After the storm

Tonight there was another thunder storm, one of the strongest of the many brief storms to pass through our neighborhood. The rain came in slanty through the windows, the lightening was bright and the thunder loud. The power went out just as my son was getting ready for bed. Fortunately our bedtime book is digital, so we sat in a dark room while the last hour of light from the long summer days made 2 glowing rectangle windows, reading "Only You Can Save Mankind" on my PDA. And then it was amazingly quiet. Out the front door you could hear the sound of the generator from the nursing home down the street, but from my son's room only the dripping of rain off branches and a neighbor playing saxophone out an open window. Later I sat in the living room my husband had filled with candlelight remembering a time when we used to light these very same candles just to see yellow light flickering in a dark room. I haven't been that quiet in a long time.

Wilty

We are all very wilty here in Ithaca. It has been near 100 degrees, but even when I went running this morning and it was 76 outside, the humidity is impressive, and it is hard to get a good breath. It has rained 4 times in the past 2 days, but still the plants are wilting. Each morning I water my pansies, and by the time I come home from work they are as wilty as I am.

More Fluff

I am obsessed with the fluff. Apparently it comes from the cottonwood tree. It looks like a snow flurry down certain streets and especially at intersections. I chased one around the parking lot at work with my camera for a silly amount of time, before finally finding some on the ground to share with you.

Where to find them

It turns out if you cross reference people who care about the earth, with people who care about the spirit, you get some very amazing people. How good it was tonight to sit in a room with people who already know that a thing worth doing on a Tuesday night is to gather at the intersection of earth and spirit. I am now floating around like the bits of cottonwood fluff filling the Ithaca air this week. What a joyful gift it is to find a group of people who talk and work well together.

Fluff

My co-worker remarks on our lunchtime walk to the sandwich shop:
"Where i come from [Arizona] things don't fly around in the air
I mean, dust does,
but not, like, plant fluff"
And I notice that some plant is reproducing madly all around us as bits of white fluff waft by on the barely noticeable breeze.

Anniversary

Today is the 15th Anniversary of our wedding. The boy is going to his friend's for dinner, and we are going out to eat at a place where you can't even color in your menu. And I'm humming to myself "Fine Again" by Liz Phair:

Everyone wonders
How we stay in love
And I tell them
That it's hell when it's bad
But it's good
Good
So good when it's good
And boy it is good to be back
To be back
To be back

Happy Anniversary Honey.

My New Church

I have amazing news. Last week I was called to be the Parish Minister of a church about 30 miles from my home. They are celebrating their 200th anniversary this year, and own two historic buildings. Most importantly, they are a really cool group of people. There are less than 50 souls all together, which will be an exciting challenge for me, since I have never served a "Family Size" congregation. There are about a dozen children who participate, and it buoyed my spirit to see how well they were integrated and embraced by the whole congregation. I had crossed my fingers that I might find a small congregation near Ithaca to serve once we decided this would be our new home, and my wish has come true. More, they are active and caring and creative and even have a drum circle!

The settlement begins August 1, but I am already ordering books on small church ministry. The commute is not ideal, and I regret the enlarged carbon footprint, but the drive is amazingly beautiful, and the little winding 2 lane route seems more restful than rush hour on the 101 or the 880 in California. (Auto Mall Parkway). In many ways this church is a foil to the last one I served. It will be a half time position in a part of the world with a slower pace of life. I will be the only paid staff of the church, so the office is empty most of the week. They kindly agreed to install a broadband link to the office so I could check e-mail while in the office; previously the church had no e-mail. (After the 100 e-mails a day I am used to in church life, this may be the biggest change of all). It is also an isolated liberal enclave in a conservative county. To quote the good folks of Monty Python's Flying Circus "Now for something completely Different."

Spring Fever

Suddenly I feel everything has to happen in the spring. No time! No time! Even as we celebrated Earth Day at the end of April, I still had a sluggish winter sensibility. But in 2 short weeks of sun and warm afternoons, I must have picked up some of the frenzie of the plants in my neighborhood. Now I understand that with such a long winter and such a short growing period, all these plants have all their growing, flowering and seed-making to do, and suddenly they are all doing it right NOW. Even on Earth Day, when we celebrated in a sacred circle in DeWitt Park and were blessed with a day of glowing sun and surrounded by the flowering trees of early spring, the pastel petals only served as contrast to the dormant trees all around them. The sky was open and life was spare. Now the canopy is growing in around us, and I remember my one New York summer, the unstoppable verdure, and I see how much work these plants do in the spring.

