it was a mere 33 degrees. But I didn’t check it as I suited up for a walk in the middle of the afternoon.

With Dodger--my hairy and sweet, soon-to-be-13-year-old retriever-chow mix of a dog--anxious at the door, I put on a hat and gloves. Good thing, because it was cold. All that is to say that sometimes our assumptions, based on what we perceive, are not always correct.

My days are spent in self-education. From gas drilling e-mail messages, which have complicated studies attached, to graduate-level discussions pertaining to whatever class I am taking (World Religions, this semester), I follow the threads left for me, at bit like Hansel and Gretel lost in the woods following a breadcrumb trail. They, and I, seem to be searching for our way back home, or maybe a route through the present and into the future that will bring us to a clarification of our place in the world.

And given this metaphor, the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale, I suspect I needn't worry about the outcome of my quest. As far as I remember, they find their way out of the forest, into the light, and back to their loving father.

But wait a minute, wasn’t the original problem that their father was in the clutches of an evil step-mother? Am I working under the assumption that all fairy tales work out in the end? Could that stepmother be another metaphor for any number of post-modern-day scourges like natural gas drilling in pristine areas or corporate greed? Like the day looking like yesterday when actually it is itself in the present moment?

Whoosh, who can tell?

Not me.

Even so, today’s threads brought me the story of Cat Stevens, who abandoned stardom for allegiance to Islam. His story is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcgCdn8I8kU&NR=1

I was intrigued, as was the documentary, that the messages in the songs that Cat Stevens was singing and writing for a very long time were prophetic to his future life. Consider his hit, "Father and Son" and the constant refrain "I know I have to go away." This line mirrored his giving up his music career to become a humanitarian serving a higher purpose.

His conversion begins with an experience of swimming out beyond the waves at Malibu and realizing that the current is taking him away from shore and that he is going to drown. "Lord," he says, "If you save me, I will serve you." Just then, he relates, a wave came that pushed him shoreward and he found enough strength to swim. Standing on solid ground, he rejoined the living.

I can only hope that something like this will happen to me. Perhaps in my following of bread crumbs or email-Internet threads, I will be led to a new morning where revelation will guide me forward.

Perhaps I will meet you there.

Beyond comprehension

2009-03-06T19:47:00.005-05:00

I have to admit that this whole gas drilling activity has my head spinning. The idea of using millions of gallons of clean water to harvest an energy that’s best left in the ground is a crazy idea to begin with, and it’s over the top when it comes to imagining that this risky behavior will be done in an exceptional value watershed. But it just keeps on coming.

I heard this week that the gas company that is seeking a permit for five wells in Peas Eddy, NY, in the Town of Hancock, somewhere in close proximity of the headwaters of the Upper Delaware River, have included in their application to the NY Department of Conservation (DEC) a plan to dispose of the “produced” water in injection wells. What this means is that the clean water to which chemicals and biocides have been added, which is then used to violently fracture the shale deep within the earth, amidst naturally occurring radioactive materials, heavy metals and salt, will be put back into the earth, for eternity.

While I’m no scientist, basic knowledge tells us that “what goes up, must come down. And since everything is itself and its opposite, the reverse is true: “What goes down, must come up.” Which is just an interesting way to say that the injected poison water is probably not going to stay put. And while geological science might very well contradict this gut analysis, industry experience in Texas shows that there is a tremendous amount of surface contamination that occurs during the injecting procedure. So much so that officials in Broome County don’t want the DEC to allow injection wells.

Bottom line: Those officials are right; it’s simply not a good idea. And it’s especially not a good idea in an important watershed.

I get it that no one knows what to do with this caustic water besides either injecting it into the ground or spreading it on dirt roads. Unfortunately, spreading the contaminated water on roads kills all the vegetation and, undoubtedly, although I haven’t read it, runs off into brooks and streams.

But getting back to Peas Eddy: The fact this is the first place that the gas companies have targeted, complete with the crazy idea to just put the poison back in the ground, is something that boggles the mind of someone like me. The idea that the first drilling will be within the vicinity of the headwaters of the Upper Delaware is almost prophetic because in its height of irresponsibility, it has the potential of allowing us, and our regulatory bodies, to wake up and say, “Huh, you want to do what? No way.”

