Busy Weekend (Sabbath) Peace!

What a rich weekend. Friday night at King Street Coffee House and great friends playing. Doing ceremony — a sad tribute to a lovely woman. An evening all about friends and listening to a dear friend who just gets better and better.

Today is jam-packed. Church (preceded by choir!). A friend in a play (and the reviews have been great.) And then more friends in another short road trip to hear EG Kight sing again.

A couple years ago EG Kight came very close to dying. And did not. But they didn’t know if she would ever sing again, let alone write, let alone tour. She’s back, her voice is better than ever, and although the touring is hard work, she packed a three hour show. Never less than her best.

And she is so encouraging. She’s played with one local musician before, and she brought him up. But she’d heard about a young man called him out of the audience and handed him her guitar. And then coaxed the best out of him and let him coax the best out of her. It was lovely. Such generosity.

So you know me. I’m a bide-at-home kinda girl. But once in a while, you have to make the effort to enjoy the bounty. And doesn’t that seem ridiculous.

I know this area is rich. But every area is. Feast and give thanks.

You can’t help but be at Peace when you’re sitting in a crowd listening to someone belting out the blues. (Most of the time I could even let the young talking kids in the front off my indignant that’s-no-way-to-listen-to-a-concert fuddiduddiness!) Music. Theater. Ceremony. Community. Faith. It’s a weekend worth celebrating and a Sabbath worth indulging, and making sacred. Oh, and there were moments of sublime beauty. It’s Peace if we give it a chance.

FrostyMoonLunacyOct25

Peace at the Edges

and in the middle… It’s where we look for it… or it’s where we look that we must place it. or where we live that we must make it… Peace can be made everywhere.

It’s really up to us.

But it’s urgent, I believe that. Needed by people and by planet.

Peace.

My heart is with our daughter and granddaughter as they let go of a man they loved. Ed Lund, we are grateful for your life and our presence in it. Today, your East Coast Family will sit by a fire and remember both that we loved you and that we love one another.

HarvestMoonLunacyOct10

A Voice, A Foreign Life, Peace

My world could not be more different from the world of the Inuit on the Hudson Bay of almost a century ago.

So going to 100 year old what passed for a documentary then and expecting to do much more than observe from a distance is usually unrealistic.

But Tanya Tagaq and her musicians totally changed that. Tagaq is Inuit. She has studied the music and has lived in the climate. She has both in her ears and her body and her soul. And last night, she opened them to us.

It was inspiring and transformative. It moved past the film maker’s insistence that the Inuit are charming and hapless. It made everything that happened in the film beautiful and infused it with wonder.

She sees her voice as a whole body instrument. She sees all of life as one. She was the wind. She was the dying seal. She was Nanook and his family.

And we were invited to see the Peace of that very hard and beautiful life.

What a blessing.

HarvestMoonLunacyOct1

Sky, Love, Peace

I am, and always have been, a concrete priestess. I’m not terribly comfortable with many things present in the out-of-doors… like bugs and slithering things.

But when you finally get me out there I have a great time. Because hey! Mother Earth. Nature.

And when Nature is at her most glorious, you have to just go with it, right?

I’m so glad i worked as hard as i did to get there on Sunday. And that I pried my beloved out his… oh, I’ll just stay home. Because this was the finest symphony of skies.

We live on this earth. we should be paying closer attention. I should be paying closer attention. It’s the explosive beauty of these moments that helps us grasp the importance of caring for creation.

This is the world we have and it’s wondrous. Why wouldn’t we take care of it? Why wouldn’t we spend a lot of our lives, pointing and gasping and saying, well, will you look at that? We should spend less time saying, well, would you look at that, gimme it its’ mine or oh, ho hum. another beautiful day, mountain, lake…

Peace. We need to be about the business of peace. Because a world this beautiful deserves nothing less.

HarvestMoonLunacySep29

 

The Peace of a Sabbath Lunar Eclipse

The weather gods may relent. There may be glimpses of this lunar event.

It’s a perfect Sabbath endeavor, now that I think about it. Nothing to do but be present. And watch the fire crackle while you wait. It’s late, because, hey it’s the moon, but it’s a great way to spend time with the family…

And in that time I’ll think great thoughts of Peace. I hope you will too. We’ll watch the Earth cover the moon, and go home to dream sweet dreams of Peace. And in the morning, let us get up and see what we can do about all that needs to be done.

I hope you get to bask in the wonder of tonight’s eclipse. It’s not that often that it happens… What a galaxy we live in!

Peace be with us all.

HarvestMoonLunacySep27

13-Year Peace(s)

How bizarre that the only people in my life today who knew me when I was working in New York are my Swedish and American family. I have friends from my seminary days. And loads of friends from my California days. And then some very old friends but mostly new from my life back in Pennsylvania.

