Flutterings

Religion notes:

Via Philocrites' Guide to Unitarian Universalist blogs: the Guuild - UU Religious Professionals Knitting.

On the op-ed page of today's New York Times, a quarter-page ad commemorating the 400th anniversary of the Episcopal church in North America.

My current church-related docket includes two more services for Cookeville, a sermon for Nashville, a set of child dedication certificates to letter, and a band gig for a birthday celebration. After July, though, I'll be taking an extended break and participating only in lay leading (once a quarter), hymn leading (pinch-hitting as needed), the fundraising table (once a month), and chamber choir (one rehearsal and performance a month). It means formally dropping out of the main choir and band (not that I've been able to participate in either this year with any semblance of regularity or reliability) and ending the monthly eastward shlep.

( passion for the unattainable )
The bottom line is that life is good. Messy and not wholly manageable, but definitely good.

---

I left for this morning's walk to the library with two books to return. On the way, I paused at a yard sale (to benefiting a youth services group) and saw several police officers getting ready to direct traffic around a 5K race through the 'hood. On the way back, I passed by two more yard sales, stopped at the bakery, and watched the runners/shufflers/stragglers streaming past a water station near the B&B. I arrived home with two pints of soup (honeydew melon and Caribbean mango), a chocolate-chip scone, a beat-up cutting board, and a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's A Wonder Book.

Last night there was quite a bit of rain, and the living room reeked of wet dog as I worked. Today the sun is shining, and the songbirds are out in force. The rest of the day will be devoted to laundry, errands, and writing. The joke is on me: If you'd asked me twenty years ago what I wanted, it wouldn't have been this. When I was seventeen, I was terrified of dogs, I was thirty pounds lighter, I regularly wore makeup (a habit I'm thinking of resuming -- but probably not this year *g*), I had yet to nosh on my first avocado or sip my first Scotch, and I doubted I would ever own a house or return to the South to live. Ten years ago, I would have told you that I liked steady paychecks too much to consider freelancing, although I was working sixty-hour weeks as a retail buyer (plus commuting daily between Ann Arbor and Detroit) and not getting much of anything else done outside of it. I had yet to visit San Francisco or Edinburgh or Tokyo, I wore oversize men's clothing more often than not, and I probably downed more wine and whisky each week than I have the whole of this year. (Ah, how I miss my old metabolism.)

I'd be lying if I claimed I'm not apprehensive about aging, but I shouldn't be: if the pattern holds, and I do my part, life will keep getting better. So: laundry, errands, and writing. (And the mango soup, and maybe a haiku, and definitely scritches for the leek-chomping dog.) And love to you all, and praise for such joys.

Just now, I finally sliced up a sheet paper I marbled over twelve or thirteen years ago.

From the in-box:

According to Rabbi Levi, Abraham said to God, 'If You seek to have a world, strict justice cannot be exercised; and if You seek strict justice, there will be no world. Do You expect to take hold of the well’s rope at both ends? You desire a world and You also desire justice? You can have only one of the two. If You do not relent a little, the world will not endure' (Genesis Rabbah 39:6)

- from a Jewish Theological Seminary e-newsletter

I remember very early having the sense that there is one poet in the world, and sometimes if you're very lucky and you work very hard, you get to be the poet for a while. The rest of the time, you're trying to earn your way back to being the poet for a moment. Meanwhile, you love poetry itself.

- Franz Wright, from an essay to appear tomorrow on Poetry Daily

I don't know that I agree with either of these, but they were interesting enough that I wanted to remember them.


Yesterday ended up being more social and more domestic than I expected -- a friend suggested brunch, and I was feeling okay enough for that, so the BYM schlepped us all to Goldie's for blintzes (me), challah French toast (her), and other breakfast-y things, accompanied by a fairly intense discussion about research, citations, etc. (which is the sort of thing that's bound to happen when you plunk a quixotic sociologist and an opinionated copyeditor at the same table. Fun stuff, honest!).

It wasn't until we got home that the BYM informed me that a neighborhood committee was going to congregate in our living room in an hour; this would be the living room I'd been treating as my writing/editing hut for the past week, with books and papers and napkins and socks everywhere. (Yes, socks. I have this tendency to get home and think I'm going to sit down for just a minute for a quick check, but then I get engrossed in writing and/or work, and then I want to get comfortable, so I end up kicking off my footwear so I can put my legs up on the sofa...) Cue Tasmanian-devil-style cleaning frenzy. (It's probably good he didn't tell me earlier, though, since I would have ended up fretting.)