But “no way” doesn’t seem to be the response. In fact,“anyway, just get it done,” seems to be the preferred reaction.

And quite honestly, that’s beyond my comprehension. What about you?

Still enough?

2009-02-11T21:37:00.010-05:00

I am washing up the dinner dishes as Stephen and I are discussing the news.

We talk about our disappointment with the Sullivan County Legislature’s decision to simply allow the outgoing district attorney the car of his choice, a Ford Explorer, which is a V-8, gets terrible gas mileage and has leather seats.

Stephen is especially disturbed that the expenditure is going out of the county.

“If the funds are confiscated from criminal activities, why is the legislature even involved?” he wants to know.

I don’t know the answer and add that I think it strange that no one took legislator Dave Sager up on his suggestion to ask the DA whether he could make due with a smaller engine for the 10 months that he will be driving the car. In the end, Sager even voted for the questioned choice, opting not to make a fuss over it.

“It’s what the district attorney says he needs,” legislative chair Jonathan Rouis is reported to have said.

The conversation shifts to the Town of Callicoon and the town board’s desire to ask bidders to disclose their overhead in pricing out a solar system for the town barn. While some residents asked whether it was a ploy to discourage bidders, councilman Tom Bose said it was to get a better price from the lowest bidder.

These two bits of news, while on opposite ends of the spectrum, somehow form an endless circle of local and county leaders doing what they have always done: maintaining the status quo.

In a different world climate, the juxtaposition might be amusing.

I place an oversized pasta bowl in the wooden dry rack and it teeters a bit. I straighten it up and the edge doesn't sit squarely into the spaces. I place another one next to it. I add the one last dish, just as the two plates fall off the side of the rack and crash to the floor. One of the them breaks.

“I knew those weren’t stable," I say outloud to myself.

"Do we have six or four of these plates?” I ask Stephen as he heads off for the broom.

“Five, now,” he says.

It’s still enough for a dinner party for four, I think.

And then it hits me.

Is that what those elected officials are thinking? That's there’s still enough to accommodate their needs?

Stephen is sweeping up broken porcelain as I excuse myself to contemplate broken things, stability and when enough is enough.

Scratching my head

2009-02-03T21:46:00.006-05:00

As more and more anecdotal stories pour in about methane gas coming out of people’s faucets in Central Pennsylvania, polluted wells and imbalanced inner-earth pressures, I am beginning to understand that gas drilling, especially those activities planned for the Upper Delaware River Valley, is a little bit like tooth decay. While you may religiously brush and floss, over time, the quality of your teeth deteriorates and there is an inevitable level of acceptance of fillings, root canals, bridges and false teeth.

When I mentioned the metaphor to one of my colleagues, she didn’t agree. “You can win over tooth decay,” she said vehemently.

By the end of the day, I had changed the metaphor.

“Natural gas drilling is like slavery,” I told another colleague. “There were many a good folk in New England, especially the early Unitarians in New England, who knew that slavery was morally bereft, but were too economically involved in the trade to actually have the will power to fight against it.”

I’m not sure he agreed.

What he did say in response was that he wondered whether we would wonder, ten years hence, when the area was a dark shadow of its pristine nature now, why we didn’t do more to stop its destruction.

And that question seems hard to reconcile in the face of our national policy and even stanch environmental groups who advocate that natural gas is a transition fuel.

Almost as an answer, the Word “office” assistant, that annoying "helpful" icon that answers questions, somehow turned on because of a inquiry that I had earlier today, scratches his head and raises his eyebrows. In this moment, he echoes my sentiments and seems almost prophetic.

So what do we do with these conflicting values, and how do we become totally clear about challenging our community to reconcile their willingness to sacrifice clean water and public health for economics and energy.

If I was cynical, which I don't think I am, I might ask the question, “What else is new?”

Loving kindness and robust health

2009-01-03T22:25:00.002-05:00

New Year’s has come and gone with little fanfare. There were no resolutions or the usual stock taking that happens when the calendar begins again. Perhaps it is due to my recent pilgrimage to Turkey and the feeling that it marked a beginning or an ending of something much larger than the coming year.

