Peace of Familiarity & Family

One of the joys of this year’s intensive reading time has been having the opportunity to do it in the company of dear ones, friends and families.

So often when you see people it’s about the things you do together that make a visit wonderful. But there are people in your lives, if you’re deliberate and lucky, with whom the visit is about an opportunity to be yourself together.

Me voila, a sort of boring, nerdish, bookish girl. and there’s my friend at the end of the couch.

It’s always a wonderful thing. This year, as I’m really coming to terms with my sister’s absence, it’s been incredibly reassuring. I’m reforming myself or maybe recognizing myself again. The number of sustained losses in these last years has been enormous.

And here they are, these old friends, touchstones from my past, reminders of my deep self… remembering and making new memories and here I am reading, reading, reading, reading. What a joy. What a privilege. What Peace.

I hope you have such Peace in your life. I wish that very much for each and every one of you.

Reading Peace

All through the summer, when I was a girl, from about junior high on, I would walk to the library at least once a week and check out about 10 books. Two summers I undertook to just read through the fiction and so I was reading epic Russian sagas at the same time I was reading British spy mysteries. It was fun. Although I have to admit that at the speed I was gulping books I may have missed some of the finer points! But nothing gave me more joy. Swim. Read. Swim. Read. All Summer long.

During the work year, while I may get one or two substantive books read, I pretty much stick to fluffier reading. I read mostly to stop thinking rather than to think. ahhhhh. a chance to unwind.

But now during the summer, one of the requirements/privileges of my job is to prepare for the coming year.

This is made so much sweeter by the fact that this year, no one is sick, no one is dying and I’m not recovering from a death in the family. I am so grateful.

So this year, I get to stuff and stuff and stuff and stuff.

And it’s grand. I have no idea how things will all come together or even if they should, but I’m grateful for the opportunity.

Books have always offered me Peace, even as they’ve stirred and excited me.

Hurrah!

Laying out Peace

I’ve read tarot cards for about 40 years. I love doing it. I do it more for friends than for strangers, although there have been times.

I’m not a medium or clairvoyant. I just like the cards. I find it soothing to puzzle through them. I don’t do it often — or like most folk, i go through spurts of doing it.

I love that it’s about a Path through life. I see it as much as a meditation tool as anything else. I like it enough that I wrote a book about it. (you can find it here)

I keep studying about paths through life. I keep working on my own. I keep writing about it. I’m working on a new one now. Spiritual paths require daily work.

In the end, I think life is about the practice. I think the Path to Peace is the Practice of Peace. I think we need to be working on Peace…

Peace Challenges on a Quiet Sabbath Morning

Life has curve balls. Always. Sometimes, I guess we could have seen them coming, other times, we’re totally caught off guard.

But nonetheless, there are challenges. It’s not what we want to know. it’s not what we want to be facing. Sometimes we can share what’s going on and get support and other times we’re pretty much on our own.

In the midst of those things, we need to be tender with ourselves.

We might also want to consider that others are living confusing, challenging lives. Which means that the people getting on our last nerve may also be having problems, and that might cause us, if we’re to be generous and kind, to be a bit more tender with them. (And if not it confuses them!)

So, on this hot and sunny sabbath, I wish you wonder, contemplation and joy. And Peace. I wish us all Peace. Peace that is graced to us, Peace that we make. And, where I am, the Moon has been beautiful these last few nights and the pictures of garden bounty filling FaceBook are incredible. So as the Moon burgeons and swells, I hope you get great big gulping views of it! Summer Moons…. mmmmm. nothing more romantic.

Courage and Peace and Lunacy

To be courageous is always a bit lunatic, isn’t it? To dare to do something that is outside our comfort zone. Luckily it’s the Ripe Garden Moon and it’s full of comfort for when we do the crazy courageous things.

It’s funny what supports us in courage. In the case of my friend, she relied on simple good manners to carry her up and over.

In my case, I just didn’t want to have an unmatched set. And really, everyone else had forgotten I made a mistake and even if they were holding it against me, who cares? It’s my life I want to have organized, nothing to do with anyone else. (so who’s my harshest critic, right, me). So I could just do what I needed to do.

