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December 29, 2008

From Christmas Eve

This was the congregational prayer on Christmas Eve at the church I grew up in. Something good to think on.

On this night, O God - on this night we confess that we do not want to confess. We do not want to examine our hearts before you and admit to the dark places. We want you to warm us in candlelight, carols, and communion. We desire soft light tonight; not the blinding shining of your glory that terrified the shepherds. We cannot stand in that light. God among us, forgive us. Help us hear your angel saying, "Do not be afraid." Flood our hearts with the light that drives out all our darknesses. Straighten our backs and loose our timid tongues that we might sing, "Glory!"

December 26, 2008

Good

It really is good to be home.

December 20, 2008

On the Other Hand

There's a lot that's good of late, too.

Baking baking baking.

Tropical fruits in abundance.

Lots (but not enough) of time with Liz.

Going through scads of old family photos and scanning them with Grandmother, Aunt C, cousin Meg, and Dad.

Enjoying the sunshine and looking forward, just a little bit, to the snowy wonderland that awaits back in OR.

The fact that slowing real estate mania in Florida is allowing lots of conservation projects to MOVE FORWARD because suddenly nobody wants to build houses anymore. Well, hallelujah.

HAVING TIME TO READ. I repeat. HAVING TIME TO READ. Oh is it good.

And some more. Details later, maybe, if I get around to it. I got several stacks of old slides to scan tomorrow - and it's time to make pralines and macaroons and maybe a nice long bike ride on my fave yellow bike...

December 18, 2008

Bright Side of the Road

Somebody send me some good news, would you? I'm tired of so much that's bad or wrong or so sad you have to cry. I'm tired of carrying around this burden of knowing the whys and hows of what is wrong and why - what it means to walk into Save-a-Lot, our local super-discount grocer, and see Latina women carefully price-checking every item to stretch each dollar and the vacant-eyed stare of an older man with a body completely beaten down from hard labor or maybe drugs or disease or just plain being tired. To see the packets of frozen fish and know that they came from collapsing, overburdened fisheries - or from ecologically devastating fish farms that destroy all the natural sea life around them. To see the towering stacks of chips and sodas and the deafening silence, atop the tinny music, of a place full of people who are having a damned hard time.

To come home to news that, yes, the state of Washington is cutting its budget yet again and the grant program that is funding the lion's share of my salary will be cut at the end of June - just as the growing season starts.

I can hardly bear to walk into the assisted living facility where my Amma lives. My mom does it every day, goes and talks to her and rubs her legs and makes sure everything is OK, and Amma barely notices. She is beyond everything except the next round of medication and I can't handle it. Not her, not the indomitable woman who was digging up and transplanting spiny pineapples at 90 and skillfully picking out the best-quality fabric at Wal-Mart from the piles and piles of bolts at 85. Who until this spring was still sewing, still ten times the seamstress I'll ever be, who would stand in front of the sliding glass doors to the back yard and roar out in tongues her love for her God.

The papaya farmer I met who wouldn't take a cent for the gorgeous fruit he gave me but relayed a series of struggles and failures to succeed not through any fault of his own but bad circumstance - hurricanes, disease, market upheavals.

Every time I come home things look a little worse around town. The long slow creep of decay and the dissolution of that most important thing - community. People are disengaged. People don't care. Or maybe they do, but they feel helpless. All those For Sale signs, all those homes falling apart, decrepit, with filthy dogs short-chained in a ring of dirt, a sign of worse things inside.

Grotesquely huge faux-Mediterranean mansions sprouted all over Sarasota and down 75, having eaten up all that farmland and open space, they sit empty, For Sale. Walking around at one of the ritzier malls in the area and seeing the price tags and nauseating opulence at a store like Saks, and thinking, what the hell? Buying all these Christmas presents for all these people and having very little ability to gauge my complicity and what to do about it.

Don't even get me started on the Real news, everything I've been reading in the newspapers and online.

To want to keep my eyes open for all of this and to want desperately to look away, to stop knowing. How do you know it and see it and live with compassion and love and not let all that need everywhere dismantle you bit by bit from the inside out?

All these hours in the day and yet so much yet undone. Projects upon projects stacked in my room and my mind, all these things I want to do for me and for my family and my friends and my job and there will never ever be the time to do it all but I keep trying and getting frustrated. It doesn't really help to know, logically, rationally, whatever, that you can't Do It All or Fix It All unless you can live that truth and find that tricky sweet spot where you do your best and you do all you can but you don't try and do it all and you don't beat yourself up over all these things you see every day that wash across your body like strong waves and threaten to sweep you right out to sea.

(ps I guess I'm not the only one)

December 14, 2008

Freeze

I've gotta say - it's not such a bad thing to be in Florida on vacation when it's 11 degrees in Oregon right now...

December 3, 2008

Rediscovered

Forgot how good this one is.

In 3 days

I'll be here:

That is all.

p.s. I love my job.

December 1, 2008

Good Things

- I go home to FL in 5 days.

- It is gorgeous and sunny outside - in DECEMBER. In the GORGE.

- I got my inbox to below 20 messages for the first time in at least 8 months.

- I may have found a great deal on a MacBook for my organization, since we currently are borrowing a laptop and will need to return it very soon.

Singing

Brian Eno puts this really well - it's a sentiment I've tried and failed to express for a long time.

Singing aloud leaves you with a sense of levity and contentedness. And then there are what I would call "civilizational benefits." When you sing with a group of people, you learn how to subsume yourself into a group consciousness because a capella singing is all about the immersion of the self into the community. That's one of the great feelings -- to stop being me for a little while and to become us. That way lies empathy, the great social virtue.

As someone who spent over 12 years of my life singing each week in a choir, and another 4 years involved with the DOC, in which singing is integral, I can attest to this. There are so few ways to truly become a part of a positive group consciousness; singing is by far one of the best.

(via kottke)