-
The Value of a Weekly Peace Vigil
The discipline of maintaining a weekly vigil for peace on the steps of the Peterborough town house helps me pay attention to the many ways the war-making mentality affects our consciousness and our decisions every day. No matter what the weather, no matter what preoccupations have dominated my thoughts and emotions during the week, on Saturday it's ( Read more... ) -
Umiaks
For no obvious reason, I found myself reflecting on Inuit boats (kayaks and umiaks) during Quaker meeting yesterday, after reading from "The Sixth Extinction", by Elizabeth Kolbert. Today, I found this article from Natural History magazine, which called the umiak "almost extinct" and mentioned the "last umiak' in Shishmaref, Alaska 1n 1968, which ( Read more... ) -
The other part of last night's dream
I was one of four girls who were left to fend for themselves on the streets of Warwick, Rhode Island on a cold, slushy afternoon in the mid 1950s. We came to a place where an electric cable looped across the street and discovered that if we stepped on it at certain places, the juke-box loudspeaker in the spa on the corner would play a song. It ( Read more... ) -
Monserrat Rock (a dream telling)
We took the ferry out to Monserrat rock. Ours was the only car on the ferry, and as soon as we pulled onto shore the ferry left, while we drove up the short, deserted but physically constricted main street to the tiny rental cottage we'd arranged to stay in. Monserrat Rock's only real attraction was the view from the inn carved out of the rock ( Read more... ) -
Prequel to My Mother's McKenzie River Journal 1946
I found these pages from an early, typed, part of my Mother's journal from 1946. They talk about getting to and starting to drive up the ALCAN highway, which was still under military governance.
( Read more... ) -
A Walk Around Walden in Ice Time
Inspired by our reading o the book "A Religion of One's Own" by local author Thomas Moore, Denise woke up Friday morning and proposed a "pilgrimage" to Walden Pond.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18079565-a-religion-of-one-s-ownThoreau used the site as a retreat where he could contemplate what really matters in life; he saw blue angels in the ( Read more... ) -
Mary Susanne Edgar and her affirmation
This is the affirmation I said at the equinox gathering on Friday night. We used to recite it as a group, multiple times, during a morning Meeting at Moses Brown School in the early 1960s.
http://blog.gaiam.com/quotes/authors/mary-s-edgar
Here is a Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Susanne_Edgar ) about the woman who wrote it. When ( Read more... ) -
My River of Stones for January
My friend Deborah Harvey got me involved in a group writing exercise called "River of Stones" around New Years Eve. The idea was to write a short piece (poetry, verse, prose) each day for a month, putting it into a single document with all the other participants. The pieces were to be inspired by something we experienced and made an effort to ( Read more... ) -
The Mystery of Ivy and her Owl
In the process of singing and thinking about "The Holly and the Ivy", the Christianized pagan ballad to two evergreens, which pronounces the male Holly victor over the barely-mentioned Ivy, I ran across this Solstice ballad, complete with the information that Ivy was a girl who danced in adoration before Dionysus until she fell dead at his feet. ( Read more... )