And me, with my untouched garden; a few bushes and landscape rock put in by a seller trying to flip the house quickly, and the weeds growing like their lives depended on it. Remembering my garden in California which I used to plant all year round except in the rainiest times, I looked forward to gradually filling in my garden over the next few months. But Yesterday my neighbor told me, as she rototilled the whole front plot in front of her house, that by July 4 many local nurseries start to close up. That the whole vision for the year must be laid and planted in the spring. I couldn't sleep well last night. Suddenly each beautiful spring day is precious and fleeting. No time! No time!

For today

For all of today here is my favorite poem
found in an old Starr King Catalogue.
It is written by Holly Horn.

To surrender oneself willing to truth,
to earn it,
in every sense, to allow
a voice to the great unbegotten
mystery and, beyond that,
to listen,
is asking for trouble

Don't doubt it. But prepare for the aftershocks.
Store water, and cans of tuna fish.
Plan an escape route, and a rendezvous point.
Write messages with lipstick on the bathroom mirror
reminding yourself...
where the flashlight batteries are stashed, and how to find the pole star.

Keep a list of essentials
posted on the refrigerator: poetry, theology, an aria--
whatever works:
a ticket to Ravenna,
a menu from Provence,
a ballad to be sung at the tomb of Rachel.

And plan to go.

Very slowly springing

Two more spring flowers have burst into their very tiny bloom in my yard. (Anyone know what they are called?)











It's definitely spring now. The tiny green buds are beginning to come out on some bushes, the birds are singing all morning their many different tunes, and the bulbs in the sunny yards are blooming. I haven't renewed my gym membership, and am determined to run in the real world until the next snowstorm (which will hopefully will not be until next fall). My dear friend came to visit a couple of weeks ago, and said driving the 4 hours north it was like turning back the clock to a time before the dafodils had come out and temeratures were still in the 50s. The craziest part is that I marvel how warm it is outside, and check my handy outdoor thermometer (Thanks Dad!) to find that it is 54. A year ago I would of thought of 54 as cold. Now I know better.

We are headed to Florida on Monday where even their lows are higher than our highs. My inner sense of season is not going to know what hit it.

Outing the Pastor

Recently at an agency-wide conference, a co-worker outed me as a minister during the “things you might not know about each other” brainstorm. Afterwards, over a beer, another co-worker profusely apologized for any time she might have cursed in front of me. There was some debate about whether the guy who hired me had adequately notified everyone that a pastor was working in their midst. (He felt he had given everyone plenty of warning, but that they just hadn't been paying attention.) Finally the shocking revelation that I was, at that moment, drinking a beer. People have some very particular ideas about what a minister is.

Woodpecker

This morning I heard a woodpecker for the first time ever. I was at the end of my morning run, just a few houses away from my own. Because there are still no leaves on the trees, it was easy to follow the sound to its maker. He was a beautiful guy with black and red and white feathers, fluffy as if he still had his winter coat on. Since he let me look at him, I rushed home to get my camera. Yet somehow as the shutter was closing, he hopped further and further out of range. Fortunately I can still hear him tapping somewhere in my neighborhood.

Getting Out

This weekend my very first friend came to visit (met in a playpen, longer ago than I should mention). The Boy had a sleepover with his Nonie, Aunt, Uncle and Cousins, and me and my posse went to see Thousands of One. It was so great to be out in the world dancing. Dancing is a sacrament you know...

Welcome to Spring!

My husband and Son picked me up at work on the Equinox, and exclaimed as I opened the car door letting in a gust of cold air and a flurry of giant snow flakes "Welcome to Spring!" The following day the meteorologist called for sleet, freezing rain, hail, snow flurries and snow showers. We had them all. What is it called when snow is shaped like hail, but still fluffy and white, rather than hard and icy? I don't know either.

Yesterday the sun shone all day. I took a phone call on the back steps and discovered that my back yard has crocuses in full bloom on the sunny side, and the last of the melting snow on the shady side. Little green shoots of courageous bulbs are coming up all over the neighborhood. This morning the sun is shining again. The thermometer says 25 degrees.

Welcome to Spring!

Sunshine

The sun came out again this morning! I think that's twice this week!

