Sweet Festival Flower Moon Peace

The Flower Moon is doing her job. Gardens are just quivering with delight. Trees are loaded. Peepers are peeping. It’s Spring, dadgummit!

It’s cool today, but the sun is shining.

A half a block away from my house two large metal sculptures are for sale. One is an almost full sized elephant head. The other is a saucy dragon. oh yeah.

It’s my party. which the whole town threw just for me, or that’s how I’m looking at it.

In villages all across the Susquehanna Valley, indeed our country, maybe even our world, people are celebrating Spring. They’re strolling in small towns, eating festival foods, greeting their neighbors, hanging out with their friends and having a good old time.

My husband’s playing in the park from 11:30-12:30. Go bang a drum with him.

(I’ll be at the food court, meeting my buds!

And coughing, yes, and coughing. But I just visited my favorite pharmacist, so I can at least mask the symptoms! Because I certainly don’t want to stop the flowers!

Bright wonderful Festival Peace be with you. Happy Birthday to my 3 birthday buddies and blessings to Ro and Arlyne who at long last are getting married! Celebrate! Create Community. and just flat out enjoy!

Gathered Sabbath Pink Moon Peace

I’ve been hanging out with dear friends at their new home. It’s a gorgeous Pink Moon kick-back spring weekend. Not too warm, not to cool.

I’m about an hour and a half south of where I live, so the daffodils, forsythia, and dogwood are well started.

We’ve listened to music, visited galleries and food markets, eaten: cuban food, local ice cream and my friend’s very good cooking. We’ve seen the sights: the parks, the libraries, hospitals, churches, college campuses and gorgeous old houses.

Tomorrow, I’ll preach, but after that, it’ll be a lot the same!

This is a sweet Sabbath weekend. And I’m drinking in the Peace of time with friends who are exploring new possibilities and new realities!

Community Pink Moon Peace

For a woman raised in a very calm and quiet household, lord love me, i adore a little chaos. (Particularly if I have a quiet place to retreat to afterwards.)

When I was an exchange student and I went from having two fairly quiet siblings to having four fairly noisy siblings, while I missed home, I thrived.

And found a way to fit in. And continued to treasure the quiet moments.

Maybe because belonging to a group, my family and my church community, were so safe, I don’t mind watching the chaos swirl if it’s benign and building community.

I believe in community. I find it healing and inspiriting. It welcomes you home and kicks you out. It makes it possible to do things you can’t do alone. It’s a good thing.

and when laughter and hilarity ensue from learning about important things. hurrah. That happened for me yesterday. And because it’s the Season of the Pink Moon, there was an entire wonderful collision of holidays to celebrate… Making memories. Making sense. Making Community.

April Fools and Lunatics

Well, we woke up and the ugly laws are still there. Laws that say that what I believe means that I may forbid you services: health, food, housing. The Fools say: oh, we didn’t meant tha-at. The Lunatics say: this is not acceptable. Peace is inclusion.

This country was founded, with flaws, it must be admitted, on civility and citizenship.

Every amendment we’ve made to its founding has been for greater inclusivity.

But there’s something about homosexuality and this moment in history that makes us think it’s ok to say you’re less than human. And it seems that has given us permission to step up our racism and our misogyny.

Lots of people sitting back and smugly shaking heads that this just proves how crazy people are. It’s not the right reaction. We have to stand up and change the laws. We have to stand up and shop other places. We have to vacation other places. Wake up. Stand up. Speak up. Step up.

As I write, I realize beloved nephew is getting married in Arkansas. So Miss Wake up. Stand up. Speak up. Step Up, Priestess had better figure out how she’s going to respond when there.

Everyone has worth and dignity. Everyone is precious. People of faith and philosophy had better figure that out. We’re here to celebrate creation and create community.

Watch out April Fools whose jokes have turned mean. We are Pink Moon Lunatics for Peace. and we vote, in the voting box and with our dollars.

Needed: Pink Moon Sabbath Peace

The world needs a Peace that’s pregnant with possibilities. It needs a Peace that holds that Life is sacred and stops for a moment just to be present to it.

This weekend, which is the weekend of the first Sabbaths in the Pink Moon is just such a weekend to contemplate that Peace. Spring is, snow notwithstanding, burgeoning. This is a moment in time where everything seems possible.

Maybe we need to take a pause, relax and refresh ourselves… and as the song says: start all over again.

Right now, we’re watching one jihadist who grew from a basketball-loving kid — but there are thousands of them. The fault is not just in them, it is in a world that fosters that need for structured hate.

In moments when I feel most hopeless when I see what’s going on “over there,” I have to remember that some of that started here. I can’t do much about over there. I can do something, no matter how small about over here. Because today it’s Minneapolis, tomorrow it could be the Susquehanna Valley. Despair has made itself at home in a lot of people. And lest we point fingers at one religious group, let us remember our white supremacy groups of which my home state has so many. It’s the same hate, it just dresses differently.

We then, are the answer, the antidote, we and the inspiration of this beautiful spreading Spring and a new Moon of Possibilities. Let us pray… and then let us get to work!

First Addition to the Village: Daycare

One of the first challenges in taking custody of a 4-year-old was in finding daycare. Lots of folks were quick to offer up recommendations – church and other private daycare programs that seemed ideal on the surface but that had stringent behavioral criteria for the children they cared for. Rules like “no biting”, “no bad language”, “no hitting” were amongst the offenses that could result in being asked to leave the program. While I might have previously agreed that these offenses in a preschooler were suspension worthy, now that I had my own child who came preprogrammed with these as his default settings, I couldn’t take the gamble that he wouldn’t express his true colors all day long.