My post pilgrimage contentment has been tested with my nagging illness and the colliding responsibilities of a busy newspaper work schedule plus back-to-back Sunday Fellowship services. On my way out the door to a contract newspaper meeting this morning, and the Fellowship collaborative service on depression not figured out, I lamented that I couldn’t get everything done in the precise manner that I would like.

My husband, Stephen, reminded me that I could hold onto the post-pilgrimage peace. And instead of becoming impatient with him for asking me to do something that was not possible, I managed to answer with a certain degree of grace and honesty, that I was not anxious, but rather sad. It was a bit magical to realize that a moment of vulnerability could be a connecting point for me, rather than feeling isolated and unsupported.

When I returned home at noon, he was just returning from the grocery store with Mediterranean olives and cucumbers. “I’m planning on having Turkish antipasto with dinner,” he said.

We did manage to watch a documentary early on New Year’s Eve on Louise Hay, a New Age healer who believes that affirmations can heal all sort of illness, including cancer, and we tease each other, as we are both now hacking away with coughs and head colds, that “we are the picture of robust health, getting healthier every day.”

Some 10 hours later, with the service completed, and neither one of us having the energy for anything but a bowl of soup for dinner, I realize that it’s not so much that I can’t get my work done as I would like, but that it takes me longer than I think that it should. Plus, I seem to need to get finished with one responsibility before tackling the next.

So while I don’t have any New Year’s Resolutions, my wish and perhaps my New Year’s affirmation comes from tomorrow's chalice lighting text from Buddhist nun Pema Chodron who writes:

“In order to have compassion for others, we have to have compassion for ourselves.

“In particular, to care about other people who are fearful, angry, jealous, overpowered by addictions of all kinds, arrogant, proud, miserly, selfish, mean —you name it— to have compassion and to care for these people, means not to run from the pain of finding these things in ourselves. In fact, one's whole attitude toward pain can change. Instead of fending it off and hiding from it, one could open one's heart and allow oneself to feel that pain, feel it as something that will soften and purify us and make us far more loving and kind.”

May it be so.

Here and there

2008-12-30T19:16:00.004-05:00

My 20-some son, Zachary, was home for the holidays and wondered outloud whether this small place, albeit in the middle of paradise, has enough to offer the soul and the intellect to grow.

At times, I wonder that same thing.

But what is it about any place that offers the opportunity for the soul and the intellect to grow?

Does one have to be on pilgrimage to the center of spiritual existence, as in Konya, Turkey, as thousands of spiritual beings congregate to celebrate Rumi’s Sherb-i-rus, his death day, and wedding with the Beloved to experience a heart opening that is lasting?

Maybe. One would hope so, if you were on pilgrimage to Konya.

But what about your return? How does one utilize the experience to keep on living on the edge of spiritual and intellectual growth?

I don’t know.

But what I do know is that we are adaptive beings. We change. Life changes us and when we see a pattern that somehow becomes meaningful it makes a difference. A lasting difference, I think.

My friend Suzanne thinks differently.

When I told her about my immersion experience for two weeks in Turkey and how it seemed that a variety of old stories became transformed with different endings, she told me that my experience of completion would not last.

“Sorry,” she said, “they will come back again. At least that is my experience,” she added as a caveat that maybe she could be mistaken.

“What are friends for,” I told her, “but to remind us that while we might think we have learned something once and for all, it might not really turn out that way."

Still, I like the idea that the group of 16, who traveled to Turkey on pilgrimage, are somehow different and transformed from our adventures and experiences there.

I certainly couldn’t have had the same experience if I had stayed at home in this piece of paradise. And it is heartening to know that I came and went from here. As I will do, again and again.

At trip's end

2008-12-24T19:10:00.002-05:00

The palpable experience of love stays with me. Despite delays in airline flight, being totally unprepared for a Christmas holiday and dealing with a cough, sore throat and stuffed up ears, a sense of peace permeates my being.

Perhaps, it’s an understanding that there is always the opportunity to complexify any situation. Perhaps, I am taking comfort in what Professor Dr. Ibrahim Farajaje calls living in “flexadoxy." Whatever it is, I am hopeful that it stays with me long enough so that I long for it if a busyness returns to my life.

Or not.

