Dancing with Trees

Do you have a tree you know personally?

I remember in grade school being taken on some sort of nature walk with my class where we were out in the woods.   The leader pointed to various trees and told us stories about them as if they were people:  “This one is an old granny who thinks…   This one is a young and willful child who wants to trip people by sticking out its root, etc.”  The she encouraged us to go up and down the path and find a tree that we understood its story.   For the next hour we took each other to various trees and told their stories.

As an adult many of the photos I have taken are of unique trees whose stories I feel.   Here are some examples:

These two trees became lovers young and grew up together and their lives are wound together and infact imbedded in each other.  When one dies the other will as well – they cannot live without each other.

This tree could not withstand the wind storm and finally let go of its hold on life, but it was caught in the arms of this younger tree who holds its mourning, apparently forever. 

       

This tree was touched by human love

This ancestor's life nourishes the next generation.

                                                                                               This off spring is a little "non-traditional".

This tree took what humanity threw at it and worked with it…undaunted.

My Meeting sits at the top of hill with a road that spirals up to the top through a grove of second growth, old growth – we look out the picture window at the beauty and grander of these trees.  Once, during a windstorm, if memory serves me right during Meeting for worship, one of the bigger trees came down…with a rather loud thud.   Someone gave ministry wondering what the other trees thought about this.   I have recently learned about mycelium, the white fibers that come off of roots.  Apparently science is learning that plants and trees communicate in some sort of way with each other through the mycelial path.   So in fact perhaps the trees did mourn for their elder who had died. 

 

Shortly thereafter one of the founding members of our Meeting died.   At the memorial someone recalled the big tree that come down and the ministry that had been given suggesting that the other trees were effected.  They likened this elder of the Meeting’s death to the loss the trees has suffered, changing the whole landscape.   At the time I felt concerned both that there are not enough young Quakers and that it seemed to me that we only had big old trees, no little trees.  Then I walked through the woods and discovered hundreds of little seedlings and was able to notice other 10 year saplings not that tall obscured by the bigger trees.  I realized “oh yes the big ones take up all the attention but the little ones are there quietly growing.”  I was reassured.

The trees of my Meeting

Recently the city told us the water pipes to our building our 50 years old and considered to small and to old and likely to leak and needing to be replaced.   They wanted us to give them eminent domain over a path from the road that would have cut through the property of one of our members who lives on the road and across part of our road.  They were going to cut down trees…about a dozen of these large old trees in order to accomplish this.

The first response of our group was to feel like “we had to”, for the practical reason of not getting a water leak.   But when I gently prodded us to examine this some more – was there no other way?  Were the pipes really at risk or just a “bigger and better” mentality,  was there a different path that would effect less trees, etc.  We began to slow down and ask more questions of the city.  It became clear the city planner who made the plan had never left his office, had just made the plan from a map – did not even know about these woods.  Our member on the street got an arborist to come out.  He told her among other things that it was thousands of dollars worth of trees and would detrimentally affect the woods.  He gave her a little courage to fight and when the Meeting learned she was going to, we said we would stand in unity with her.  So she and the clerk asked the city to come up with some other plan.  They then came up with the  plan of boring through the ground to get the pipe in which will not kill the trees!  (which I suspect will be equal or less than the cost of all that logging.) So the sillium of the woods are communicating their relief to each other.

I wish this were the end of the story, but it is not.  At the bottom of our spiral drive is a lot that a woman who was mentally ill lived in till the end of her life.  She did not care for her home, nor pay her taxes.  So the house needs to be torn down and the city seized it for back taxes last year.  We knew it would be sold and just hoped a developer would not buy it.  Around the time we thought to tell the real estate agent that we would oppose any development that took the trees on the property down…it was too late.   It was sold.   Nothing has happened for quite a while, and it was possible to forget about this.  I had imagined they would leave all the perimeter trees and take down the center of the plot ones to build.  But the member of our Meeting who lives on the street announced last Sunday that she had heard they were coming to cut them down…all of them.  I’m scared that the loss of about 1/6 of the entire woods will be such a shock to the surviving trees as to weaken and damage this whole interwoven forest eco-system.

