a week away....

With a coating of snow, it's not hard to believe Christmas is a week away--but the temperatures forecast for the next week are back in the 40's, maybe even 50 on Christmas Day!

Bern has spent the day rearranging furniture! I stay out of the way!!! I would probably never move a piece of furniture across the room, much less upstairs to downstairs. I just lay low and pray she doesn't hurt herself since I'm still no help because of my knee immobilizer.

Plus, she doesn't want me helping anyway....

First it was the candy houses that focused her for days. Today, and probably tomorrow, whole rooms with be transformed by her single-handily. Bless her energy. I'll just stay out of the way.

I've already finished and illustrated her story for this year and since she only drove me away for one day, she must have finished whatever she made me.

Our children know to donate money--hopefully to pet rescue groups--for our presents.

My little gifts are all in bags on the table beside me.

We've discussed the Christmas Day menu.

All that's missing are the kids/their spouses and the grand-daughters....

But that's good enough to wait for a few more days.

Waiting, after all, is what Advent's about. It just makes the gift sweeter to wait on it....

ok, now it's New England

Today I'd been driving and when I started to get out of the car--still awkward because of my knee immobilizer--the wind blew the cold, cold air against the car door and shut it on my good leg!

I've lived in New England for 36 years (+2 years in Cambridge for Grad School)--that's 38 years, It's 55% of my life that I've been a resident of the (thankfully) blue-state New England. There's an old joke in Connecticut: the first hundred years are the hardest....It takes a while to 'become' a New England-er, but I think I now qualify.

And today it was officially New England. The temperature plummeted 25 or more degrees from yesterday and the wind got angry. Wind chill tonight is below zero. And will be all day tomorrow, if the Weather Channel is to be believed. (Though, since we're in Trump-world, why believe the National Weather Service any more than the CIA?)

But it snaps back on Sunday to high 30's/low 40's and may be in the 50's part of next week and ON CHRISTMAS DAY!

So, New England lives for 48 hours or so and then we're back to what we're becoming--part of the Mid-Atlantic states: Maryland, Virginia, Delaware...places like that.

But it can't be 'climate change', Lordy, no! That was canceled out by the Presidential Election.

Maybe everything here in Trump-land is simply becoming more like Mar-a-lago.....

The moon, the moon

As bright as could be, nearer earth than it really is, just off our back porch to the east: a full as full can be moon. Oh, my Lord.....

I realize I've written about the moon many times before. I found a couple of them for you....

Saturday, November 22, 2014

The moon

Tonight, as I stepped out on our chilled deck to smoke a cigarette (I know! I know! Don't chide me about it! The cold does more to curb my smoking than all my friends' warnings....) I looked up, as I always do, to find the moon.

It's too overcast to see her, but I looked anyway.

Today I was sorting through all the 'paper' of my past, and found a poem I wrote a decade ago about the moon. I was sure I must have shared it in the 1100 or more posts on this blog, but when I typed 'moon' into the blog search box, I got several hundred responses (I mention the Moon a lot) but none that was this poem. So here it is, from November 26, 2004--4 days short of 10 years ago.

THE MOON

OK, so I'm out on the deck smoking a cigarette
and drinking red wine.
What I'm really doing is watching the moon
through the trees in this, my now favorite tiime
of the year...when all is bare, stark, dying and thin...
knowing what comes next is new life.

Most people I know would chide me for smoking
and more than a few would deride my for
the red wine--but I no longer care.

What I care about is the moon, the moon, the moon.

I know why countless ancient folks worshipped the moon.
Why wouldn't one worship what brings dime light
to deep darkness and moves the seas.

Like the seas, the moon moves me.
Outward into the great chill of the ionosphere and beyond...
though I will never possess the moon, she draws me near,
though I will never own her, I worship her.

When the waxing ceases and the waning begins,
the moon pushes me back, deep inside myself,
down along a dim passage I seldom have walked,
to a door to a room I don't remember knowing,
and I open the door...and there I find, the moon.

So I stand and stare, wishing to know more,
longing to possess the wondrous brightness of it all.
Waiting on my deck, smoking and drinking, watching this only:
through the bare trees--the moon, the moon, the moon....

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

The moon, the moon....

The moon, in the sky beyond the half dozen hemlocks beside our back porch, is as full as it can be in the eastern sky.

OK, I know the moon doesn't really shrink and then swell, it's all about the earth blocking the sun that reflects off the moon. I know that. But I like to think the moon does really shrink into darkness and then swell into wholeness. It seems right.

"Lunatic" comes from the Latin for 'moon'--luna. And I truly believe the moon has an effect on the way we are.

At St. John's, all the years I was there, we dreaded the full moon. Crazy people got crazier and people who didn't seem crazy got a little bit crazy.

Folks in the Soup Kitchen acted out a bit more. Street People became more aggressive. And a Vestry meeting on the night of a full moon would devolve into nonsense.