Perhaps, I can live the life of the Sufi dervish for some time to come.

From what I gather, dervish life is one of service to the other. The dervish lives with a sense of expanding love and being a perpetual student. It is one that expects that the spirits of Shams and Rumi will continue to add mystery and fun to any situation. Meaning is found in the simple and the tendency to problemitize any situation is actively avoided.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything is easy and one is wise to remember that it was the murder of Shams that created a void so deep in Rumi that poetry of the Beloved emerged in its place.

But what does any of this have to do with ministerial formation and what did I learn about my own ministerial path?

I learned that I am a student of the heart. I learned that I, like many, have been walking this path for some time. I learned that intention is powerful and neutrality utmost in creating a situation with the most potential for negotiation.

I learned that people all over the world want nothing else but to live in peace and that an effective leader needs to be well aware of their own snares and binds. I learned that other people want to step up to the plate and have the opportunity to lead in our absence or in our giving them room.

I learned that opportunities are ours for the making and we either act on them or not.

I will either pursue the relationship with the master felter that I met in Konya, whose artistic partner lives within two hours of my home or I won't.

I will either pursue more information about a music healing hospital somewhere in Turkey or I won't.

I will heed the instructions from strangers to find my heart voice, to sing with assurance and to not let a day pass of not doing something that needs to be done or not.

And if it turns out that every choice is the not, I learned that I will be invited into my potential over and over again. "Even if you have broken your vow a thousand times, come, yet again, come."

All of this, including this feeling of floating, seems sharpenly directed toward building a just, peaceful and sustainable world where living from the heart is the lifeblood of the dervish or the minister, depending on what perspective one keeps.

Home again, ho

2008-12-23T09:22:00.004-05:00

It was kind of okay when Delta 73 was three hours late in taking off due to a problem with air pressure in the cabin. The captain was very efficient at assuring us that the light that blinked on and off as he was powering for take off at the Istanbul airport would be fixed as we taxied to a side runway to wait for a mechanic and word from "Atlanta" as to what needed to be repaired.

No one was that concerned when he acknowledged several hours later that the temperature was rising and that the overhead air jets needed to be opened to cool the cabin down. And, undoubtedly, we were all a little bit tired, and many had taken their sleeping draughts, when he announced that we were landing at London's Gatwick Airport to take on more fuel. The news that we would be put up at the Hilton connected to the airport was accepted as well.

But when we had to stand in line for three hours to be rechecked onto the flight and some of us were still not processed when the flight was late by more than an hour the next morning, people started to get annoyed.

"This is London," they said, "not some small airport in the middle of nowhere."

Hand-written letters and petitions were passed through the line. People, assured that they had connections to other places, were told that they would probably be spending the night in New York City. And when one woman learned that we were boarding the same plane and it had been fixed with parts arriving from Atlanta, she was sure that the airline was making a decision to send a broken plane into the air to cross the Atlantic.

We were the last of the passengers that were in a holding room, waiting for a bus to be found to take us to the plane as it sat some ways from the gates, when she told us we were being sent to a watery death.

"You know they make decisions about what is the least expensive," she said.

I couldn't quite get the logic about how the loss of a plane and its 300 passengers would be cost effective and gently reminded those around me that when I take my car to the mechanic and he tells me that it's fixed, I believe that it is safe.

On the bus, I countered the woman's story to those newly on the plane that there was never really the fear that the plane would crash, that there had been a plan to fly over land so that we were never out of an one hour reach of a place to land, and that the reason we had landed in London, and that the flight had been canceled, is that airplane personnel are not allowed to be on duty for more than 10 hours.

Later, as we made our way across the ocean in a seemingly perfectly working aircraft, the woman was visibly relaxed and laughing in the aisles. She might have acknowledged to herself that the story that she was telling us all was simply a product of her fear and her desire to go home, I don't know.

What I do know is that the pilgrimage did not end when we boarded the plane in Istanbul. My West Coast classmates are travelling still, as there were no connecting flights available last night due to heavy holiday travel.

As I digest all that I have experienced these past two weeks, and experience the reemgergence into my life, I am thinking that I would like to remain on pilgrimage, being open to whatever comes my way for whatever reason it comes.