New Ways of Thinking

It's all so much bigger than I thought.  It's more complex, though not necessarily complicated.  It's deeper, and wider and fuller than I realized.  God, and in a connected way, Truth, are so much more than I knew.

And I didn't just wake up one day and realize this.  It's been a gradual dawning...piece by piece, truth by truth, depth by depth.  I treasure simplicity, and I still believe in the simplicity of truth, but the edges are fuzzier and the depths...well it turns out they may be limitless.  Things don't wrap up as neatly as I thought, into tidy packets of certainty, but what I've lost in terms of surety and clean edges I've traded for breathtaking wide open spaces filled with seemingly endless possibilities.

I absolutely love

Friday Harbor!

We enjoyed a getaway on a groupon there in early October.  We stayed at the Earthbox Inn and had fun exploring the town and beach.

Some of the parks were closed because of the government shutdown, but luckily Lime Kiln Park is a state, not federal, park so it was open.

 We went to a lovely Thai restaurant before heading home.

 Ava got a rock skipping lesson from an expert....

 One of the great things about islands is that getting there and back is half the fun!

Paris

It's not always (or maybe even often?) true that highly anticipated experiences turn out to be as wonderful or even more so than the high expectations they created.

Paris sailed past the mark.

It really is a magical place, every bit as beautiful as anticipated.  The calm and largely seamless juxtaposition of ancient and modern, the serenity of the Seine that draws Parisians to it's banks all hours of the day and evening, the seemingly effortless elegance of Parisians, the warmth and friendliness we encountered everywhere, the breathtaking beauty of the gardens and the endless small touches of beauty everywhere you look, the deliciously simple food, the treasures of art right before your eyes....this list could go on for pages.

I was surprised by how deeply the cathedrals affected me.  I'd always considered myself a 'low church' kind of girl, and thought of the old cathedrals as maybe a bit ostentatious and...wasteful?  But the sweeping architecture, the simple furnishings, the intricate detail, the candles, the quiet beauty were very moving.  We must have visited 20+ cathedrals throughout our time in France and Switzerland, and I never lost the sense of awe upon entering one.  In some ways they were all similar, with a continuity of basic design, but each one was unique in it's detail and emphasis.  Most are still houses of worship today, so there was not a museum feel to them, but a living sense of worship continuing throughout the generations and centuries.


Before we left home I'd read 'A Moveable Feast" and 'The Paris Wife' simultaneously.  So one highlight of the trip was visiting the Shakespeare Book Company, a British bookstore frequented by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound and others.  I bought a copy of The Great Gatsby there.

Le Jardin des Tuileries and Le Jardin du Luxembourg were names I learned in french class when I was 16.  Now I have beautiful images in my own memory to go with the names.  Both so very lovely, and so well used by the Parisians.

All in all, this sums it up....

“As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” --Henry David Thoreau

The abundance of July

The casual miracle
of wandering out the back door
and filling a bowl
with sweet fruits
to top

my oatmeal.

Some thoughts on fertile soil of various kinds

Before I was a gardener I had a vague idea that to create a garden you chose plants that you liked and planted them in a pleasing arrangement.  After that point your role was to keep the garden free of weeds, but the garden itself was more or less 'done'.  

This has not been my experience.

I now understand that a garden is never 'done'.  It is a living, growing, ever changing space.  The plant that I planted last year isn't getting enough sun in that location, so it needs to be moved.  The plant that was so visually appealing when it was small and compact is much less so now and needs to be trimmed or possibly removed altogether.   I prune, trim, rearrange, pull out, renew the tired soil.  There are literally always changes to be made in a garden.

What I have come to realize,  even more recently, is that my faith journey is in many ways a lot like my garden.  I used to feel secure in the fact that I had a tidy packet of beliefs that were irrefutable and once I understood them, and tucked them safely away in my consciousness, I was more or less 'done'.  I still needed to learn new things but the basic framework was in place.  In one very broad sense that is still true, but on many levels it is not.  My faith has stretched and grown and accommodated many new and uncomfortable ideas.  Some have become a part of the mix, others are left on the cutting room floor.  But there is no end in sight.  My faith is a living, growing, ever changing space.  

Here is a quote from a book by Brian McLaren that meshes with and adds to my faith/garden analogy:

Doctrines don’t exist in a static linear outline where you can take out your outdated eschatology module and replace it with a new updated one, leaving everything else intact. Rather, doctrines cohere and interact in a dynamic system in which each part is related to all the others. (Brian D. McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road? p. 158)

New ways of thinking create the need to rethink not just that particular belief, but many of the others that are intertwined with it.

It's messy.  Both gardening and living life as a follower of Christ are messy. But I discovered years ago that some of my happiest moments are spent outside with my hands in the dirt.  And I've learned to love the questions, the  discoveries, the multitude of new and old voices that echo truths I sensed but couldn't express. I treasure the cloud of witnesses both ancient and modern day that help me find my way into the mystery of life in Christ and all of this has brought a wealth of new joy, energy and depth to this journey of faith.

Mystery

Penetrating so many secrets
we cease to believe in the unknowable.
But there it sits nevertheless,
calmly licking it's chops.

H.L. Mencken