Disturbing the Peace Friends, llvl

I had the most divine trip down one side of the river and back up the other yesterday. I’ve see the river from both sides now from in and out and still somehow… I love this stretch of the river.

And in the center of the trip, along a rushing stream, there was a wonderful lunch with two friends. One’s a long-term friend, my mentor since seminary, who has the astonishing knack of allowing me to mentor or perhaps minister, to her. The other is her niece, a woman with whom I sense potential for friendship, but who at the very least is a charming, charming, insightful lunch companion.

So there was catching up on the life that’s happened since last we saw one another, catching up on the bits of one another’s lives about which we had no idea and oh, more than a little time, dreaming into the future.

It’s such a rush to have those conversations. Talk about our loves and losses, our passions and disappointments, our rages and our curiosity… Intense, irreverent, inane, insane, inspirational and just flat out funny. and, oh, reassuring. Lovely to know there are folks you could get up to great good with and occasionally no good at all!

It’s important to have folks you dream with and folks who call you to account for your dreams. Let us disturb the peace (peace with a small p is just status quo) so that we can make Peace (a new, exciting, just world). Let’s do it locally, and let’s do it on a grand scheme. We’ve got friends. We’ve got the world. And we have laughter. And that’s a lot!

(wow, picking words for word search. all these years of these blogs and FRIENDS has never been a choice for me? where has my brain been?)

Containing Peace, llvl

Ah, the human heart. Or at least this human heart. Holding so many contradictory thoughts and feelings.

But I guess that’s the truth of life, isn’t it. It isn’t this or that, it’s all those things. We need to stretch past the other, very real emotions and obstacles to Peace.

There is a stunning picture making the rounds on Facebook (and I helped) of a bereft Israeli father holding a bereft Palestinian one. Moving into their grief toward Peace. How do we learn to love one another?

Loss is a lousy way to get there, but it’s sometimes the road we’re on.

I know that the visceral anger I feel at what’s going on in this world is helpful. It is that rage at what is wrong that pushes me to what is right. It mobilizes not only me but us. Here we are, in whatever haphazard way, working toward becoming a Valley with No Hungry Children. Individuals putting in their $1.25 a week or finding ways to help the project along. Making a difference because we can and because we want to.

How many lives can we touch? How many hands can join in the Peace-making efforts? So many more than our cynicism would like to believe. Peace. It’s where we want to be going, whatever else is going on in our lives. I’m grateful that my vida local is small enough that I get to know so many neighbors who are going there too…

Nature’s Pyrotechnic Peace, llvl

Oh, Pennsylvania gardens in the summer! Lush, no other word, except perhaps, pyrotechnic, which our photographer Deb suggested when sending this picture. The greenery explodes, the color pops. “Look,” gardens cry. “Celebrate!” I love the way the spikes burst out of the ground in this photo.

Flowers and plants have their own reason for doing their dance, but we’re the happy recipients of their bounty and their beauty. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vegetable gardener, a flower gardener or, like me, simply a garden appreciator, there they are, gorgeous.

Gardens require a lot of labor. Feeding the world and dazzling us with delight takes tending. I’m so grateful for folks who do the work. I’ve been a dedicated apartment dweller my whole life… I live without dirt, because i pretty much break out in hives or poison ivy in the great outdoors… but that doesn’t mean i’m not dazzled or grateful.

Life. Wild and glorious. Mother Earth is bountiful. And too often we are careless stewards of this abundance. Our approach to such beauty should be reverent and tender. Yesterday I had what i hope may turn out to have been a fruitful conversation about the benefits of boiling water vs roundup for a man beside himself because grass kept pushing up in his sidewalk.

This abundant garden is where we live. For our own sake, and for our Mother’s, why would we put poison on the ground? The Earth gives us life. Shouldn’t we, if we can’t conceive of giving life back, at least consider not poisoning what nurtures us? It seems very little to ask, especially when the world is exploding in bounty under our feet and fingertips.

