Party

What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

There are three or four (non-work-related) social gatherings that stand out from the past year, though I’m not sure any of them “rocked my socks off.”  There were the gathering for Becca’s graduation celebration, the gathering for Jon and Ilona’s wedding, the meal up at Mount Tremper Arts just before a great performance and discussion of gay issues in performance art, and various gatherings around holidays and birthdays.  I think, though, that the gathering that currently stands out most for me—perhaps because it’s the most recent—was the one the day after Thanksgiving at some friends.  We were each asked to bring our leftover food and booze to their house.  We gathered in the living room to eat, watch the fire, and socialize. After everyone had eaten we ended up playing Pictionary in teams of four with the ages of those playing ranging from 5^th grade to in our 50s.  Teams had people from a variety of countries; besides the US, there were folks from Belgium, France, Germany, and England.  It was very laid back, very friendly, and at times, very competitive. I wasn’t hosting and, while most of the families gathered were members of my congregation, it wasn’t a group that expected me to wear my ministerial hat in any way. I think all three of us—Kathy and Becca were with me—were able to just be ourselves and relax.  I had a lot of fun.

Beautifully Different

Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different – you’ll find they’re what make you beautiful.

Somehow yesterday’s email with the question for the day didn’t come through, so I’ve only a minute to reflect on this question.  I don’t really think of myself as beautifully different.  I’ve begun, as I’ve gotten older, to think of myself as eccentric (and I mean that in a positive way).  And last week, at a dinner gathering, a friend lovingly suggested that I move to Vermont where I could be “as crunchy a you want.”  I think that, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more distinctly myself and generally I’m happy with who that is though I’m not sure it “lights people up.”  And that’s fine with me.

Community

Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

            Finding community remains a challenge for me. I’ve always hoped to be part of a small intentional community that worships together, studies together, is involved in social justice work together, and plays together. I’ve never found the group though.  During the early and mid-90s, a small group from my congregation came as close as any group I’ve been a part of to being that community, but that was a non-intentional coming together of circumstances and as a few of the circumstances changed, so did the existence of that community. I’m still friendly with many of them but we do less of the “all around” community stuff together than we used to. 

            I discovered community of a different kind in the online cohort doing their doctoral work with me.  We met online at least weekly during the years when we were doing our work and also gathered F2F several times throughout the years and I feel fairly well connected with them –all but one of us keeps in touch with each other and a few of our profs on FB- but since we’ve graduated there’s been no regular gathering.

SO—

            Recently I’ve tried to find the community I long for in a variety of places. I’ve tried various types of gatherings in Second Life—mainly worship settings or educational gatherings—but so far they just haven’t cut it as a community, mainly because I find it very hard to be part of groups where the way of communicating is only typing slowly back and forth and each group I’ve connected with uses that method of communication rather than SL voice.  I enjoyed one of the SL congregations that ran a book group and worship service I attended this summer but their fall gatherings have all been when I’ve been at work so attending hasn’t been possible.  Maybe in 2011?

            Kathy and I have also joined a small group called the Green Yoga Sangha.  It meets about once a month and focuses mainly on environmental issues as they impact our personal lives and our communities.  It seems to have a movable feast of interesting people who come and go and I’ve enjoyed each of the three times we’ve met with the group.  They come from all types of careers (though last month for some reason the bulk of the group were lawyers) and all types of philosophies of belief but most, if not all, practice yoga regularly. I’m hoping that as we attend more of their gatherings in 2011 that may begin to provide more community for both of us.

            What kind of community would I like to connect with in 2011?  An intentional one.  The setting—online or F2F- seems less important to me than the intentionality and the focus. I’d love to be with a group who are intending to live lightly on the earth in an environmentally responsible way, who want to treat all creation as sacred, and who are interested in finding ways to make that intent and that belief more concrete in the world around them.  I keep searching environmental groups that are out there—especially permaculture groups, who from stuff I’ve read seem to come closest to this—to try to find such a local and/or online community, but so far, no luck.  But I’ll keep at it and hope that, in 2011, it’ll become a reality.

Making Things

Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

            Over the last several years I’ve moved toward making more and more of the things we regularly use.  We now grow our own vegetables – this year using a cold frame outdoors and a small “greenhouse” bookcase indoors in the winter to keep that going—and use them regularly in our cooking.  We make our own compost, both in outside bins and in an inside worm-bin. We hot-water can tomatoes, ketchup and jellies—and hope to start pressure canning next year so that we can do a wider variety of food.  We make our own bread and use very little prepared foods in any of our meals these days.             I also knit and am currently working on a scarf for my youngest and a throw for the living room sofa.

            What I’d like to make and have actually gathered the material for, though I haven’t had the time to work on it, are two quilts.  One would be a more traditional “country quilt.”  The other would be a quilt make out of favorite old tee-shirts of the middle child that I’ve intentionally saved over the years for this purpose.   I’ve never quilted though, so it’d be a long process learning step-by-step learning to make the quilts I’ve got in mind.  I’d have to set aside lots and lots of blocks of time to make it actually happen, time that at the moment I don’t think I can clear.

Letting Go

Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why?