I’ve had a wonderful life, but it has, I think more segments than many people’s… Not everyone changes careers in midstream (taking a long time with a slide through another course of study to get where I belonged) and I’ve always known lots of folks. My friend the epidemiologist uses me as an example of people who know a lot of people with terminal diseases simply because I know so many people — and have been supportive. Great, another thing to put on my resume, I’m a statistical anomaly!

But I’m happy to know and love all these people. Happy to have known and loved these landscapes. Who doesn’t love NY? Who doesn’t love the Bay Area? And as many of us remark, the central Susquehanna Valley is paradise, except for those for whom it is not…

I seem to have dug in here. My husband’s happy playing here. I love my work, my friends, and my  life. My family has changed a lot in the last 13 years, a couple gains, a lot of losses. But still this seems like home. And so I stay and try to figure out what great fun can i get up to in the time ahead? 13 more years and I’ll be, gasp, 76… And hopefully still doing what I love to do!

We’ll see… In the meantime… I’ll keep looking through the lens of Peace and see what I need to get up to next.

Peace and Blessings, my friends, and may you love and be loved where you live.

GardenMoonLunacyAug10

Traveling Peace

This is the place in the summer where I celebrate how lucky I am — and not only because it’s swimming season!

I’m visiting friends and family all over CA. Friends from Sweden, friends from when I lived here, family from when I got married, friends from living back East. Sweet, satisfying visits (with lots of fresh vegetables and talk npr on the way from one house to the next!)

It’s sort of like heaven. All these people are people I love. Many are people I think with. and some, like EG are just bonuses. what a delight. and what a blessing! Thinking. Reading. Loving. yes!  Lucky, lucky me.

But oooh, the traffic. Gotta love rural central PA.

But meanwhile. I’m having fun. How about you?

Love brings a lot of Peace, in so many ways!

I hope it brings you some. Start Loving! Start Peacing! Yahoo!

GardenMoonLunacyAug3

Lammas Celebrations! Sabbath Peace! Oh, boy!

In-gatherings!

A friend reminded me that the ancient celebrations were more approximate. You didn’t stop to celebrate in the middle of the harvest. You didn’t grind the flour until the wheat was out of the field and threshed.

I love this celebration in the middle of the hot spell. Back home, there’s corn, tomatoes and blueberries. How much sweeter can summer get?

Out here? there are grandchildren, swimming pools and tomatoes. May in fact be sweeter.

And today, another beautiful summer Sabbath, spent with them. Full moons and hot summers. Sacred. Joyous. yeahhhhhhhh.

Hurrah! Peace be with you all.

GardenMoonLunacyAug2

Sweet Peace of the Road; Sabbath All the Time

I’m on retreat/vacation. Every day’s a Sabbath with me for a while. It’s a wonderful thing and I’m so grateful. I’m being a reading fool. Sometimes a cleaning fool, which IS shocking.

Also a traveling fool. Steve and I took off for Maine for a week and had a wonderful time at our cousins’. Quiet, lovely coastal visit. Lots of oysters. Plenty of lobster. So many books. So many quiet conversations. Piles of Peace and Quiet. Lovely sleeping in the cabin in the woods. Lovely being together. So many blessings it was hard to keep track, let alone count.

We’re good traveling buddies. Talk. Talk. Talk. It’s nice. It was particularly nice doing our night driving on the way home. It was an easy drive with Ms GPS telling me how to get hither thither and yon. So, just lots of comforting darkness. Not even a moon, as it was the dark of the Moon. Just Steve and me and the road.

It was an abundance of plenty. Rejoicing in the Peace.

Now I have a couple more things to do before starting the great writing… but there’s time. Blessed Sabbath to you all… May there be beautiful slow days in your life this summer.

And there was this…

GardenMoonLunacyJul19

 

Visiting Peace, Ancestor Peace

My mom was a great sick mom. She made special simple foods. In the closet were the bed aids: Sick table. Sick pillow. If you were really poorly, she would come and set up her sewing machine or something and sew while you were sick.

I was heir to the sick accoutrements. So, when you fall and break your leg, you can count on me to run over with Great Roberts’ dinner tray, now dubbed the sick tray and a whole host of pillows. I’ll even empty out the drawers on a side table and cart it along.

And when you break your knee, you need the sick aids. You’re going to need them a long time. No problem, we deliver. In the name of the mother and the sister and all who went before, here’s a snickerdoodle or twelve I asked someone to make for you…

Peace, my sweet niece. Sure glad my nephew brought you into our lives. Here’s to healing and renewed good health.

ThunderMoonLunacyJul3