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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

A new start.....HAPPY NEW YEAR! Sad New Year...love is the answer!.

Happy New Year to my Jewish sisters and brothers celebrating Rosh Hashanah!
Let me join you in assessing my spiritual highs and lows of the year and prepare a clean heart for the year to come....and eat honey apple cake! Yum!

Happy New Year....and Eid to our Muslim friends! Refreshed after Ramadan and hopefully renenergized with a new spirit! Let me join you whilst you eat a lot!

Happy New Year to the Hindus who celebrate their god Ganesh...that elephant head dude...the god of beginnings and science, and art, and creativity! I'll eat with you, too! Probably no meat....

And continuing with the new year theme.....

Both boys got on the iconic yellow school bus with smiles...sort of...that's them in their first day back at the institution! I did not embarrass them with photos and kisses at the bus-stop, but I did make small-talk with everyone present, children and parents alike, which I'm sure they didn't appreciate! Oh well.
Maybe once in this run-up to school I got a twang of remembrance for that back-to-school feeling for the teacher....the organizing the room....the bulletin boards....those tape name-tags with the alphabet on each student's desk... the surreptitious, stolen whiff of the new crayola box ...oh no...wait..that was last year! This year I'm just so happy I'm out of it!!!

On a less frivolous note, R and I woke early for the webcam funeral of Professor Alan Ervine at Glasgow Uni. It was a good celebration. Sad...which is fitting. He was young and had just retired, planning to do missionary work in East Africa. I really didn't know the guy more than to exchange pleasantries, but this last, really tragic month of his blogging has been transforming for me. His honesty, his faith, his anger......he said to his minister the other day, "When I die, I want you to take the service.....and I want you to preach the Gospel!" Well done. It was well done. Onward and upward friends! Keep working until your time's up!
For Alan's family, obviously, I pray. This isn't just a new year...it's a new life that's going to be pretty tough without him.

I know this... Monday, a beautiful day that was a little cooler, marked the 25th anniversary of my mother's death. Strangely, it both feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago.....yet were she to walk into my kitchen just now and make a cup of tea, I probably wouldn't bat an eye...at least at first. Assuming she looked...like normal....not like a zombie or something! That would be freaky. Just kidding.
Every year, on the 6th of September I am stopped in my tracks. This year it was different. Somehow, twenty-five years makes the mourning more...grown....more able to take care of itself. The hole her passing left is still there, the me maybe dances with it rather than is led by it. As I come closer to the age she was when she died, my perspective on how I live changes and that hole helps define me, and obviously makes me question how I spend my time.....which for any of us, is limited. A few months ago, Alan Ervine was planning his future, wasn't he? We need to make the most of what we have whilst we're here.

I wanted somehow to mark the day...I wrote a poem...I'll maybe spend some time today working in the moon garden...it's all a bit hollow this 25th anniversary. Not even a little silver...maybe it's a tarnished silver. I dunno.

The next anniversary coming up this week is that of 9/11.
Regardless of your personal stance on terrorism, politics, the loss of innocent life, your own friends or family lost that day, the memory of that gorgeous, picture-book September day...full of Monarch butterflies and ripening apples... and those towers being hit, and collapsing, changed you...Changed you forever. How you felt on 9/10/01 and how you felt on 9/12/01 were drastically different. This year is super-charged with emotion because of the plan to build a mosque so close to the site.....I hear both sides of this issue constantly, and in both sides I hear fear, but I also hear love.....only I don't hear enough love.
Ouch.
Start with love. Breathe out. Breathe in. Open your heart to God, and make every thing you do be with love.
Put the fear aside.
Yoda said it well, "Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to sufferiiiiing." Yoda, a very wise puppet indeed.
Put love first.
...and happy new year!

Friday, September 3, 2010

Hurricane Earl.....anti-climax......



Don't get me wrong.....I don't want any property or people hurt, but if we're going to have a hurricane....well....better not jinx us. There's a few more depressions out at sea just waiting to nail us. The Jersey Shore is overdue for the 100 year storm, so I really shouldn't tempt fate.....but.....it's sort of boring! It's been gray all day, a few very brief showers that steam up. Barely a breeze, but then just when one stirs up, it stops. The pool was hastily covered....as much of the garden flotsam and jetsam cleared to make way for actual flotsam and jetsam.....honestly, that's probably why I'm most annoyed at the lack of storm....at least if we had a storm everyone's back garden would be a tip...now it's just mine! No excuse other than...well....not doing a blinking thing in it all summer.

So. That's the summer done I guess. Blah. Very, very uneventful.

The children and their friends, on one of the last days of freedom, have been arguing over what dvd to watch....looks like they've decided on "Beowulf". A super-violent computer generated film from a few years back with the cartoony characters very much resembling the actors that provide the voice. Grendel's mother is hot....Now the argument is whether it's ok to see a naked, character generated Angelina Jolie, as a hideous monster that shape-shifts into a shapely babe, or not.....the friends are English boys....so I'll just tell their mum it's part of their rich, cultural history! I'm pretty sure they won't be harmed....pretty sure.

The semester has begun for me....This will be a semester of reading and writing to the n-th power...much different from last year. Feels like much more. All I can say is "ouch". The preaching bitis always with me....the images from the lectionary texts like stones in a swift river...I'm jumping from image to image not too sure of where it's taking me! I might add, too, that I'm not feeling great about the swiftness of the river.

I suppose I can't help but remind myself to just go with flow...sorry...that cliche just couldn't be helped.

Wind might be picking up a bit, actually......

I must now supervise the Beowulf.....Grendelesque behavior from the minors with NOT be tolerated!!!!