You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
In the early ’80s, when I lived in the Rust Belt, we chanced upon a small Greek bakery in the middle of a residential area – just five or six blocks from our house, actually.
What an incredible discovery! Along with the realization it made no sense to try to keep anything over an additional day – that honey soaks through the flaky phyllo dough too quickly! But, oh my, before it does!
As I said at the time, all too long ago now:
Preserved and mature, how tall the great trees along the Northwest rim: the redwood, red cedar, Douglas fir.
Too often a memory, the tall-masted vessels as well, billowing in the current.
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No Friends Meeting is ever the same – whether with the same body of people, in the same location, or while visiting around the world. This awareness casts a new light on the concept of expectant worship, in that you never know exactly what to predict, other than the possibility of being blessed by something wondrous and remarkable.
Traveling among different strands of Friends expands that concept.
In one pastoral Meeting, for instance, I encountered “silent singing” – no, they did sing from a hymnal, but the room was awfully quiet. Maybe all of their best voices were away in Philadelphia that weekend.
In one Evangelical Friends Meeting, as the pastor told me the following week, the Holy Spirit had been so powerful he had to put his sermon aside; I’m sure he wasn’t expecting that!
Or I was introduced to karaoke, of a contemporary Christian vein, in a midweek Meeting in central Pennsylvania. Who’d a’thunk.
So what do you say, greeting the stranger at our meetinghouse door, ready to sample Quaker worship for the first time? This is what not to expect?
“Maybe we’ll have a rare, totally silent worship,” seems to be as good as any. You never know.
The delight of watching from our dining room as a hummingbird goes from one bloom to the next in a tithonia beside the window – observing the balanced hovering of what looks like giving each one an injection of a special nectar and then moving on, to repeat the dance figure. And then, it’s gone.
It’s the joy of embracing a rare moment before it’s gone. And then? It’s a lesson in appreciating life itself.
One of the biggest lessons I carry from backpacking as a kid is the importance of traveling light. Take no more than you need. Be resourceful.
In those days, I should add, everything weighed more than today’s high-tech, lightweight gear and dehydrated food packets.
On our week along the Appalachian Trail, I was a 12-year-old hauling a 60-pound pack in what seemed endless uphill marathons.
It’s a lesson you don’t easily forget, even when you’re going by airplane.
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Making the orchards bloom was a labor of irrigation. No matter how fertile the volcanic soil of the valley, water was the missing element man worked to provide.
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There’s good reason the rattlesnake-infested, corrugated humps encircling the orchard valley are pale brown: they receive none of the snowmelt impounded from late March into July in the high mountains. Agencies release and distribute that water through blazing summer into October. Green agriculture parallels the river and irrigation canals, defying the tough, roasted inclines above, where sagebrush and bunchgrass stroke tawny eternity. In this compass, wind rarely precedes rain. Beyond lucrative strips of orchards, the principal agriculture involves herds or hay; because of irrigation and unfettered sunlight, five mowings a year are common; bales are trucked to dairy cows and pleasure horses on the rainy side of the tall mountains. Desert has few chickens — and no pigs to speak of. Somewhere out there, Basque shepherds elude the heat. Forests begin at the top of high ridges observed fifty miles distant.
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A boulder resembles a round loaf on a breadboard. Maybe it’s just there for giants in the night. The leaves on the ground give an idea of its size.
I don’t know how it is where you live, but here in New England, we seem to have gone straight from the end of June into August. Not just my household, either – ask around, and everybody admits the same. We just didn’t have a July. Nobody knows where it went. Hiding out in one of the closets?
Some years we know it’s July by a prolonged steamy oppression that finally breaks out into a glorious August. Not this year. The only evidence of passing time I see is in the profusion of weeds – the garden was still orderly at the end of June. At least the produce is coming along on schedule. Oh, my, yes! Real tomatoes!
If it were just me, I’d blame being obsessed with drafting my newest (and likely final) novel. But then I ask around. Yup, everybody agrees.
Now, let’s make the most of August before it, too, has passed.
Hearing the distant sounds of cannon at the Battle of Bunker Hill to the south, local militia mustered here on Nottingham Square in New Hampshire and began marching to combat. It’s only an hour-plus drive today.
Here are some quackers seen at a gathering of Quakers.
