A Thunder Moon Sabbath to Remember

The Thunder Moon is really rattling. Every day it seems, we have a thunder boomer.

And last night the sweetest rain to sleep by. zzzzzzzzzzzz.

Today is Father’s Day… may your memories be sweet and may you make new ones as sweet and juicy as this season’s berries.

Today’s the solstice, giving us a whole sweep of bright and shiny days with long hours of sun (over 15!) well, sun behind the clouds, because that’s what’s going on here! May we be illuminated… May we use the light to look clearly at what is going on in our world. May the beauty we see empower us and keep us strong in the face of the work to be done.

And there’s a lot of work to be done.

Today in my valley we will commemorate the nine who died in Charleston. We will pause and weep. We will decide what if anything we’re going to do to make a difference here. Or at least have a start at it. Let us remember those who died for no reason other than hatred. Our family has lost children. It’s awful. I can’t imagine losing children — or anyone — simply because they existed. To have them targeted and executed. Assassinated. May we be moved to act against the hate — and act in ways that make a difference.

Peace was never more urgent; never more confusing. Let us Peace.

Language of Love and Peace

Every family has their own language of Love. At the Evans household, one of the threads in Love’s language was fabric. weird, eh?

But Mom started art school in fashion design. Dad was a color chemist in a carpet factory. We loved fabric. The house was filled with beautiful color. Mom sewed. (Deb and I were less capable! and disciplined… although i have ideas, I have usually fairly haphazard executions!)

But oh, we’re admirers of a well-cut anything. Or a beautiful pattern. Or a fabric that falls just so.

So when I saw those beautiful dresses, so well suited to those beautiful young women, all I could think was where are they? So often if I had a wedding in Bloomsburg, I went home to Deb’s house. This must be the first wedding I’ve had since there was no Deb’s house.

And we would have sat and I could have told all my fabric stories and then shown her pics later. But that was yesterday. And here I am, fluent in a language that is now more or less extinct. It’s sort of a weird thing… It’s a scramble to figure out Peace when no one speaks your language of Love. Adaptation… ah, it’s a slow segue… and Peace is sometimes a dance with memories.

Summer Memories, Sabbath Peace, Berry Moon

It’s a positively beautiful day.

It’s a day for breathing in the Beauty and all the promise and possibility in the beginning of this Berry Moon Season. Strawberries, soon! Swimming, soon! Memories abounding. New possibilities ahead.

It’s the Sabbath and a day for reflection. Today among other things, I’ll be remembering an old family friend. Part of my parents’ crowd… fewer and fewer beloved elders. (as I become one despite my shock and surprise!). Jack. loved steam engines. Did the best corn on the cob. Funny, corny jokes. could fix anything. His wife and my mom shared a birthday on December 24, so we always lunched together that day. Making family every way we could.

Hope your day is grand. Hope you find some sweet Summer Peace to indulge in and some memories to make. Sweet blessings of the Berry Moon be with you…

Kids are OK in Flower Moon!

Oh, it was such a sweet morning and the kids were amazing.

I’ve never spent a lot of time with kids. Don’t have my own, lived across the country from too many of the kids in the family when they were growing up. Always had friends around who had kids they’d share and there was always the neighborhood… But direct kid interface, not so much.

And now, boom, i’m the minister at a small town church and we got kids! 100 members: 50 kids. My colleague Sara who does the education piece is fabulous. No other word. Fabulous. The people who teach with her? Fabulous. So I get all the bennies of watching these kids grow and folding them into my arms now and again. And they’re pretty puppy like, so they love being enfolded. How sweet is that?

So they’re off to learn more about who they are and what their tradition is and how they might grow into it. (I reminded them when they left that in our country, our tradition started here, so they come from the source! or maybe they come from the roots and are off to visit the place where the tree grew… also grew! They’ll make a whole bunch of memories. They’ll create family and community for themselves when they’re stuffed into that big ol’ van. Laughing all the way and learning whatever comes. Oh, may they see the possibility. The Flower Moon is compressing, time to make sense of things!

But the kids. The bright, funny, interested, loving kids and the two great parents who are hauling them along. Those kids. They’re more than okay. And I am at Peace with that and more than a little in Love.

Choosing Love & Peace in the Flower Moon

As always when I’m in one place with a bunch of people I love, I get confused because all the other bunches of people I love aren’t there.

Love is a wonderful and mixed up thing… and creating family is so important. The Flower Moon is also known as the Mother Moon, it’s about figuring this stuff out. Who do we love? Who do we Mother? Who do we Family?

Love is a deliberate choice. It’s fraught with knowledge and boundaries and it’s hard work. It seems so easy at first, but it requires attention and awareness.

Peace is like that too. It’s not just the honeymoon, it’s the careful and deliberate intention to be at Peace, in Peace, in love with Peace demands.

We need more Love. We need to create more Family. We need more Peace. And oh, right, it’s on us. It’s important work.

Peace, Community, Sabbath, and a Full Moon

Gathered community. Gathered community knitted together — or more correctly, gathered community knitting itself together around relationship and commitment and family.

