Our 2lbs. of New Zealand bees arrived for pickup today. There is nothing quite like handling a seething clump of life like that. They come in a neat little crate, with the queen separated into her own little apartment. You peal back the lid and give the crate a good thump so the bees fall into the waiting hive and no doubt getting down to the work of being fruitful and multiplying. Excited!!!
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The Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor is recognized widely as one of the world’s best short story writers of all time. She was sick most of her adult life with a debilitating form of lupus and died young at age 39. She doesn’t have a large volume of work but everything she has written was brilliant and unforgettable. I loved teaching her stories to my English 12 students, introducing them to this seemingly simple woman who once said of her life that it was lived, “between the back door and the chicken coop"? What it tells you is that she must have had a rich interior life and imagination to have written as she did. What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. ― Flannery O'Connor, The Old deGroot siblings started a WhatsApp last October and though I'm not always great at staying on top of what's appening on my phone, since it is usually just laying on the kitchen counter, it has turned out to be great for staying connected in ways we were not before. We have been sharing family life, its ups and downs, keeping each other in the loop on joys and sorrows, sharing photos and memories. Some piece of our shared family story might come to mind, we share it on WhatsApp and get to enjoy our collective reflections. Maybe it's a bit of nostalgia but it's a lot of what Nial Williams is talking about when he writes, "The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer. There is no way to get there, except this way. [Telling stories] And I am reconciled to that. You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn't endure the certainty of suffering. That's how it seems to me." The interesting thing about this school photo to me is the shirt that I'm wearing. I really loved that shirt, passed down from my older brother I think, after he got a couple of school photos out of it. Also notice the black faux turtle neck which we called a dickie. Very nice for keeping warm and wearing the shirt in several seasons. It made me think of a short video we watched today called Clothing waste about the amount of cast off clothing that ends up in Greater Vancouver landfills; 20,000 metric tonnes per year. These amazing folks are trying to do something about this enormous problem but it starts in our own closets. We need to declare another fast. In the novel This is Happiness, Noel Crowe, the 17 year old narrator strikes up a deep friendship with the much older Christy who is 'sent' to the small Irish parish of Faha to sell the installation of electricity. He boards in the same home as Noel, who is staying with his elderly grandparents to get his own life sorted out.. Christy, full of life experience and folk wisdom, becomes a mentor to our narrator as the two cycle the roads of the parish, seeking to slake their thirst and pursue a legendary musician. The book's title comes from Christy, spoken one night on their cycling search. "He smiled, quoting himself: "This is happiness." It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it. I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness, and the bulky blue figure of Christy cycling across the next life would be waving a big slow hand in the air at all of us coming along behind him. 'This is happiness,' he affirmed once more, pushing off and gasp-pedalling the uphill away from further enquiry. Beneath the pinholed heaven, the night was God-dimensioned and monumental before electric light....." I'm not sure who first thought of the idea of little easters but I like that. Theologian Robert Webber said, “Every Sunday is a “little Easter.” Every Sunday of the year is a celebration of the Easter event. The work of the people in “doing the Christ event” through memory and hope is the source for personal and corporate formation into resurrection spirituality.” Lent begins with ashes, and leads us into 40 days of remembering our mortality. The little easters, the Sunday breaks from the fasting, are a weekly reminder that this is not all there is, but in Christ all are made alive. We could do with more weekly reminders that death does not have the last word and the new life is already breaking into this reality and we get to participate in even smaller Easters, every time we see it or make it happen. All things new. There are very few people who call me by the name I was baptized with and fewer that know how I happened upon the name Dennis. My parents were pretty proud of their Frisian heritage and it took a number of post immigration years before one of my siblings got a "Canadian" name. Three other siblings got sturdy Frisian names from our grandparents and so did I. I was baptized Oense deGroot, after my maternal grandfather. Growing up I could relate to Johnny Cash's 1969 song, A Boy Named Sue. Meeting new people usually left me red-faced for having to pronounce it several times, especially at the beginning