There’s a romantic allure to the idea of living on an island, and Maine has more than its share. Still, a day visit can be memorable.
INC. TO INCA
In a global economy, even a backwater town’s at risk.
To go from Inc. as in Incorporated to Big Inca is just a small leap in the miasma of international corporate espionage and conspiracy – especially when a frontline player has to run for his life.
Take it from Bill … in the mill.
~*~
The novel is available here.
A ROCK AND THE RIPPLE
Looking back on the passing of Silas (all those years ago, now) also stirs an acknowledgment of a major transition in our Meeting, something that had been in process over recent years as he retreated from the active business of our fellowship, all the while remaining a guiding spirit. Now came the finality and the reality. What’s become apparent in our recollections is that despite our emphasis on equality and the avoidance of hierarchy, some Friends are more dedicated, committed, active, forceful (fill in your own words) in their service than are others. This is a statement of fact, not a value judgment. The two decades I knew Silas, after all, came in his retirement years – which were focused fully on his passionate causes.
Maybe we were also admitting we had no one stepping into his shoes. And maybe, to some extent, that’s a good thing – he was, let’s face it, a character all his own. On the other hand, a lot of tasks in Meeting are left unfilled, to our own loss. How we would address these in the coming years was yet to be revealed.
By coincidence, we had a message a few weeks earlier about the absence of guru-style teachers among Friends. Even so, as I wrote, we encounter a string of teachers in our Quaker practice, each one a unique presence. Among them, we would have to count Silas. A Boston Globe at the time carried a story of another, by then in a nursing home in Washington state, and a violin that he’d begun making in prison during World War II, finally completed by his grandson and a friend. As I started to retell this story of someone I’d last seen more than a quarter-century previously, my younger daughter interrupted me to say she’d heard the report on public radio. With all of these overlapping circles, it can be a small world, indeed, and sometimes rather timeless. Maybe our harmony, too, will be heard, well beyond our imagining.
What I feel now is gratitude for each one in our fellowship, and the gifts we bring together. Wherever we are going in the coming years is not entirely in our own hands, but an opportunity for a revelation in faith. Maybe our being here, itself, was not entirely in our own hands, either. That, coupled with a wondering about our ripples and how far they might carry.
~*~
A wonderful documentary with Silas is now available as an online video. Just click here.
REMEMBERING SILAS
Sometimes an image says everything. I remember sitting on the green at Bowdoin College one afternoon during Yearly Meeting sessions and looking out to see a line of boys marching along the far sidewalk. Four or five, maybe six of them, ages somewhere between eight and 12, and determined with a destination. In tow, perhaps twice their height, was another, hunched forward in his gait, a man obviously grinning to be part of such a mystery – Silas Weeks, of course. Who knows what they had to reveal to him? Only that it must have been important – very important, in ways that remain veiled or part of that precise moment.
The fact that they were leading him, rather than the other way around, says a great deal about trust and openness, in both directions. Even the role of affirmation. Everything so natural and rare.
Silas was one of those “old Quakes” who had managed to become A Character, in the best sense of the meaning. He was already well into retirement by the time I relocated to New Hampshire, and remained a force in Dover Meeting for much of the next two decades, despite his growing deafness. He was one of the handful of Friends who reopened the meetinghouse to weekly worship in the 1950s, after its use had become irregular for several decades, and he faithfully served it in many capacities, including clerk, over the years. That’s not to say he couldn’t be stubborn or cranky, but he did manage to get Friends moving on a project. Thus, his passing at 94, though not unexpectedly, brought a deep sense of loss to the meeting.
“Silas tells funny jokes,” is what Eli Abbott, 13, remembered.
Silas stories were bountiful, within and without the meeting, and there’s no way I could begin to tell them all.
When majoring in community development at the University of New Hampshire, however, one of our friends had Silas for her academic advisor. She remembers being honored to be part of a group of students invited to a social gathering out at the farm, until he announced on their arrival that it was time for potato planting – and then pointed to the spades. For them, it was an awkward situation where nobody could say no freely. The next semester brought another invitation, this time accompanied by the revelation that it was now harvest time for the spuds.
Apparently, there was no ill will. After learning that they shared the same birthday, however many years apart, these two begin meeting for a dinner each year to celebrate together – not always on the exact day, but as close as they could manage – a tradition that spanned three decades. And she still keeps a garden, in response to his lessons.
ON THE HILL
For a decade, I lived on the highest point in the city of Manchester. Sometimes I called the development Yuppieville on the Mountain, but its views of sunsets could be stupendous. There was even a city-run ski lift on the other side of the freeway.
BEWARE OF BIG INCA
The New World – North American and South – comes clashing in the down-at-the-heels mill town of yrubBury when Bill sets out on his first job out of college.