You understand why painters paint and sketchers sketch and writers write, trying to embrace and honor the beauty. There are so many reasons I’m happy and lucky to live here… gardens are a pretty fabulous reason. Nature, let us be one with it. Let us be at Peace in it.

Paradise, Peace & that Pesky Fly, llvl

It was so fun showing my friends my life here in the Susquehanna Valley. Or at least the happy parts of it! And really most parts are happy parts. The pesky fly in the ointment are the things that are invisible. Hungry Children. Unemployment. All the ‘isms.

But it’s the happy parts of it that give us strength and a reason to stay steady with the work. This is a particularly beautiful part of the body of Mother Earth. Nature… gotta love it!

Added to the glory of where I live, is the great joy of sharing this Valley Beauty with my community/communities…

Sweet times with old friends are balm. All over the world, people are working on the same issues, fighting the same battles, reasoning through the same problems — with perhaps different results, and making differences where they are. And we laugh because we all need to laugh. We compare notes, and then we go back to our lives and see how we can make things different.

But in the meantime. Here’s Paradise. Halfway to Heaven! Y’all come! (and you know I’m not crazy, because Deb Slade is documenting!)

Remembering Peace, llvl

I’ve been realizing what a time of remembrance summer is for me. It seems, looking back that some of the sweetest memories were summer ones. So all summer, I’ve been doing slow and wonderful things that remind me of my family and I’ve been a watering pot. I’ve been weepy lots and lots. I miss my family. I miss Deb, lots.

I was so happy when I received the invitation for Bob’s celebration. Bob and his wife Peggy, who’s now gone about 7 years, were very good friends with my parents. The Houstons were family friends, I loved all their daughters. I love that even though we see each other only once a year or so that we have all this shared history. They know me, who I am and how I think. Our life choices have taken us in many different directions, but since we all know where we started, we can sometimes trace our way forward to where we are today. We love one another… Love simply is…

It was a beautiful day. Bob talked about how he used Sam as a model of who we wanted to be and how he wanted to age. He spoke about mom’s painting lambs in his barn. All these little moments of our lives were there to be touched and explored.

A day under the trees of remembering old memories and making new ones with cake — wow, a sheet cake that was half coconut half banana! and Tandy Kakes. PA picnics.

Small sweet, sacred oases of Peace in the midst of a challenging world. Seize those moments when you can! Life! It’s what we build and we have and what we can remember.

Defiant Peace, llvl

So much of the world is embroiled in out-right conflict. And more is stuck on fear. Sometimes it feels overwhelming. It’s awkward balancing between awareness of this and of giving into the discomfort.

Rose-colored glasses don’t work because they hide the truth. At some point we need to get to work in the muck. And just because the muck is real and sometimes huge, doesn’t mean we can’t work on cleaning up our small corner of the world.

I believe I’m best suited to do that here where I live. Together, we make small changes, and move slowly forward. let’s acknowledge that forward momentum. Celebrate. and start cleaning again! We are the answer and Peace’s small hope…

Peace with Fireworks, llvl

I live in a Valley that takes its fireworks seriously. Driving home Friday night there were fireworks dancing behind every hill.

I find it thrilling. I always have. It’s a family joy. I have a very early memory of being in a courtyard and seeing them reflect off windows. My mother enjoyed them well into her Alzheimers and dimming eyesight.

Once we established that they didn’t actually have roots in bombs, my husband has tried to like them, but frankly I think the fact that they’re set off arhythmically bothers him a lot… he can’t beat the time to a bunch of humans with matches.

But that was as far as I had thought.

Well, I knew I wasn’t a fan of the gunshot in Oakland, aside from the fact that it’s just noisy and not beautiful, there’s that old what goes up must come down problem with bullets. eeeesh.

But now I’m hearing more about those who suffer with this past-time. First it was the pets… and you can’t explain much to them. Then it’s the wildlife, and you can’t explain anything to them. And then it’s slowly making the connection about the fear this causes PTSD sufferers who can get thrown into flashbacks. And sensitive people for whom the noise is assaultive.