            The first thing I let go of this year was the idea of trying to do the best job I could at preparing for each class I taught, each sermon I gave, or each project I worked on.  Toward the end of this year, as I added a sixth part-time job to the five I already had, it became clear that, even if I gave up sleep entirely, there just wasn’t enough time in the day to make that happen.  Now my goal is to do a “good enough” job at each that I won’t be wasting people’s time but will still be able to get all the work done.

               The other thing I’m conscious I gave up this year was the expectation that there would come a time in the near future when I would be able to work one full-time job of my choosing rather than all the part-time jobs I’m currently doing.  For a good number of years now, I’d made peace with having the “ever-increasing number of ever-decreasing salary” part-time jobs by believing that, once my youngest child had graduated from high school and headed off to college, I’d be free to take a job of my choice anywhere in the world that I’d like to move.  I’d talked with Kathy, the one person who would then be affected by it, and she was more than happy to move wherever such a job might take us.  Toward the end of August I began to look for such a new job and found a possibility or two that looked intriguing (and, though long shots, might even possible despite the denomination’s position on lgbt clergy).  But then the youngest left college and came back home, making such a move much less possible.  And in November Kathy’s younger child, who lives in New York City, had her first grandchild, which makes a move away from the metropolitan New York area even less desirable.  Now “following the ideal job” seems very unrealistic.  I’m doing the best I can to let go of that expectation and beginning to rethink what life for the next ten or fifteen years of work might be like.

Wonder

Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

Cultivating a sense of wonder isn’t a problem for me and, as far back as I can remember, has never been.  It doesn't seem to be something I need to cultivate.  It just grows in me on its own. I am in awe of nature and the universe around me day in and day out, even on my most depressed or difficult days.  In high school I discovered Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting” and always thought that, if you changed  the word ‘awaiting’ to ‘experiencing”  in the following lines of that poem, it would be what life is like—or at least what life is like for me.

“…and I am awaiting

perpetually and forever

a renaissance of wonder.”

There is so much around me that amazes me but that I don’t understand and that I want to understand—not just by knowing about it but, when possible, by experiencing it.  I look out the window and want to know where do the birds at the feeder go at night or when it’s cold and snowy, how do they fly, what factors allow the tree to go through its changes seasonally and to grow into the unique shape that it has taken in all its particularity.  Not only do I want to understand the principles behind those things, but I want through whatever kind of mimicry is possible to understand them in my very being so that I’ll feel firsthand the awe of how it all fits together.

I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of even the smallest area of such wondrous possibilities. I’ve only begun to experience the awe of the world’s religions, of prayer, of stillness, of being at peace and at one with the universe around me.  Even in this small area, there is still so much I’m hungry to know firsthand.  And then there’s all of the other parts of life yet to explore.  As I’ve gotten older, I’ve become painfully aware of all the things I won’t experience in this life.  I’m too old and in too poor shape physically, for example, to hang glide now and experience just a little of what it would be like to fly. I won’t be able to learn to play all the music or dance all the dances that I’d love to feel within my very being. I won’t be able to live in each of the areas of this earth that I’d like to experience life from within, much less to travel to other parts of the universe. I won’t even be able to know and be amazed by the one small yard of Dobbs Ferry that I spend most of my time in as well as I’d like to.  The part of me that is a glutton for wonder finds myself like W.B. Yeats in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul”.

I am content to live it all again

And yet again, if it be life to pitch

Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch,

A blind man battering blind men…

I am content to follow to its source

Every event in action or in thought;

Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!

When such as I cast out remorse

So great a sweetness flows into the breast

We must laugh and we must sing,

We are blest by everything,

Everything we look upon is blest.”

Reverb 10- the Beginning

I’m going to try to do Reverb10 for a while in December to see if I can find some time to write –about anything—rather than just doing work.  I’m three days behind so this post is my catch-up.

December 1^st  Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you?

         Word for 2010- frenetic

         Word for 2011- focused

December 2^nd Writing. What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?

         Almost nothing I do during a day contributes to my writing. It’s not that I don’t write each day. I write a lot—lesson plans for church school, lessons for the courses I teach, outlines for Bible studies, sermons and prayers for worship, emails for each of the six different jobs I have, and on and on. With the exception of the legal material, I enjoy doing just about each of the types of work the jobs demand and I discover new connections as I write about them, so that’s good.  All of the writing, though, is driven writing—responding to immediate demands—rather than focused writing, which would focus on a writing project that I’d like to complete.  When I look back on my work at Drew, the one thing that stands out is that, while the topic I worked on for the doctoral project wasn’t my first choice of a topic, I actually enjoyed focusing upon and then writing the work.

         Can I eliminate the other work so I can write more?  Nope.

December 3^rd Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

         I’m not sure there is any moment this year that stands out as a time when I felt most alive.  I often feel alive in a lot of what I do because I’m curious to learn more about it- whether it’s doing the adult education events, having pastoral conversations with people, working on Roots & Wings, leading worship on a good Sunday, swimming, much of the time working in the garden, kneading bread or canning tomatoes, or so many other things—but there’s not one specific time this year that stands out as a time when I felt more alive.  Maybe down the road when I look back there will be, the way the year before the drive on the red clay washboard dirt roads through the surrounding jungle in Belize, with its deep rich smells that I’ve called up a lot since, stood out.