So then who in the community do we turn to that will provide daycare to our less than perfect young ones? It didn’t seem that it was going to be the places that took care of our neighbor’s or colleague’s kids! Luckily, we found out that there are some AMAZING caregivers in publically funded Child Development Centers and Headstart programs providing nurturance, guidance, positive behavioral support and care to kids! I also don’t think that I could have found a more saavy and seasoned behavior manager who also managed to love our son at his most unlovable moments than I found in our beloved “Miss Danielle”. We talked a lot with Miss Danielle over the year – trying to figure out what set off tantrums, how to soothe anger, how to build friendships, what rewards motivated good behavior – and when it was time to graduate from preschool, Miss Danielle had tears in her eyes as she presented our son with a signed book about a Little Engine that Could.

Sometimes members of our village aren’t where we expect them to be. Miss Danielle was not in the cushy private daycare that caters to the kids of professionals and receives fabulous ratings on all measures. But boy were our preschool days better because of her presence with us! Where are you looking for your village? Who do you really want in your community? Are you stuck because the box in which you search is too limiting? Perhaps it’s time to expand or abandon your box. Who knows, maybe your “Miss Danielle” is just on the outside of yours too…

An Oasis of Calm and Mischief Gets Built

Ann: Hey Everybody! Say Hello to Maia… Maia! Talk to us about families and communities, will you?

Maia: When, in 1996, Hillary Clinton made it known to the world that It Takes a Village to raise a child, I had no idea how true those words would someday become to me. In my work as a child psychologist, I had observed many times how “others” in children’s lives had stepped up to be the difference in their world, so I guess I had an inkling of the importance of community in raising kids. However, it wasn’t until just about 3 years ago when the foster care agency dropped off an adorable, smart-as-a-whip, behavior-disordered, attachment-challenged, 4-year-old alien at my door that I really began to understand the place that the village has in helping to raise our children.

At the time my partner and I decided to adopt, we were already feeling pretty good about the community we had around us – family members (both biological and chose), friends, coworkers, church members – lots of good folks who were cheering us on in our pursuit of adding a child to our happy, coupled life. The ideal of community support seemed to be there and we were ready to take on whatever child was to come our way. We were ready, but the community that we thought would be there maybe wasn’t quite so ready for the challenges that came with the amazing child the universe had chosen for us.

As our default village started to be less present in our lives, our challenge, then, became to figure out how to surround ourselves and our new son with other people, a new community, a welcoming village; those folks who were willing to be an important part of our lives…to nurture him and us, to challenge us to be the best people we can be, and to help to hold us accountable to giving back to others as well. Little by little we have found the members of our new village. They have not always been those we would have predicted, but they are folks that we hold near and dear to us. I hope that in telling our story of creating our village, others who are also looking for a village will find hope and inspiration while creating their own…

Where Hate Lines Become Peace Lines

It is exactly where hate happens that we have the largest opportunities to turn things around.

Whether hateful activities are to be the place of Peaceful ones or to be the catalyst for Peaceful movement in other places isn’t what matters, what matters is that hate keeps moving us toward Peace.

We don’t understand hate as hate. The kids on the fraternity bus (and their parents, for goodness sakes) can twist themselves to believe that racist slurs aren’t racist. Senators can convince themselves that the law doesn’t pertain to them… that’s where hate is… and it’s exactly there that it needs to stop.

We’re the ones to turn hate lines into Peace lines. We can start it on our own, we can be a point of Peace, but we want to connect those Peace points into line. Because together we are strong. Together we can. Peace. We can do this. The Peace sap is running, let’s boil it down to its full sweetness… in what’s left of this Sugar Moon… Let’s be present to the possibility of Peace, shall we? and erase those lines of hate.

New Peace under the Sugar Moon?

A friend of mine, an amateur but dedicated astrologer, says that we’re in the midst of a large breakdown of societal structures. And that things are spiraling.

Don’t believe in astrology?

Okay, let’s read the newspaper.

Same message.

Determined assaults on public food, healthcare and shelter. Facile racial and religious slurs and hate crimes.

What’s to be done? One response has been the purity movements we’re seeing. They’re causing death and mayhem.

If we remain lackadaisical about this, the purity movements will win and hate will become even more entrenched.

Celebrating diversity and building civilization on that is hard work, no way around it. And it’s necessary. We are the ones. Peace is waiting for us. And creation is under assault while we don’t act. Let us be Peace on Earth. Let us distill the sweetness still here under this Sugar Moon.

Sweet Sabbath for Sugar Moon Peace

An Anglo and a Palestinian woman walk into a doughnut shop: time to make the Peace.

Sometimes it’s that simple. Meeting up, in public places, so people get used to seeing women with and without headscarves sharing sweetness. Giggle for Peace. Share a pastry. Spend time with friends to build community.

It’s heartbreaking really, what’s going on in the world, all the places people were being killed. We named them, all the martyrs, all the ravaged lands, including our own.

Kindness, we need more kindness. Give up on your need to have others be wrong. Reflect on what you can do better. I’m not going to solve the problems in Africa or the Middle East. I can keep building community here. I can go out for a sweet slice of life in the name of friendship and wind up having it be Peacemaking.

If that’s not keeping a Sabbath holy, I don’t know what is. And every day is a holy day. This is the season for boiling our inclusive instincts down into kindness and compassion. Sugar Moon, indeed!

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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