Things happen that need to be dealt with. Sometimes they’re fairly small things. Sometimes they’re big and horrible. But we do what we have to… or at least what we can of what we have to. We step up and do the hard work.

And that is just that…

A certain kind of Peace comes in doing what needs to be done. In doing the right thing. In daring. We like ourselves when we dare for things that matter. so, let’s shall we, let’s Peace.

Everyday Peace in the Ripe Garden Moon

I am extraordinarily lucky to work in a UU church which takes the preparation for the year seriously. I have a moth of study and a month of vacation. So few clergy have this, although we all need it.

We need it because we’re tired from a year of putting out. We need it because if you’re not going to hear the same old sermons next year, we need to put something in. But I get it.

And I’ve been a reading fool. I’ve been absolutely luxuriating in the reading. Stuffing my brain full so I can let it all percolate around for a while.

What’s made my reading time more wonderful is that I’ve been able to do it in the company of people I love. I’ve been in one house and then another. And there we’ve sat being together and quietly doing whatever we do.

I’ve gotten things accomplished. In the company of loved ones. And rather than running around doing things, we’ve hung around and done what needed to be done. talked some. laughed a lot. and been quiet together. The first week was with my Sweet Pea. I had long quiet stretches with him. ahhh. oh, the blessings to be counted.

This is a Peace I don’t often have at home. There are things to do. And some of these friends are very far away. But because of my job, I have this lovely, sacred pleasure.

I’m going to indulge this particular Peace as much as I can… and give thanks as I do it. And stare out the window at the lovely Ripe Garden Moon, whose picture his sister took, and remember the vegetables that just graced our supper table this evening… mmmmm.

Give Your Heart to Peace

And any of the rest of your organs. A friend of mine drove around for years with a bumper sticker that said, Leave your Heart on Earth, Heaven Doesn’t Need It. Be an Organ Donor. And i think she was. Bless that great big heart of hers. I hope if someone got it they learned to love like she did.

It’s a sad and awful and wonderful duty when a loved one dies to really release them. And you have to accept the awful reality to allow new reality to happen.

I watched my dear friend, who was in the process of dying from cancer, reel with the sudden accident that took her husband and then sit through the hours it took to release his body for donation. It was so hard and she was so brave. It was such an important lesson. Bless her loving heart and her stubborn right-doing mind.

So determine to make Peace and put your whole heart into it. However that happens. and consider Peace-giving organ donation.

Gifts of Love and Peace

It was such a whirlwind for the family of the little girl who needed a kidney. There was a man who loved this little and wanted to give her his kidney. And then, undergoing tests to make sure all was compatible, it was discovered that he had a tumor on his kidney. If they hadn’t tested, they would never have found this tumor. It’s such a silent disease until it’s ‘way to late. So the man who would have saved Katy was himself saved.

And then a tragic accident. One family decided that the only way to find comfort in their loss was to share organs. They did and a little girl’s life is transformed.

There are so many kinds of courage in these stories. So many kinds of decency.

Peace and Comfort… may they all find new life… may we all find Hope.

Ripe Gardens, The Moon & Peace

In this region, this Moon has been called the Sturgeon Moon, because in the Great Lakes, they are most easily caught during this Moon. It’s also called the Green Corn Moon or the Grain Moon.

But most of us are not Grain gatherers, although I’m sure some of us are. Many people are gardeners. Even if, like me, you aren’t, you can’t escape the wild bounty that’s happening (she says, munching on a French breakfast radish purloined from my landlady’s bounty. Yum.). So Ripe Garden Moon seemed like a great descriptor. I sure hope it stops clouding up long enough to see this Moon!

Let’s celebrate the sheer lunatic abundance of this time. Do it by eating something wonderful from gardens currently going crazy with good. Do it under the light of a slyly shining moon — Why not?

“One is nearer God’s heart in a garden, than anywhere else on Earth.” (Dorothy Frances Gurney). Sweet Summer Peace, Folks!

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…

Sacred Village

Building a World of Peace, Village by Sacred Village.

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