He could easily be a Pony Express rider venturing out onto the frontier – or a lonely station master, saddling the next horse and holding it ready.
This time the frontier has one foot in the past, a time of water power and European immigration of labor. And rather than the Great Plains, his route runs through urban blight.
As Bill discovers, history’s never finished. Especially when Big Inca starts lurking.
~*~
The novel is available here.
A MORE FITTING DISCLAIMER
When it comes to my novels, any resemblance to actual persons is greatly exaggerated … meaning it’s truly fiction, not fact.
Of course, they way they see themselves, or did, is also far from any reality.
The places, of course, are rendered with perfect faithfulness.
~*~
For a free copy of my latest novel release, click here.
LABORING TOGETHER
In his book of essays, Life Work, Donald Hall divides our labors as jobs, chores, and work. Jobs, of course, are done for income; chores, the things that must be done to keep a household running, are gratis; but work, he says, is done out of passion, and if we’re really lucky, it even pays our bills. In other words, work energizes us.
Another poet, Gary Snyder, uses the term, The Real Work, which is also the title for a book of his own essays and interviews. There, he argues that real work is a matter of attention and focus, as well as finding our unique place in the universe of the moment.
From the Shakers’ “hands for work, hearts for God” practice, I would add that real work is not rushed, but rather proceeds at a sensible pace, without too much concern for “productivity”; real work includes times for reflection and play. Otherwise, you’d never conceive and create things like a circular saw or clothespin. And, increasingly, such work is rarely found in the workplace. (Job-place?)
From a conference representing three different strands of Quakerism, a statement from one of the Evangelical Friends has stayed with me. She differentiated between “church work” and “God’s work.” One, she explained, was agreeing to teach First-Day School because an adult body was needed; the other was a response to something deeper and fully engaging. In Hall’s view, one was a chore, while the other was work.
Nominations time will approach all too shortly. Yes, our pool of available bodies is shrinking and aging. Still, I’ll ask that you search your heart for the ways you might respond to God’s work in our midst. (As clerk, I was more and more amazed by the range of skills needed to keep this building and its activities running!) Look especially at the little ways this might play into your own larger Life Work – and for ways we might engage playfulness into our labors, transforming chores into the real work.
I’ve spoken of what I call the parable of the geese – the image of our clerks, rotating in the lead so that none get exhausted. My turn, your turn, his turn, her turn. And to think, the birds fly almost as fast as cars on the freeway. Maybe it’s another image of the perfect Meeting. In one of the first quarterly meetings I clerked, as I looked out from small table at the high bench in the Henniker meetinghouse, I thought, Look at all those former clerks! It was my turn, and I felt comforted to know I could trust their guidance.
So who’s leading the geese? And how do they decide in their lineup? I can’t decide if they’re barking or laughing as they fly, but they sure sound like they’re having fun – coming or going.
ALONG THE MERRIMACK
For three years I lived along the banks of the Merrimack River, a primary energy source for 19th century New England industry.
REGARDING THE DLQ
Jaya, in Promise, isn’t the only character in my fiction to address a concept I’ve dubbed the DLQ, or Dedicated Laborious Quest. But she does, I’ll argue, come closest to aspiring to an artistic expression for its encounters.
The DLQ, as I envision it, is the long-range discipline of spiritual pursuit, one that can be found in any number of variations in any number of religious, artistic, social activist, or even athletic lines of action. It’s a blending of heart and head, body and soul, awareness and discovery – the poet Gary Snyder refers to something similar as the Real Work, for instance, or maybe simply “daily practice” will touch on it as well.
One of Jaya’s concerns is a search for a fitting vehicle to embody the experience. Essays are too prosaic. Poetry? Sometimes. Drawings or paintings? To a degree. Maps of a kind? Getting closer, I’d hope.
Even so, I’ve wanted to leave the ultimate form she uses open to the imagination.
And then, more recently, I came across something that comes closest. An exhibition of Shaker art and artifacts at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockport, Maine, introduced me to what are called Gift Songs or Gift Drawings or Gift Paintings, which take their name from the faithful artist’s position as a medium receiving the song or design from a deceased member of the sect (that is, given) to be conveyed to another, living member of the sect (also, as given). To be appreciated, these must be seen in the original, full size, since much of the detail gets lost in reproduction. Sometimes the words are in a secret, private language and alphabet. Sometimes they blend. The lines flow, turn upside down, sideways. The works are sprinkled with artwork as well as words. Are they magical? Or simply mysterious?
Whichever, they spring from a tradition and discipline and practice to utter something deep in the heavenly desire and earthly community of a particular recipient.
I can tell you Jaya would have been most impressed. Definitely.
~*~
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Jnana's Red Barn 