The to-do list remains fearsome, but most of it isn't due this week, so I have some hope of getting back into the swing of things (catching up on correspondence, seeing the floor of my study again, etc.). Seasonal scheming continues apace (with much glee), and I have (finally!) only two scenes left to write for my holiday exchange fic, so I'm hopeful I can send that puppy to the mod by the end of the week (provided my beta(s) are still speaking to me by the time they get through draft the nth) and then put in some serious time on (1) my upcoming Advent sermon, (2) assorted encyclopedia essays that need to be drafted sooner rather than later, and (3) the suite of poems I started while in Florida.

First, though, the bank, and then the library, and then a couple more hours of billable work. Onward...

There are tasks, inevitably, and here on this farm, at least, too many to be filled in one day. Some tasks are seemingly straightforward. Wash the kitchen floor. Shovel the barn floor. Others are less so. While washing the kitchen floor remind yourself to be more consistent in keeping shoes off in that room and better at mopping spills when they happen. When shoveling the barn concentrate on what being a shepherd really means. To find some joy in the appointed tasks is another requirement. For without joy, what is the point? That is a more difficult thing to do. And that is one of the things that define us to ourselves.

- Sylvia Jorrin, "This is a Day"

Right, then. Lists...
( To do... )

Slightly vexing things:
* Gouged my heel on a nail
* Car sounds worse than before its stint at the shop

Splendid things:
* Says You now airing Saturday afternoons.
* Pomegranates on sale (*nods to qrssama)
* Sting's new album of John Dowland songs and letter excerpts. I've been playing "Have You Seen the Bright Lily Grow" (by Robert Johnson -- the one non-Dowland piece on the CD) over and over - so, so pretty! Also, I normally loathe "Can She Excuse My Wrongs," but Sting's arrangement is interesting enough (and he has that lovely decadent tinge to his voice) that I won't automatically hit "skip" next time I run the whole playlist. And the liner notes/design is also well-done.
* Earrings from orbitalmechanic. They're perfect. Thank you, my dear.
* The painting almost_clara surprised me with yesterday. It's inspired by a series of drabbles I wrote related to "Dover Beach," and it's stunning.
* Random notes and cards from friends.
* Sun's out. It's going to be a brilliant day.

On the underside to the lid of this afternoon's bottle of tea: "If we don't change the direction we are headed, we will end up where we are going. - Chinese Proverb"

Not an inappropriate admonition for the end of this month and the eve of Yom Kippur. I got back from DC late last night, and am still half-addled from lack of sleep (66 billable hours and counting...). In addition to the usual raft of to-be-answered emails, I have four sympathy notes to write (no one close, but a result of having enough acquaintances who matter to me and a "the least I can do" m.o. The other side of the coin, of course, is the gladness of having so many people to care about, and knowing in turn that there will be friends who will check on me when it's my turn to endure such losses).

Also from the week: two rejections (but one of them had passed first cut, so that's cheering) and a very pleasant dinner at Fleming's -- more pricey than our usual night out, but fantastic service and ambiance (quiet but not tomblike, and no wait). We split a bowl of French onion soup and a plate of tuna carpaccio, and dessert was key lime torte.

My current mealtime/bathtub reading is Sylvia's Farm: The Journal of an Improbable Shepherd. I am currently on the chapter in which she waxes upon her infatuation with mangel-wurzels, but the passage I bookmarked earlier today was the one which ends "Days of Grace":

Winter skies will come soon enough. Each task done needs bring its own joy. And the day requires being lived well without fear of tomorrow. It is in gathering the beauty of each individual moment that one, in truth, gains strength for what the future holds.

- Sylvia Jorrin

HAH! 28-page spreadsheet CONQUERED!

Some weeks, it just doesn't gel: started three letters while on election duty last week, and abandoned them all 2-3 pages in. Started a poem earlier today, but it's behaving like parachute material -- flappy in peculiar spots and dead flat on the grass otherwise.

Even so, I've promised myself to get 500 words of sermon drafted tonight. I was trawling through Vassar Miller's If I Had Wheels Or Love for possible meditation texts just now, and these two poems stopped me in my tracks.

( Prudent / A Word to the Wise )

Earlier this month, I finally got around to badgering my husband for the photos he'd taken when we were in Japan last fall. Today, I finally got around to uploading them. Here are two of the better ones...

( trees! fish! )
( nattering about stuff I need to do... )