over 3 centuries ago a philosopher named Descartes made treaties which much of western civilization was built upon, that said things like body and mind were separate, and earth and “man” were separate.  We are now facing a crisis so severe, climate change, that it threatens all life on the planet.  We arrived at this severe place out of just this Descartian error of viewing nature as separate from us: as something to use, to take advantage of, of something we had dominion over, or control over.   We failed to see ourselves as part of it or to understand that what we did to the earth we did to the host body of which we were one cell, one life form within a larger life form.   Regarding trees we have seen them as lumber (an object to use), scenery (something outside ourselves to view), or an obstruction to somewhere we were trying to get or to build and thus something to cut down/remove.  We have not seen them as part of our ecosystem, or as carbon sink protecting our air, or as living forms.  We most certainly have not seen them as personalities like my nature guide did. 

 

This weekend at Quarterly Friends Meeting we were invited in query to ask what if all life (not just humans) had a Light within?  For myself I know it would mean I could not just cut down a tree to suit my own purposes.  I have never understood people who chained themselves to trees and risked arrest to protect them, but I am starting to understand them.  But more profoundly I would have to learn to think about myself as part of network of life with reciprocal life relationships.

Out running Your Light: a Confession

Recently I was watching a tv show where a lapsed Catholic went into the confession booth and said: “Forgive me father for I have sinned, it’s been 13 years since my last confession.  I have…”  After a life time of just finding the concept of confession odd (probably because I did not and still don’t believe in sin) I watched this scene with a certain envy.   It seemed like a comforting idea to be able to go somewhere and confess that you have strayed from your connection from God, and to ask to have that connection restored.   I guess readers’ you will hear this Quaker’s confession.

Quakers have a historic concept of outrunning one’s leading, or one’s light – as I have explained in a previous post.   In that post I explain the idea that God can give us a leading but that Quaker’s of old had a clearness committee or now called anchor committee of elders appointed to support their ministry.   These elders were to hold them accountable and be a source for them to turn to for grounding so the ministry would not wander from its source, and become ego driven or over taken by worldly considerations.  The phrase out running one’s leading or light meant that you tried to do more than you were given light or divine direction about.

Two and half years ago I founded a chapter of a climate change organization in the city I live in.  I had been operating under a leading to do climate change work for years, and the way the pieces fell together to start the group was also very clearly a leading.  It had all the hallmarks of way easily falling into place, doors opening before you could even ask, etc.  In the first year of the group we did amazing stuff and I had the peace and contentment one has when on the proper path.  The inner leadership of the group was an odd assortment of personalities, but I felt a little like Jesus who had collected a strange assortment of fisherman, prostitutes, and sinners, as his inner circle with which to do amazing work.  (I did not feel like Jesus, just to be clear, only that my process of collecting people felt as random.) 

But then to my heartbreak the infighting started.   Because I knew I had been lead to create this group and because I could already see the powerful difference the group could/did make I instinctively felt protective of it.   I would argue and fight with those on our leadership team who I felt were taking us in the wrong direction.   I only ever had 20 to 25 hours a week to spend on the group, while some members were spending 40+ hours on it.   So in my free time (the 20 to 25 hours) a week I would rush like a mad person – to the extent that my closest friend said in exasperation one day “No Lynn, it is not just getting through this up coming action/event…perhaps you have not noticed you have been going at this pace for over a year.  Being over busy is a form of spiritual disobedience.”  I heard her, but I still felt caught on a treadmill I could not exit.

As I prepared to write this blog I see the previous blog about outrunning one’s leading written a whole 10 months before.  I see the one I wrote about giving testimony where I recognize that I had spoken cleverly while giving public testimony,but not as lead.  In my July blog post I even spoke about my realizations that the ways in which I have learned to do Quaker process do not work well outside of Friends Meetings – and that was one of the many struggles I was having on how to be a faithful Quaker doing this work in a secular setting.  I go on to say: "I now have a better way, but I will need a Quaker committee of elders or anchor committee, so I do not get lost in ego or blindspots by this way of trying to lead.  In general the American public does not see the search for Truth as part of the work of life. "  But I did not do that.  Why?   This is not an excuse, but it is true.   Like many Meetings in America right now mine is of shrinking size.   The active members struggle to take care of a Meeting House, and to do pastoral care for our aging members increasingly in ill health.   How do I ask an over stretched Meeting to create an anchor committee for me?  But I am clear now that for any future climate work I do that I will have to…or again I will be over extended beyond my light.

