I do think back on my earlier parenting days with some sad regret that I didn’t waste more time with Jenny and the boys. Those are days I can’t get back. A nap in the middle of the day might be worth considering as well.
Small children have a great way of helping us to joyfully waste our time. I was reminded of that this week as our granddaughter A. was able to stay with us for a few days because her caregiver had her own sick children to look after. We had two long days, with a nap in between, to go for walks down the road to see the neighbor’s goats, to play in the sawdust bin with a clowder of cats, to greet the cock-a-doodles (meaning all chickens) take notice of the miraculous fall of golden maple leaves and pick the last fading flowers that won’t give up on summer. There are times when I can get into the over productive mode bred into my Calvinist bones and feel like I shouldn’t be wasting my time in puddles and saw dust bins.
I do think back on my earlier parenting days with some sad regret that I didn’t waste more time with Jenny and the boys. Those are days I can’t get back. A nap in the middle of the day might be worth considering as well.
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I have long had a rather complicated relationship to my name. The name given to me at birth is my grandfather’s name. The name I use, I received because I was afraid that my given name would be mispronounced, and I would be embarrassed or feel awkward. In other words, I’m named Dennis because I was afraid. But maybe my name is like the names of trees as told by an Ent in Tolkien's The Two Towers. “I am not going to tell you my name, not yet at any rate.' A queer half-knowing, half-humorous look came with a green flicker into his eyes. 'For one thing it would take a long while: my name is growing all the time, and I've lived a very long, long time; so my name is like a story. Real names tell you the story of things they belong to in my language, in the Old Entish as you might say. It is a lovely language, but it takes a very long time saying anything in it, because we do not say anything in it, unless it is worth taking a long time to say, and to listen to.” As you live out your life, you fill out your name and indeed that story gets longer and longer to tell. With dark patches, and sunny days, and days that are hard to recall at all once you’ve lived through it. And altogether they make up a life and more and more “tell you the story of things they belong to.” All day long the rain beats a steady dull drumbeat. The skies hang low above the trees and puddles in pastures become ponds. The cats hunker down in the barn and the chickens look rather bedraggled from their forays outside of the coop. We have had our glorious sunny days of late fall and now the rains must come. Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee Nation and the first Indigenous US Poet Laureate. Her poem “Praise the Rain” captures the gift of rain. “I agree with Gide that most of what is created is beyond us, is from that source of utter creation, the Creator, or God. We are technicians here on Earth, but also co-creators. I’m still amazed. And I still say, after writing poetry for all this time, and now music, that ultimately humans have a small hand in it. We serve it. We have to put ourselves in the way of it, and get out of the way of ourselves." Praise the rain; the seagull dive The curl of plant, the raven talk-- Praise the hurt, the house slack The stand of trees, the dignity-- Praise the dark, the moon cradle The sky fall, the bear sleep-- Praise the mist, the warrior name The earth eclipse, the fired leap-- Praise the backwards, upward sky The baby cry, the spirit food-- Praise canoe, the fish rush The hole for frog, the upside-down-- Praise the day, the cloud cup The mind flat, forget it all-- Praise crazy. Praise sad. Praise the path on which we're led. Praise the roads on earth and water. Praise the eater and the eaten. Praise beginnings; praise the end. Praise the song and praise the singer. Praise the rain; it brings more rain. Praise the rain; it brings more rain. No doubt there are already books being lined up at various world printing presses with titles like, 10 Lessons We Learned from Covid 19 and shortly will be on the shelves at Indigo just in time for Christmas. However, the things that we have learned during this pandemic thus far are in fact very personal. What I am learning is going to be very different from what you are learning. It has been said often in the last 20 months that we are all in the same storm, but we are certainly not all in the same boat. To this day there are some that are clinging to bits of splintered dugout canoes and others have already booked their next cruise. Same storm, different sailing vessels. That fact alone will make all the difference as to what we might have learned over these many months. I mean deep learning. Not things like, stock up on toilet paper or clean home living surfaces often. What I do mean is that there are a lot of lonely people out there and we need to get better at being friends and neighbors. We should have learned that the already marginalized were more likely to get Covid and more likely to die because our health care systems have some serious prejudices that need to be addressed. We should have learned that old folks need to be surrounded by holistic human caring. Covid has helped us to see that our climate crisis is a CRISIS!!!! That means we need to fall deeply in love with this good world again. I hope we have been able to see that of all the hundreds of thousands of folks that died of Covid 19, the coffins were all relatively the same size. Not a one of them was able to take anything with them, so let us live as generously as possible. Live with compassion and empathy and stay open to learning more lessons. Despite all of its pain and loss, Covid can also be a gift if we open ourselves to receiving it. Strange that we spend so much time talking about people and so little time listening to their voices. This is especially and sadly true in the Christian Church when it comes to LGBTQ folk and their inclusion in the full life of a church community. Poet and theologian Padraig O'Tauma in a piece called "Welcoming the Stranger" writes. "We are not afraid of the bible - and we are not afraid of the quality of our own love. We do not doubt but that God is found, sacramentally, in the love that we commit to each other every day. We are not defined by the loudest voices that define us, those voices that not only speak about us, but also seek to dictate the boundaries of legitimate responses that should come from us. This is the truth that we know. Love is hard. This is not a piece of LGBT wisdom - it is a piece of human wisdom. Love is made harder when people speak about you as an “issue” or a “debate” or a “question”.... It is right and appropriate to listen to the ones who have been the subject of policies, debates, and synodal arguments. We are not here judging the quality of the marriages, or the erotic lives, of church leaders. We are here discussing how we are discussed. And it is important to listen to us, because we are the ones most affected, in real and tangible ways, by poor language and poor listening in public society today. It is the right, Christian and moral thing to do.... LGBT people are the ones who are the authentic spokespeople on the weak quality of ecclesial welcomes thus far." O'Tauma's quiet gentle voice on this topic can be heard here at A Question of Belonging I love this time of year. The fast and the slow changing of all things. The shifting of the light, the lengthening nights and shortened days. I love that it’s cool in the morning and yet the sun can still be warm enough to make you take off your sweater. The leaves are finding earth again and the bees are busy winterizing the hive. I love the moons that balloon to twice their size in the smokey autumn night skies. The house needs just a touch of furnace to get out the chill enlivening my sense of smell with heated dust and I find myself dozing over a novel earlier in the evening than I was just a month ago. The cows are enjoying the spurt of pasture growth from the recent rains but they look to me for fallen apples and pears to supplement their diets. I find myself coming in just a bit earlier in the afternoons and the smells of dinner on the stove are almost as intoxicating as a glass of port. This is a liminal time or as Robert Frost might have said, a beguiling time. The Irish mystics talked about liminal places and times or thin places. How do you know you are in that place, where the ordinary touches the divine? Well might you find you are tearing up at something that might otherwise be so mundane. You want to respond with words but you don’t trust your voice not to waver. Last night we entered that liminal space with some of our Indigenous brothers and sisters on the first ever National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. The air was chill as the drum beat out the women’s warrior song and we walked with guttering candles among the crosses to remember the First Nation’s children buried in unmarked graves in school yards across this country. So much work to do. So much healing that is needed. So good to be there together. My hope rises. Great creator move the hearts of this nation. |
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