Apostles of the Living Light

I just finished cleaning the meetinghouse after a late concert tonight. It was a wonderful accapella harmony group who sang many spirituals and some beautiful traditional songs. They also sang a lovely Wendell Bery poem put to music. They sang it as an Earth Day gift. The last time I consciously celebrated Earth Day I was cutting blue circles and wildly innaccurate squiggly green continents out of construction paper (1989?) but this gorgeous poem about trees lifted up my heart:

Slowly, slowly, they return
To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life's a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their brightened leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed.
0 light come down to earth, be praised!

In my childhood Canada spring was a time of mud and blackflies, and I didn't really understand the fuss about it. I am still an autumn-loving girl, but spring here is radiant, with blooming trees on every corner. This poem gave me a little breath of God.

Whine, Cheese, and a Girl Going Crackers

Well, I am sitting at the meetinghouse desk with a heating pad up my sweatshirt and nothing stronger than advil and tiger balm to staunch the torrent of my whinging. I’ll at least keep all whining parenthetical. (stupid patriot's day that makes things be closed!! stupid closed pharmacy! stupid prescription lying in the stupid closed pharmacy doing me not a bit of good! Boo hoo!) Everyone seems to be out/in for the night, so I could close up shop. But the internet access is calling me, and keeping me here. (Plus I'm feeling too lazy to find a new outlet for my heating pad. Waaah.)

I keep writing posts about why I'm not writing posts, but I haven't published any of them because none of them seem to be quite accurate. I'm not sure why I'm not blogging. I am not sure whether I'm more or less self obsessed than usual these days, nor do I know if my degree-of-self-obsessedness at any given moment contributes directly to the quantity or quality of my blogs. It's not that there's nothing interesting going on. Life continues to be lovely/catastrophic/mundane/annoying/nifty by turns. There are flowers everywhere.

(I miss my bike! Boo hoo!)

Sometimes I want to write a post because I have an urge to remind "the world" that I'm still here, I'm still questing, I'm still trying to be true, I still have things to say, I’m still cool. Sometimes I want to write because I want "the world" to remind me of these things. These don't feel like very good reasons.

Sometimes I don't want to post because I'm feeling too tired to worry about how perfectly faithful I'm being in this sentence or that. Sometimes blogging seems like one more way to mess up...a way that's easy to avoid. Sometimes I don't want to post because I wonder if this or that idea of mine is worth the headache it might bring me if someone disagrees or misunderstands. That's not very brave. And I don't know if not wanting to be bothered about something that sometimes feels very ethereal and optional is a failure of faithfulness. I can't tell if my vague guilt on this count is justified. It's never been that God's handed me some big message that I'm refusing to give to Pharaoh. This blog's never been like that, it's always been whatever I was thinking about at the time that I thought other people might like to think about, too.

(Should that last paragraph have been in parentheses? And do I need something to whine about in this parenthetical remark? That's easy--waaah, I'm out of Diet Coke and my sternum's cracked! Sniff.)

I’m not terribly interested in inulging myself in a long meta-think about why I’m not posting. It just sometimes kind of makes me sad that I’m not.

Things have been fairly quiet in my world these days, even before falling off my bike. (I was wearing a helmet! It didn’t help! Waaah.) I’ve been doing some reading that’s been useful, and some reading that's been silly. I’ve been knitting some sweater:



(And since I fell off the bike I’ve been lying in bed a lot! Poor me! But how can I really whine when I have such a handsome boyfriend who wears things I knit for him even when it's too warm for them and poses all cute while I stand on a table and take endless numbers of pictures of him? How? Like this: Poor me! Some of my torso is broken!)

One lovely thing that’s happened lately? When my friends heard about the accident, I think every single one called. One morning I had five phone calls within an hour and a half. For a chick that sometimes likes to sit in the garden and eat worms, or sit in my bedroom and mope about how I have no friends, it was humbling and made me thoughtful, and it made me feel less like whining and more like rejoicing. (Don’t rejoice with a cracked sternum! It hurts! Waaaaah! Boo hoo! Poor me!)

Thank you, friends! And thanks to everyone who left me loving well-wishes on here, too. (And now I am going to go find some more advil. For my poor broken bones. Sniff.)

Oof

So, I've had a few posts in the works, but some have expired out of their usefulness before I put them up, and one I really did like just disappeared into the ether.

But I just wanted to say hi and I'm alive(ish)... I crashed my bike yesterday and broke my sternum and a rib, so I'm laying pretty low. Prayers for fortitude appreciated! It is probably too hard for me to stay in one position long enough to attend formal worship tomorrow, and I'll miss it, so company in spirit will be very welcome.

God bless you all!