I was driving up Rt. 13 and the stands of bare trees were coated with ice. The ground was white with snow, melted and re-frozen. Then I turned East and the low morning sun was shining through the top branches, shining through the ice like they were all diamond glazed. I gasped with awe. It was a perfect moment, and I tried to some how capture it as I zoomed east on the two lane highway. I was yearning for my camera, but knew this moment was too amazing to get on film. I imagined myself pulled off beside the side of the road walking up and down the shoulder trying to get the angle just right, trying to capture the vastness and at the same time each shining branch. I came to a red light, where the electrical wires, also glazed in ice melting in the bright sun. Rods of ice 5 feet long fell 20 feet and shattered on the pavement. The combination of brilliant sun and the night's accumulation of ice had met for one awesome moment and that brilliance would burn away before the morning was over.

My Dentist

I went to a dentist today, for the first time since we moved. It just wasn't right. Sure they were friendly, and the office was decorated in cheerful colors, but my California Dentist did everything differently. She did all the work herself, without the aide of hygienists. She used old-style films instead of digital x-rays. She used the manual scrapey thing instead of the new sandblasters they developed while I was under her care. She was gentle and kind. She cleaned my teeth while I was pregnant, and gave my son his first ride up and down in the dental chair when he only had 8 teeth. Because of her, he loves going to the dentist. She recently sold her practice to spend more time with her young children, so even if I was still in California, I would have a new dentist now. But in the immortal words of Joni Mitchell "You don't know what you've got till it's gone." I miss you Dr. W. You were a great dentist.

Winter Rain

Today I saw a kind of freezing rain I've never seen before. It wasn't hail, it wasn't snow, but there was a layer of it almost a centimeter thick on the ground. Weird.

Rain
Freezing rain
Snow
back to Rain

All in one day,

It's night now and the rain is dripping noisily outside.

Self Tending

In a recent article about personal practice a colleague of mine referenced “that small clearing deep inside myself, which is self tending...”

This phrase has really taken root over the days since it entered my consciousness. "Self-tending" describes something about the "self" we seek in meditation that I had never articulated before. It describes what I think of as the most amazing part of being "grown up" -- the knowledge that there is a part of myself which does not need healing and soothing to come from outside; it is self-tending. It calls to mind the word "autopoesis" which means we are also self-creating. This is one of the defining factors of a living system, that it be self-sustaining. Of course we are not a closed system; we inhale and exhale, but we are in some fundamental way self-tending.

The larger systems I am part of push and pull. What they ask from me sometimes takes me away from my self. But if I can just remember to return to my self when I am confused or depleted, I need only look for that little gardener inside who is already restoring and creating the living system that is my self.

Different Dream

The preacher said this morning that when he was a child in fundamentalist Sunday School he dreamed of a non-dogmatic religious education, one where you could ask questions and doubt.

I grew up in UU Sunday School, and wanted someone to tell me it was okay to believe in something. As a child beset from a very young age by anxiety about non-being, I needed something to have faith in. It is true that when I visited more conservative churches I was glad to know I didn't have to fit into a dogmatic box, but freedom from dogma is not enough for me. What I needed as a small child, and what I want today is simply something to get me through the nights when one feels adrift in an infinite universe, and your non-being sits like a chaperon in a dark corner of your bedroom making the "why" of life seem urgent and ever-present.

As Nancy Shaffer writes in her poem "A Theology Adequate for Night"

"But-- this may work in the night:
Something that breathes with us, as others
sleep, something that breathes also
those sleeping, so no one is alone.
Something that is the beginning of love,
and also each part of how love is completed,
Something so large, wherever we are,
we are not separate; which teachers again
the way to start over.

Night is the test: when grief lies uncovered,
and longing shows clear; when nothing we do
can hasten earth's turning or delay it.

This may be adequate for the night;
this holding; something that steadfastly
breaths us, which we are also learning to breathe."

That is my dream for religious education: to learn again and again that there is something steadfast in the universe, to learn how to remember it in the dark of the night, and to breathe.

Practice what you Preach

Every winter I say something like this from the pulpit:

"After the busy harvesting and preparations of the fall, winter can be a time to quiet down and look inside, to reconnect with family and self."

It's hard to practice what you preach.

I am the kind of person who is in constant motion. I get confused when I am sitting still. But this past week or two I have slowed so far down that I don't even HAVE a to do list. I have yarn ready for a new sweater for Dog, and It just sits there next to me while my partner and I watch the Firefly marathon on Tivo.

The downside is the angst, and the sense of being adrift.

The upside is that I am many-fold more patient than I have been since seminary. I sat with my niece this morning on our matching child-sized chairs and had an extended exploration of grapefruit and its many mysteries. My son has been giving me lessons in "how to speak Super Mario." I'm a slow student.

I haven't made any progress on balancing my checkbook, on the dog sweater, or on saving the world. In the mean time I'm going to listen to my own sermons and believe that season is coming in its turn.