So I sort thought about my experience as that I and one of the leadership were having a lot of fights.   (Looking back I wonder why I did not look for that of God in her despite her atheism.) I failed to notice till the very end that it was actually a power struggle.   That she was trying to pull certain things away from me, to go around me, and to minimize my position as coordinator of the group.   I reacted instinctively to protect, to defend, to deflect which I thought just meant I was always being pulled into conflict, but really meant I was in the power struggle just defensively and unconsciously so.  My brain was increasingly trying to figure out what to do, how to counter her next move…caught in a big chess game – something which in no way resembles a faithful walk.  

Increasingly, I was wearing armor whenever I was engaging my leadership team, which due to email meant many times a day in my own home.  When you have to put on armor that many times a day, it eventually does not come off. Thankfully, I can say I never became mean, vindictive or attacking.  But at some point I realized that I was becoming a different person because I was living inside my armor with my heart locked away, becoming a person I did not want to be. When it reached its height I walked away and left rather than demand that everyone take sides and engage in an all-out war.  Which meant I took the pain, and the loss on myself…and that I got to take the armor off.

Why was I outrunning my light?  I was returning to activism after a several decades long break to raise my child.  Activism was from a time in my life where mostly I did secular activities – my faith-life strongest in other times of my life.  These two parts of me existed separately and without integration.  I was lead to start a secular organization – a puzzling thing from the start.   But I don’t live on the East coast in a thicket of Quaker population.  There were in fact in my whole large city no Quaker’s I could even pull into my secular group.  Like so many Quakers whose work life takes place in a secular setting I just saw this as a natural development, but not as a danger to faithfulness.  And I think perhaps if I had done it a different way, it could have been done faithfully.  Looking back I can notice I would have needed to pray about everything I did, all my own personal decisions made within my group.  And I know I would have to have an anchor committee.

Right now I am in spiritual recovery.  I am slowing down enough to be able to hear a still small voice again.  I have stepped away from my group so that the chess game in my head will finally shut off.  I am noticing the nudges I had, but was completely distracted from by choosing other paths that the power struggle required.  I am divesting of tasks I took on out of duty or responsibility, but not out of leading.  I am deciding that like Quakers of old that would come to a cross roads and wait until they discerned which way to go, that I can take steps slowly and wait for the next step till I have Light.  Because while the planet melting has urgency, God’s timing is always deliberate and perfect. I am re-deciding that I will move at a pace that includes self-care, play and fellowship even if it means I get “less done.”  I suspect less will become more; that what I will do will be more effective.  Certainly if God is in charge it will be!

Held in the Light - a poem

Dear Comforter, Source of all Light, hold us in our pain

Friends please hold me in the Light as I interview for this Job.

Friends hold my beloved in the Light as he is operated upon on Monday.

Hold this beloved one in Light and give the strength to overcome addiction and turn from it.

Oh God Hold me in the Light as I follow your lead and risk to be faithful.

Hold my parent, my child, my friend in the Light as they lie dying.

In the Light we are held by you all as we broken heartedly grieve.

Friends hold me in the Light as I find strength to speak truth to power.

Hold us in Light as we give birth to new beginnings.


Hallelujah Holy One celebrate with us!

Thank you Creator for the birth of this new life!

Thank you for the blessing of meaningful work and a place to do this work.

I'm grateful for this new love.

What a blessing to watch the joy and the unfolding of our children's lives.

Thank you for the kindness of the stranger today, and for the chance to be that kind stranger.

Thank you Lord for this life well lived, even as it parts from us we are grateful.

Oh Light, thank you for your Presence in our every passing moment!

Lynn Fitz-Hugh
5/10/2014

Hat Honor

It is fairly well known among Quaker's that early Friends refused to doff their hat to those of higher class an offense for which one could be jailed. Friends did this, as well as using differently thee and thou, as a way of making the point that we are Children of God and equal in the Creator's eyes.

