Rule of the Universe #137

Never try to clean your glasses with the paper towel you just blew your nose on.

The backyard zoo

So, there is this multitude of birds in our back yard and a family of chipmunks and, most recently, a momma bunny and at least one baby bunny. Bunnies are so so cute....And nevermind our front porch robin and her two babies--always mouths open and she is running back and forth (flying actually) to bring them worms and bugs. On the way back to the porch there is always something icky in her mouth....

I sit on the deck with my binoculars and watch it all. We have a little bird bath and a dozen or so birds a day bathe there, amazing to watch.

I had begun to think this was always so and it is only now that I'm not gone most all day most all days that I've just never noticed before. So I asked Bern and she answered:
no outdoor cats.

Until last summer we always had an outdoor cat. Before that both Catherine and Millie were on the hunt and kill day after day. What a menagerie of creatures they left by the door--moles, baby squirrels, birds half eaten, lots of creatures. But they're both gone so the yard has become a cat-free-zone and the creatures are everywhere.

I truly love it, watching all this life....the zoo is open....

work comes along...

The Diocese has asked me to go do supply work at St. James' in Fair Haven next Sunday and the Sunday after. It's very flattering that they thought of me. I've lined up 4 other Sundays in July and August as well. However, the thing is, the Diocese isn't real sure where the Eucharist will be or if anyone will be there...They're paying me nevertheless so why would I complain?

The Rector left the Episcopal Church this week. It wasn't so much a surprise as it was sudden. So the Diocese is trying to find out what's going on with the congregation and who has a key and stuff like that. They might be meeting in a local school.

The Rector who left did so because the Episcopal Church is damaging his faith in God, or something like that. He's one of the ones who has been shaken up in the past decade by how horribly 'liberal' the EC is. (Point of view is everything: I think the EC is to the right of moderate!) So it is a bit ironic that they're asking me to go there. Geoff and I are as far apart theologically as Barney Frank and Rush Limbaugh are politically.

So, I'll keep you updated unless I'm held hostage until Gene Robinson resigns.

Washington is burning...

I was in DC last week and so today's heat is nothing to compare to the Nation's Capitol.

Built on a bog in the middle of a swamp, the whole city is perpetually damp and when the heat comes sweat sheets on your body on the dash from an air conditioned building to an air conditioned car. You sort of steam in that kind of heat.

I was there to lead a Making a Difference Workshop at Howard University School of Divinity. We've gotten in the door at Howard and the next step is to get credit for the workshop. It now gives continuing Education credits. I happen to think every seminarian in the country should do the workshop--course I would, wouldn't I???

I committed to have a MAD in Ct in 2011. Sign up now and sign up early....

lightening bugs

I saw lightening bugs tonight in our back yard. You might call them fireflies, but you know what they are. I see them rarely in Connecticut but when I was a child in West Virginia, they were as thick as a plague. They were everywhere.

When I was a child we would catch them in my Uncle Russel's front yard by the mayonnaise jar full. I regret to tell you that we would tear off their tails and make bracelets on our sweaty wrists and the girls would make necklaces of firefly tails in the moisture around their necks.

And did we ever let them out of the jars before we fell, exhausted and damp into our beds?

What I don't remember is how we scraped the tails off our skin after the glow finally left....Probably I don't want to know that.

I was in a restaurant in Washington, DC about a year ago. It was the night of the terrible train wreck that injured a lot of people. The restaurant was only on stop from where the accident happened. Buses were lining up to take people around the wreck area so they could get home. It was terrible. Everyone eating knew about it and we were all horrified.

When we came outside, across the street from the restaurant there was a little patch of grass, filled with lightening bugs. They blinked and blinked and we all stood in silence watching the wonder of that display.

Then life interfered. We had to go where we were sleeping. We had all had too much wine and, I remember distinctly, I had chicken livers...something you don't find too much...to eat.

And people were on there way to hospitals and some of them would die and two wars were raging and the economy was in the toilet and the world as we know it was about to implode.

But there was this: those lightening bugs took our minds away from all that for a long moment and we simply watched them flicker in the night.

my back deck

It is amazing what I see out there.

We have a family of chipmunks in our yard this year.

One came up on the deck when I was out there reading and our Puli dog was sleeping. It came up (I sat real still) and sniffed Bela, then left the way it came, climbing down the Rhododendron bush.

Today it was a group of young chickadees who were flying in and out of the trees that surround our deck. They would be on a branch high up and then simply drop like a rock and then fly to another place. I'd never seen birds drop like that before flying. I watched them for half-an-hour, moving through the foliage.

Then I thought about our Robin on the front porch in her nest. This group of 4 or 5 chickadees were obviously young. If the Mama Robin had eggs, wouldn't they have hatched long ago--like these young chickadees?

And the male hasn't returned, yet she sits on the nest hour after hour, leaving only occasionally to feed, I hope. She is so stoic about her pose. We can stop and talk to her, 4 feet away, and she doesn't flee. I still am worried about what is going on. It seems so odd to me. Where is her mate? Why is she, now in summer, still on the nest? I fret about her now.
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God loves us

I drove for a long time today behind a car with a bumper sticker which said: "Horses are God's way of telling us he loves us".

Since I was behind that car for 15 minutes or so in slow traffic, I pondered that sentiment. I think it is true. I didn't grow up around horses, but I was never far from them in my childhood. I learned to ride a horse quite young--and though it was a work horse I learned on I realized there was something remarkable about a creature that large that would do what I asked with my childish hands on his reins and my heels against his body. Riding a horse is a wondrous thing. And horses, in and of themselves, are remarkable. They are so huge, so intelligent, so social and their eyes and faces are so expressive that folks who know them well realize what a awesome gift they are.

My father, as a teenager, rode a horse to deliver the mail from Waiteville to Rocky Gap and Union. He went day after day--winter and summer--and the horse and he became bonded in a way it is hard for people who don't know horses to recognize and acknowledge.

I went to Maria's new house today and met with people I love from the staff at St. John's who I have hardly seen for a month and a half. It is difficult and problematic not to be welcome at the place I served and worked for 21 years. I understand the need for me to 'disappear' as the parish goes through what it needs to do to find the next Rector. And I feel left out and lonely because I loved those people so much for so long. So seeing the staff members was a gift to me--something like a proof that God loves us.

I gave Maria a card I found in my favorite gift shop that showed four young women from decades ago lying on their stomachs and toasting the camera with red wine. The card said:
"Wine is God's way of proving he loves us and wants us to be happy...." In vino veritas, I always say. Amazing how God's love shows up in our lives.

Sitting on Maria's front porch I heard dozens of birds and saw many of them. It's like that in our back yard--birds in abundance, lots of songs, flashes of color...birds, it seems to me, are a proof of God's love.

If you only sit still long enough and think about it, there are so many ways to know about God's love. Beauty, Hope, Poetry, Music, the face of One you Love....the air you breathe, the light in the early evening, the taste of melons, the moon and the stars....how come we don't realize how deeply and eternally we are loved by God? How come we don't?

That's what I ponder.....