What is intimacy? What is family? what is celebration?

These are not daily conversational tidbits in our life… and yet what prepares us?

This wedding was presided over by two judges and a priestess. (sounds like a movie, no?)

Lots of stuff was swirling around the gathering… and we rode the waves. As I told you, I found myself in the catching position… and another new nephew, and another new nephew and another new niece… and zoom…

and on the Sabbath, we all rested. family tradition mimosas for brekkie. (over hotel waffes and birthday cake, goodness gracious, pleeze, may there be protein soon.) civilized coffee in a foo foo hotel. a little writing. a nap coming up.

And more family. wonderful kids who have wonderful kids.

Peace as a jigsaw with lots of little pieces… being slowly fitted together. leisure. no need to hurry. we’ve got most of this day.

Peace be with you. and catch tonight’s Full Flower Moon. I’ve got a date with my pillow.

Families, Flowers and Peace

I’m a very lucky woman. I have a very interesting family and I like them.

Yesterday, at one event after another, I walked into the arms of family members. Children scoring soccer goals, children reading all 41 books on the Maine reads, children loving bubbles. Cousins delighted to see one another.

My nieces and nephews.

My cousins and my brother.

We didn’t know one another well, growing up. Now we’re sharing stories and lives and food and laughter. And swimming. well of course swimming. Even though the pool is outside and even the Maine kids are whiny because it’s so cold.

And then all the others at the wedding. Interesting people with interesting stories.

And the Flower Moon on the river? and the hopping town? just lovely.

It’s important to weave yourself into your tapestry every once in a while, make sure the threads are still attached. It’s a whole different kind of Peace than I work on most of the time. But I’ll take it.

So Peace to you, my friends. and go fall in Love with Love. and Joy. and Family.

And if we’re going to talk about Peace, remember, if you will that the local synagogue was defaced this week. Hold them in your hearts and let’s figure out how to step up and step in in these moments. Because it’s so not ok. More on that later this week.

Flower Moon Peace and Joy!

Ah, Spring. The Flower Moon — doing her job.

Out in the woods to revel in the beauty. These hardies don’t belong here, they were brought from the Mediterranean and Asia Minor and have been cultivated for a very long time.

The ones in this little valley were planted by a homestead, i’m sure. The homestead is gone. The flowers persevere.

And the Evanses. hardships notwithstanding, have persevered mightily.

So we’re lucky. We’ve found our Peace.

A friend reminded me of what’s going on in Europe where huge batches of people from entirely different cultures are arriving in their countries, escaping their own, but wanting to establish their own culture where they are, rather than moving to where they’ve moved.

That’s a different issue. I’ll get back to it. But today’s Peace and beauty is what i had for the moment. Tomorrow, I’ll be writing about family Peace.

Pink Moon Daddy Peace

Some days, rather than writing about the world, I need to write about what’ and who are all the world to me.

My father would have been 100 today. That’s a righteous number of years of which he lived 93.

He was a good man. He was a gentle man, a gentleman. A bit stern, a chemist, so very thorough. He was a Christian in all the ways that mattered. He was thoughtful, stood for what was right, served on committees, school boards, municipal boards, pool boards. He helped start the day care center and the women’s shelter.

I’m proud of him. Proud to be his daughter and follow in his lineage. Proud of his grandkids for him and in his way… Grateful for him.

Oh, we had so much fun in the last years of his life.

So Happy Birthday Daddy. I’ll try and find some lemon meringue this weekend and lift a forkful to you in celebration. I’ll call my brother and tell him I love him. And write his grandkids and tell them I’m proud and that he would have been so proud.

Peace. I was a lucky woman with a good father. I miss him, but mostly I’m just so happy I had him and that he had the raising of me. I’m a better woman for it.

Lucky me. Lucky Peace. Thanks Pink Moon, for a great Daddy. And wow, a whole century of him!

“Greats” are really great

I come from a nuclear family full of worriers. There is no one better for catastrophizing than my mother. It didn’t take long before she and my sister (who had always wanted me to have a biological child) were kvetching about whether or not it was a good idea for us to have taken on such a challenging child. Along with their worry came a bit of detachment – because their fear would have likely lead them to stop the adoption process, they were a bit slow to warm in their commitment to seeing our son as a full part of the family.

Without grandma fully there, there was another unexpectedly unfilled role in our village. Where was our wise and loving female elder who was going to love him unconditionally and bake him cookies right before we wanted him to eat a healthy dinner? The answer came in a woman I have adored myself since I was about the same age as he – my beloved aunt! Auntie came with us on a week-long timeshare vacation and came with a full and open heart ready to love our boy with all of her being, just as she has my sister and I through our whole lives. Watching the two of them together – doing puzzles, watching the birds, giggling in imaginative play – it was suddenly clear that “Grands” weren’t the only loving elders who could play a role in community!

Sometimes our immediate families aren’t our best supports. Who else is there in the extended clan that might be there in your village in a role you didn’t consider? A beloved aunt? A cherished coach? A favorite teacher? A church member? Love can be packaged in many ways…are you open to finding it in a different package than you expected?

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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