of a new school year with a new teacher. By the time I left elementary school, Dennis was making his way in the larger, out of grade school, world. I have some regrets about the change, especially since it was a name that went back a few generations and though I never met him, my Pake (grandfather) Oense must have been a pretty sweet man. From what I know of him, he lived a hard and simple life as the owner/skipper of a steam-engined barge called the NoordFries, a business he took over from his father, moving people, freight and cattle around the small villages and farms along the canals and even into Dokkum and Leuuwarden where the larger markets were. If your cow was going to market in Dokkum, you would tie it to a post somewhere along the canal route and my Pake would pick it up on his way to the auction. My Pake was widowed at the birth of his second child, my mom. She likely died of blood clotting, something easily treated today. He was left to care for two young children until he married my step grandmother a few years later. As a young man he served several years in the Dutch army even protecting the Dutch border during WWI when Holland was neutral. He wrote to my great grandparents everyday when he was in the service. Those letters have survived. I grieve the fact that I never met my namesake. He was gone by the time flights to the Netherlands might have been possible. And Pake Oense, I'm sorry I never kept your name. I think my boys are happy though. I've always envied my peers who had grandparents and I love being a Pake. Noel Crowe, the seventeen year old narrator of This is Happiness by Niall Williams, is describing a fellow patron at a small Irish pub when he says, "Salty was an intelligent customer; by Aristotelian and Jesuitical reasoning he had ascertained that though Lent was prescribed as forty days and nights, the true measure between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday was forty-six, which showed Our Lord wanted human beings to have wiggle room." That is a sweet understanding of the surplus of days. In fact, around the sixth Century one of the popes decided that Sundays were feast days, not fast days, and so the time was shortened until the ninth century when it was decided that 40 was a good number, given Jesus' fasting in the desert for 40 days. So the days were added back in and were started with Ash Wednesday, with a small feast the day before, Shrove Tuesday. I still like the idea of Wiggle Room though, a recognition of our humanity, our need for grace, our need to receive it and to give it to others. Isaiah 58 has the amazing justice passage, that challenges and inspires and I was thinking of one line that goes, "If you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday." Why the phrase spend yourself? It got me thinking that we do spend ourselves in all kinds of ways, we just don't speak of it in this way. We might say at the end of a work day or week that we are wiped out, wasted, exhausted, empty. Which is actually quite close to spent. Started the day feeling like $100 and now feel like $0. But Isaiah is challenging the listener to spend themselves on behalf of the poor. Exhaust yourself, empty yourself. But he puts it out there like one of those challenges with a promise. Do this and you get that. In fact the promise is quite amazing. Spend yourself for the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed and your light will rise, your darkness will lift, you will be like a flourishing garden and like a spring that never dries up. Speaking of springs that never dry up, one of the little mysteries of Swallowfield is a little natural spring in the middle of our pasture. Our place is the high spot in the area and when it rains, the waters run away in all directions. And yet oddly at this high point is a small spring that trickles water almost all year round, even in our rather dry summers of late. It can become to me a reminder to spend myself on behalf of the poor. "Is not this the kind of fasting (this kind of Lenten practice) I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice." There was some serious coming out on the part of the bees today. With the sun warming the earth it seemed like we had bees from everywhere. These are domestic bees from someone's hive. Turns out we had just ordered two hives on Saturday to get started up again. It's been a couple of years since we have had our own bees. We wintered a Manitoba farmer's bees here for a couple of winters, 140 hives, parked near the barns from October to April after which they made their way into BC berry fields and then on to Manitoba farms. But we are going to give it another go around here on Swallowfield. There is a lot to know about keeping bees and a lot that can go wrong and cause you to lose your hives. These little creatures are so important to feeding the world and we often take that for granted. Three quarters of all plants, that produce 90% of the world's food, are dependent on pollination. Bees are the critical pollinators and they continued to be very threatened and endangered. Monocropping and pesticides are very problematic. It was encouraging to see so many out this afternoon already diving into the few blooms that we have here. |
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