All the farther I’ve gotten is that perhaps there should be a rolling celebration in areas like this where there are NOT fireworks so that as towns celebrate, there are safe places to go. Seems like the Veterans and the Veterinarians could sponsor that: the Vets for Fourth of July Quiet… Maybe we need to do what they do with Halloween and trick-or-treating and allow one day in town and prosecute vigorously those folks who set off the boomers randomly in towns.

I don’t know if there’s a safe middle ground… but it seems as if we should try to keep Peace and Celebration for everyone… I don’t know… am I just reluctant to give this up? Ah… well, it’s the Sabbath… i hope your thoughts are less involved than mine. That’ll stop soon. I’ve church and preaching with poetry before that and I’ve friends arriving whom I haven’t seen for a year. Yay.

Morning After Peace, llvl

I’ve been thinking about Jeremiah… I’ve always liked that hoary Hebrew Scripture prophet — at least from a distance. I think he’d not have been a comfortable buddy. There’s more written by him than any other Biblical character. He ran around trying hard to get people to wake up! “Peace! Peace! the people cried. But there is no Peace.”

We talk easily about Peace. But we don’t do Peace. We’ve allowed ourselves to let that settle back… A few old guys on the Post Office Corner on Saturdays, and nothing much else. We want Peace or so we say, but we don’t go out of our way for it…

We don’t understand the work it is. It is as hard as war, harder. It demands compromise. It demands generosity. It demands sacrifice. It demands Love. It demands knowing we are not all that matters.

It looks both exactly the same and very different in different communities. Peace is local. Peace is global.

It’s heartbreaking right now to read the news. To see people of this nation hating… and calling it Peace. Hating people of different religious groups, while claiming oppression. Hating small children seeking the same Rights and Hopes our forebears sought. Carrying guns to shop for underwear rather than taking cookies next door to newcomers. And to see our government be so far from a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

And yet we balance these hard and sad truths with groups working to feed local children, create local liveable communities for seniors, making music across all sorts of lines. I work hard to find the Hope. I wish I had to look farther for the ugliness…

Peace. Let me be Peace. Let us make Peace. Let us keep shoving back the hatred. Isn’t that a worthy goal for this Fourth of July Weekend?

Abundance and Peace, llvl

I’m having a sobering 4th of July. Thinking about what I love about the US and saddened by some of the things I know. So my post is a sideways post. I’m choosing to remember, I’m choosing to face toward the abundance.

I’m not ignoring the challenging, I’m fueling myself and I’m reminding myself. There is so much that is great and wonderful. I can work with that. I can work for that.

I need the reassurance these proud blooms give us… because there are people who are counting on me. and you… as Pete Seeger taught us “when there are problems to be solved, let’s get all the world involved, God’s counting on me. God’s counting on you.”

Peace, baby! Happy Fourth. Celebrate today. Work tomorrow. Stand up! Step up! Be Present! Be Beautiful. (i’m a whole buncha damned bumperstickers).

Peace, Peace, cha-cha-cha, llvl

Ah, it’s sweet to dance. Sometimes, I take my life for granted and then I remember, wait Steve Mitchell has my back beat! oh, yay! And I’ve got my good friend Sue who loves to dance, and so we do. Week after week. And then sometimes, one or the other of us is away and boom, we’re back in it. Welcome to living my wonderful little vida local!

Having been “the tall girl in class” I always had to lead anyway, so i got some practice there, and Sue’s a great follower — at least in dance. In other things she’s a heckuva leader!

And dancing is pretty completely disconnected from my brain in any conscious way… once in a while I’ll find myself saying, oh, try this… but that’s sorta it. Mostly it’s just rhythmic Joy — choreographed laughter.

How excited was I when my poet friend Tom wrote this? Very!

Good one today …
Everyday too
But this one’s
With cowbells

Cowbells and Peace. cha-cha-cha.

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