No kidding.

I actually knew today that the moon would be full tonight. I had this energy unlike my normal energy--just a little off the grid. I said things to people I probably wouldn't say at a quarter moon or half-moon and never in the dark of the moon.

I like believing the cosmos has some power in our lives. Like the moon drives us a bit. And the seasons make us different. The Spring 'me' is different than the late Autumn 'me'.

We are looked over and driven by the stars. Don't tell me astrological signs are meaningless. I am Aries on the cusp of Torus and that rules my extroversion and my irony. I really know that.

If you get a chance, go out and look at the moon tonight or tomorrow night. A full moon is a lot of energy. Really.






(back to 12/12/16)

I'm just into the moon in a way I don't understand. Maybe I'm into it because I don't understand why. That would be 'moon-like' after all....

Open Letter #6

I've been a while, Morgan, Emma, Tegan and Ellie. I've been living day to day knowing that for a few more weeks Donald Trump isn't 'really' President of our nation. Not yet, dear Lord, not yet.

I've been in deep denial that he will ever be your president (our!) but denial really isn't much more than a river in Egypt.

I have to face the facts (even though Donald doesn't!) and admit this is going to happen and happen soon.

I think I mentioned he said "millions" voted illegally with no basis in truth.

Since then he's taken credit for keeping a thousand jobs in the US (while actually a multi-million dollar tax break by Indiana did).

*He's taken on SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and Alex Baldwin again on twitter for making fun of him. (The boy hasn't learned the adage that 'all publicity' is 'good publicity'. Most people would be delighted to be made fun of on SNL! But not thin skinned Donald....

*He's not receiving the daily 'security briefings' a President Elect should be getting. He says he doesn't need to be told things over and again and to 'brief him' if something new comes up.

*Plus, and the worse yet for the future, he has said the CIA report on Russian hacking in order to influence the election isn't accurate. Well, maybe, if he doesn't believe the CIA about that, he doesn't believe them about other things and simply doesn't want to hear from them!!!!

People all over the political spectrum have eyes rolling out of their heads and eyebrows having to be scraped off the ceiling. If the President doesn't trust the CIA, who does he trust? Brite-Bart news? Putin? His own intuition? His own 'imagination'?

In a little over a month, he's going to be the Commander in Chief and the boss of the CIA. Will he simply 'fire' the CIA like he fired people on his TV show?

This my beloved grand-daughters is a moment verging into the surreal. The CIA stands between all of us and lots of evil. And the man who will be President (in spite of my denial....) doesn't believe them????

Lordy, Lordy.

I'm not just saying that as folksy Appalachian-speak. I'm calling on the God of the Universe to help us.....

Lordy, Lordy, Lordy.....

Love  you girls like I love my own heart, because you are. Granpa....

Advent III

I was ordained in 1975--so, I've been preaching almost every Sunday for most of 41 years.

In the Episcopal Church, the Sunday readings are on a three year cycle. So, the same lessons show up every three years. I don't usually use a text or even an outline for a sermon, but I do write them out many weeks and store them in my computer.

One of the ways of 'cheating' in preaching is to go see what you said one of the other times on Advent III, for example. Just to get ideas, you understand, not to preach the same sermon over and over...

So I looked up Advent III in my sermons and found one from 2013--three years ago, so on the same readings. But the more I looked at that sermon, the less I could remember preaching it. Writing and preaching are vastly different experiences. I looked at Advent III, 2013 in Emmanuel Church's service book and low and behold, that day the churches I serve were cancelled by snow! No wonder I couldn't remember the sermon....

So I used it today and here it is for  you....

Advent iii, 2016

          John Baptist was out of control.

          He lived in the desert for years—eating only what he found in the wilderness. He did not participate in society—instead he railed out dire warnings to the sand and the rocks. He wore strange clothing he had fashioned from animal skins and never cut his hair. Little wonder then that when he appeared from the wilderness, proclaiming that the Kingdom was near, people were both frightened of him and yet almost irresistibly drawn to his strangeness.

          And one thing John never forgot—he was a ‘prophet’ of the One Who Was To Come. His whole life and everything he did pointed, not to himself, but to another. He was to make the Way straight—to clear the ground for the Coming One of God. He was not ‘the One’—he was the forerunner, the harbinger, the messenger of One greater than him.

          Little wonder then, when John found himself in prison, soon to lose his head for daring to condemn the royal family, that he suddenly wondered if his life-work had been in vain. Had he made the rough ground smooth or had he wasted his time and energy…had he failed to fulfill his only mission in life?

          John sent disciples to Jesus. “Are you the One?” they asked him.

          “Are you the One, or are we to wait for another?”

          In all the gospels, Jesus almost never gives a direct response to a question. He either asks a question in return or tells a story or gives what seems like a non sequitor in reply.

          His response to John’s disciples is no different. Instead of answering their question—instead of claiming to be The One all Israel was awaiting—he tells them to go back and tell John what they see and hear.

