"dog days"

Summer here is stretching out in hot, humid days, a moisture in the air that feeds not the wilting plants but feeds the deadly fungus on the rose leaves and provides molecular H2O rides for mesquitoes. We watch squirrels stealing drinks out of forgotten water vases on our back porch, never noticed by our varmit hound, who's passed out under his red chair. It's too hot to enjoy the cosiness of bedclothes; we all sleep under fans on "hi" and thank God in our haze of sleep for the mild a/c we use at the missionary level of 81F. It's almost too hot for eating, but for revelling in ice: iced water, iced tea, icy beer--depite the dieticians advice to drink at room temps to balance the bodily temperature. While we give thanks for electric lines and freezers, the obvious modern coolers, I think its more about water, the substance without which we'd be dead as the hard casings of worms who tried to cross the pavement and fried up brown there in the sun.

Thoughts On Work

"If you want to produce Christian work, be a Christian, and try to make a work of beauty into which you have put your heart; do not adopt a Christian pose." ~Jacques Martin

The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables." ~ Dorothy Sayers

Worshipful Rest

I enjoy the idea that our work can be our worship, but I am also intrigued by the idea that our rest is just as much a form of worship. This weekend we rested and worshipped with Elizabeth and Ryan. May our rest be always this wonderful and our worship this deep.

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Daisy time

Our daisies are in full bloom today, after a three-fold series of rain storms yesterday. The daisy tends to be abused with overuse in sentimental baby girl layettes and mistily empathetic Hallmark cards. In reality, they present a cheerful, unabridged profusion of white petals shooting out from their yellow centers, like dozens of sunny-side-up eggs flying right out of the frying pan at you, the onlooker of the garden. That's what greets our visitors these days as they pull into our drive. Prepare to be chuckled at by a host of the bright yellow day's-eyes.

Fruit of our Labours

We built and filled our little brown bed with local horse manure and nursery soil back in March, strategically located in the corner of the yard. A bit ignorant of our summer sun patterns, we now have tomatoes and beans growing in the shade with very tall marigolds reaching for the scattered light of the afternoon. Despite such experimental setbacks, we've enjoyed several rosy tomatoes and baby beets with green onions. The fight against cabbage moths was nearly lost upon our cauliflower, but Kermit rescued them with a concoction from our True Value, which became our preferred source for plants since last year's flower beds were planted. I am most happy with our two lavendar plants, which often languish in the humidity of the south, but produced handfuls of lavender wands to be dried.

Next To My Big Red Chair...

No Time Like A Good Time

You know, I have a propensity to only think about the tough stuff. Especially when it comes to work. I allow myself to be bogged down by the harshness of it, and tend not to look beyond where I am at. But seriously, is not that the way of it? Here right now in front of us is a grand world that is enshrouded in a Mystery by its Creator. And the Mystery extends into both the Spiritual and the Physical. But do I regularly take a peek into it...no. This is why I have greatly enjoyed reading Frederick Buechner's book On The Road With The Archangel. This lovely little novel is a joy to read and has more Theologically sound golden nuggets within its pages than most books sold under the title "religion."

Sample this quote: "The things the world fills time with are enough to turn the heart to stone, but the goodness of time itself is as untouched by them as the freshness of a spring morning is untouched by the yelps from the scaffold. Time is good because the Holy One made it that way and then set the heavenly bodies wheeling through the sky so there would always be a way of marking its passage. Unfortunately, not even the most devout understand this for more than possibly a day or two out of the entire year when everything seems to be going their way. The rest of the year they go around like everybody else rolling thier eyes and expecting terrible things to happen... they prefer to think that it is time itself that is terrible and that the terrible things are only another method by which the Holy One afflicts them for their sins."

Oh, so good. It is a treasure to have artists who have the ability to transfer Truth in a way in which we can understand.

the long road

Some things take a Long Time to process, which is an idea somewhat relative to the culture in which we are raised. A long time to me might be one week; most packages from Amazon.com arrive within a week, much longer of a wait than if I went downtown this very afternoon and bought from Books-a-Million. For the Lost Boys of Sudan, on the other hand, one month is hardly sufficient to learn three new English verbs in their hometown refugee camp. One of them might happily read a very small book within a year.

We watched And God Grew Tired of Us last Saturday, a documentary on the lives and fortunes of several Lost Boys. A few of them were very determined young fellows who, some 3-5 years after arriving in New York City and Pittsburg, could live fairly self-sufficiently (as they found to their sorrowful loneliness, Americans are trained to do) and began to search for family left back in Africa and for other Lost Boys scattered across the US.

Watching the movie, I remembered one young man and woman who came to our high school in Franklin, some nine or ten years ago, and only this week I learned the story behind why they were called "Lost." I also realise we ask silly questions of refugees: "aren't you so glad to be in a country where you have freedom?" Away from your homeland, much of your family, left-behind friends, the common language of the refugee camp, only to come to America and find cars that are out to kill you at all times and crowded apartments where no one meets you in the eye. Given time, America can be a good home. Give it years, and let yourself stumble diligently through work, busy roads, neighbouring strangers, to find the neighbours less strange and something familiar of your culture has been absorbed by them.

Turtle Huddle

Wlaking the dogs down to Little Beach from our house, I passed a swampy pond inhabited by turtles, cormorants, and the occasional duck or goose pair. Today, dozens of turtles in all sizes were sunning themselves on submerged logs, a few piled awkwardly on top of each other, others off on their OWN log, and big grandfather turtles waiting patiently behind baby palm-sized turtles. Soon, I can take our new, grey-turtle cloured camera down to snap some pictures for you!

Considering the Day

When the day's plans skid across my mind like a rush of cars to the common screeching halt at every stop light between our house and town, I grab a piece a paper before the light turns green and all the speedy plans rush away, lost on their own sidetracks. Composing an agenda becomes a daily habit not entirely intentional, conceived in the need for traffic management, lest the mind's highway become a mental wreck scene, each pointed plan a cell phoner screaming for policing. What life is there, I question, beyond the fly-by list of the day?

I want to see a master list that dictates the road of errands and laundry, a language pattern to describe the slow-motion ritual into which the need-plans riding in imaginary motorcars speed. All creatures have instictive Things To Do, man having the priviledge of manipulating the basics into elaborations of reality. My list is a declaration of ordered time, commanding myself with the end of pleasure in things done.

Spring Snow

Like its brother Winter, Spring
the season, pours forth a show
all in white, decking the wayside
with blossoms cloudlike as if
suspending light on shadowy branches
in the understory of the forest,
dispels the gloom of grey days
on end, leftover clouds of rain's
essential recipe, precipitation
welcome from a burdensome sky, with
the sun be buried by her leaden veil,
a light springs forth from the woodlot--
happy the seed whose funeral rites foretold
of the lacy gown on the dancing dogwood.