Currently reading

• Look at the Birdie   --  a collection of short stories by Kurt Vonnegut
• The New Evangelicalism-Freeing the Church from Western Cultural Captivity by Soong-Chan Rah
• Eating Animals  by Jonathan Safran Foer
• A Timbered Choir -- poetry by Wendell Berry
• The Writer's Desk by Jill Krementx, who, coincidentally, was married to Kurt Vonnegut.  It is a collection of portraits of writers and their thoughts about their workspaces.

A Busy Day with Ava

Ava and I spent the afternoon together, as we do most Fridays.  Today we:

• finger painted with banana pudding
• worked together to vacuum and mop the floor (post pudding)
• watched 'Heidi'--the Shirley Temple version
• danced to James Taylor
• read Each Peach Pear Plum for the first time (so fun to share my favorite books with her as she moves beyond the board books only stage )
• fed the ducks at the pond (in the rain) and tossed pebbles off the little bridge for awhile
• came in to get warm and had cocoa and popcorn by the fire
• played Polly Pockets and dress up
• made apple pancakes with rhubarb sauce together for dinner

A fun day with my sweet girl!

A Local Meal--more or less

Homemade soup , homemade honey whole wheat bread , homemade applesauce  and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies (homemade, of course :).  I've obviously been listening to 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle' on cd, read by author Barbara Kingsolver.  The soup contains local sausage, the bread contains locally milled flour and local honey, the applesauce is from our tree (via the freezer), and the cookies aren't really that local.  But I'm feeling pretty inspired to continue to serve and eat more and more whole foods that are not more well traveled than I am.

The Natural World

The thoughts below are from a daily meditation that I receive via email each day from Richard Rohr (thank you Betty Cribbs!!). It just makes a lot of sense.  The way that we live, more or less insulated from the natural world and largely believing that we have conquered it, seems logical, and, well, natural to us.  But it's really a very new way of thinking and living in terms of the span of human history.

The modern/post-modern self lives largely  in a world of its own construction and reacts for or against its own  human ideas.  We have disconnected  ourselvesfrom nature, from the givens of life, from the only world that people lived in for most  of human history.   This, as much as anything, may explain  the loss of soul. When you read the writings of Francis of  Assisi, you see he is calling  everything in nature brother  and sister.  Now what would make  a man call the  natural world brother and sister?  Well, it means he learned how to live there  and somehow got  connected with it.  Francis  recognized that the  soul that he had was also over there! Now until you come to that moment,  there is no soul initiation.  You live in what modern psychology and philosophy call the state of alienation, the state of separation.  You don’t  experience yourself as r adically connected or radically belonging to this universe. Adapted from The Soul, The Natural World,  and What Is

: The whole earth is full of God's glory!

The path gets a second chance

I've always loved the pathway on the west side of our house, and have thought of it as my 'secret garden'.  It's been a shady, somewhat secluded little area, full of ferns, hostas, columbine,  and lady's mantle, much of which I brought from Baba's property before it was sold.  But last summer the serenity of the path was dealt a severe blow.  Our neighbors pulled out the hardly-rotten-at-all wood retaining wall and picket fence that was attached to the top of it, and replaced it with massive blocks of grimy concrete.  It was no longer a shady habitat, afforded no privacy whatsoever, and the concrete wall conjored up visions of prison yards.  The plants along the retaining wall side were destroyed.  It was a sad little place.  I didn't take any pictures, not being of a masochistic nature. But this spring we had a lovely cedar fence built along the property line, which restored both a measure of privacy and the shady environment of previous years.  It is now a tabla rasa, which is not such a bad thing.  I came across a photo of the path from another year in the midst of its summer jungle-like lushness.  I've taken a picture of it now,  as it is being readied to begin to come to life again.  Stay tuned....

Help one person at a time, and always start with the person nearest  to you.
--Mother Teresa

Henri and the House of God

The writings of Henri Nouwen for me serve as anchors in what at times feels like a sea of confusion. I have a little book called "The Essential Henri Nouwen". It has small excerpts from various of his writings, so it lends itself well to being used as a daily devotional. This is part--actually most- of what I read today. It concerns prayer as the House of God.

The more deeply we enter into the house of God, the house whose language is prayer, the less dependent we are on the blame or praise of those who surround us, and the freer we are to let our whole being be filled with that first love. As long as we are still wondering what other people say or think about us and trying to act in ways will elicit a positive response, we are still victimized and imprisoned by the dark world in which we live. In that dark world we have to let our surroundings tell us what we are worth. It is the world of successes and failures, of trophies and expulsions, of praise and blame, of stars and underdogs. In this world we are easily hurt, and we easily act out of these hurts to find some satisfaction of our need to be considered worthwhile.

As long as we are in the clutches of that world, we live in darkness, since we do not know our true self. ....In prayer, however, again and again we discover that the love we are looking for has already been given to us and that we can come to the experience of that love. Prayer is entering into communion with the One who molded our being in our mother's womb with love and only love. There, in the first love, lies our true self, a self not made up of the rejections and acceptance of those with whom we live, but solidly rooted in the One who called us into existence.

--Henri Nouwen, from The Return of the Prodigal Son