          “…the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised and the poor have good news brought to them…..” Jesus tells the disciples of John that what he “does” should answer the question of who he “is”.

          Jesus’ words echoed the description of the “holy one” from the prophecy of Isaiah. His identity is found, not in who he ‘says’ he is, but in the works he does.

          When John heard the message he must have realized that he had fulfilled his mission. John must have known that Jesus was “the one”.

          It is really no different for any of us. The proof is in the pudding. By the fruits we will know who someone truly IS.

          The Kingdom is near—the Kingdom is always near, always ‘at hand’, always just out of the sight of our periphery vision. Close, but ‘not yet’.

          So the question is not, ‘who do we say that we are?” The question that matters is how do we live into the coming Kingdom? How do we lean into the reign of God? How are we part of the in-breaking of Light into the Darkness?

          We are the children of the Kingdom that was and is and is to come. We are God-bearers, Light bringers, the vehicles of healing in this tragic and suffering world.

          It is not who we ‘say’ we are that draws the Kingdom nearer. The Kingdom is unveiled in our midst by what we ‘do’.

          Advent is not simply a time of ‘waiting’ for the Coming One. It is a time to ‘prepare’ to welcome the Kingdom just at hand.

          Make straight the road of Kindness.

          Smooth out the way of Compassion and Generosity.

          Tear down the mountains on Indifference and Judgment and build highways of Love and Inclusion and Acceptance.

          Through the Wilderness make a path for Forgiveness and Mercy to walk on.

          We too must ‘prepare’ the way of the Lord.

          We are the ones for whom the Kingdom waits.

          We are the ones God is expecting to welcome the Child.

All this is expressed beautifully in the Wisdom from the Hopi Elders. Listen….

          There is a River flowing now, very fast. It is so great and swift that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.

          Know this: the River has its destination. The Elders say we must let go of the shore, push out into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.

          At this time of history, we are to take nothing 'personally'. Least of all, outselves. The moment that we do that, our spritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

          The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!

          Banish the word 'struggle' from your attitude and your vocabulary.

          All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

          We are the ones we’ve been waiting for….

          We, you and I, are the ones to lean into the Kingdom.  Amen.

Im-mo-bil-ize

"Immobilize" is the verb of the noun of the thing I've worn on my right leg since September 28. That noun is "immobilizer".

It is a fabric brace with a three inch flat metal piece in the back and two one inch flat metal pieces on the right and left and four Velcro tabs to tie it on. And it does it's job. It, according to Merriam-Webster, serves to 'reduce or eliminate motion of the body by mechanical means'.

Velcro, metal and fabric doesn't seem very 'mechanical' to me--but it damn sure works.

I wore this thing 24 hours a day except for bi-weekly and horrifying showers without being able to put weight on my right foot, except for my toes--from September 28 until November 14. All that time I wore the immobilizer and used crutches (which I suck at!). Since November 14, I can walk with a cane and drive again. But watching me get into and out of a car with an immobilizer on should make America's Funniest Videos.

I've been having Physical Therapy almost since surgery, but even though I do that without the brace, the brace is still 'immobilizing' my life.

I hope on December 19 that Dr. Shai ('Shaw') will take it away.

My knee is still stiff though I can bend it to 110 degrees and walk easily without the cane at PT. I can even go up steps at PT without the brace.

I'm still (except when sleeping without the brace and taking showers without terror) made immobile most of my waking life.

Here's my advice: never, ever rupture your quad muscle on either leg.

Heed that advice well....Or find out what 'immobile' really means (Merriam-Webster come to life....)

opposites attract--thank God!

If opposites didn't attract I wouldn't have been married to Bern for 46 hours, much less 46 years!

Here's an example: 'focus'.

Bern gets really focused on things. Like today, I came home to find her working on the candy houses she's making for our three oldest granddaughters. I complimented her on how they were shaping up. I think she grunted in reply. It may have been a sigh or a growl, but it tipped me off to keep several rooms and hopefully, a floor between us this afternoon.

When she is in 'focus-mood' best not try to do 'small talk'...or any talk! If the house were on fire I would risk telling her--but 46 years is long enough to learn when to back off.

I, on the other hand, could be doing brain surgery and carry on a conversation about the weather! Which, as I think of it, is a good reason for me not to do brain surgery.

I don't have much 'focus' at all. I mean, I can get things done, but I don't go 'into myself' like she does. I'm an extrovert and she's an introvert and that explains things around the edges. But not fully....

You see, when she's 'candy house focused', I want more than anything to 'chat' with her. Since I don't 'focus' like she does, I (somewhere deep inside of me) want to prove she doesn't 'focus' like she appears to. Why? So I can prove she can't do something I can't? 'Opposites' are a red flag before my bull? Or, most likely, I am toward ADD on the scale, like she and my daughter say....

"Focus" and attention disorder. Thank God opposites attract....