I think that mostly modern Friends think of this as another cool or exemplary piece of Quaker history.  However, I wonder how many of us have stopped to actually feel out what this really would be like.  Imagine standing in front of someone who in these modern times has way more status than you and then imagine deliberately doing something which you know will offend them, and in fact will probably get you arrested.  Yeah, you may notice as do I, that this takes some nerve!

Actually it takes faith.  It means that in a non-creedal, non-doctrinaire way that one takes action not as an expected ritual action, but as active witness to a Holy One that you are in active communion with.  I am reminded of the feelings I had while taking part in an active civil disobedience on the White House lawn during the Reagan administration.  I had felt lead to this action and felt engulfed in Light in a most intense way as we sat praying on the lawn.  It felt literally sort of amusing to me when the secret service men read us an ordinance against sitting on the law and ordered us to leave.  I was amused that mere mortal men thought they had any power over me as I sat literally covered in Divine Light.  It seems to me that in the Peace Testimony when it says "we act in the Life and Power that takes away the occasion of all war" that it is this same intense Life and Power that they are describing.  And I think that when early Friends refused to doff their hats that they were faithful to that same Presence.....otherwise it was just a lot of nerve!

Recently I was at an action that was some thing between a demonstration/street theater and an arrestable act of civil disobedience.  A group of twenty entered Ameritrade bank which has funded the XL pipeline and inflated an pipeline replica (made of black garbage bags) and read a declaration condemning the bank for its part in destruction of life as we know it on this planet and imploring it to stop.  One person had to keep reading while the security guard literally jumped up and down in his face, while another person had to try to reason with the guard asking for time to finish reading.  The rest of us sang or chanted to distract or emphasize the point and we all left before the police arrived (although standing out side legally protesting as they arrived and left.)  But as the reader continued to read while the bank manager freaked out I was reminded of hat honor.

On one level if you think of it as getting arrested for not taking your hat off it seems ridiculous.  On another level if you think of it as making the point that all people are equal it is an extremely important point to make where ever that arises.  And yet today, in the totally non-arrestable action of simply what we buy and what we don't buy we are confronted with: bananas, teas, coffees, sugars and chocolates which are planted and harvested instead of food for the citizenry in the countries that provide them to us for dirt cheep.  Also our chocolate and the metals mined for our cell phones are made by child labor (sometimes slave labor) and yet we still buy these items.

We read in the papers the slow chipping away of our civil liberties, our right to privacy, workers rights, etc.  Are any of these important to us on  a level of our testimony's for social justice?  Corporations continue to heat our planet in a thousands ways.  What feels important enough to you to stand your ground for?  To not doff your hat for?  To risk arrest for?  For what will you be Holy Obedient?

The Unnameable One

For some time I have been struggling in my spiritual life with how to call out to the Infinite Holy One. For me the term God has not evoked a male presence, but it is not an intimate enough term for me in prayer, for heart-to-heart discourse. For years my prayers had begun "Dear Lord", and for many recent years I've tried to tell myself that while that term historically refereed to the adult, male owner of the manor, it wasn't a male term. I told myself it was a term for grandeur, vastness, and powerfulness. But i had to admit to myself that an above me/below me quality and a "taskmaster" quality were sneaking into my intimate Divine relationship. This was not how I really thought the Nurturer is. So aware also that some of my sisters find the term God alienating when used in verbal ministry, I set out to seek a new name.

I wanted a name that I could call out to or speak of, that Ground of My Being, that would work in all instances. That is where I got stuck for several years. I tried out terms like Goddess, Creator, Comforter, etc. Nothing felt right. Goddess just put a different gender on a Being I find genderless. Creator wasn't the one I could pray to in grief. Comforter is not the One who made the Universe... and it went on and one. My whole prayer life seemed adrift. I was trying to change how I prayed to reflect more my feeling of calling on the Inner Light and the Outer Light to move in concert in my life. But how does one form a prayer without words?

Finally, in one of those divine ironies where one gives in order to get, I was leading a workshop on personal theology at the Friends General Conference Gathering and the answer was opened to me. The workshop was on theologies we construct for ourselves, and I had invited people that morning in small groups to look at how they conceptualized and called out to the Divine. As I visited the groups and as they reported back to the large group, I again heard the familiar struggle. Many names were put forth: Yahweh, the Light, God, Ground of my Being, Goddess, Abba, etc. But either the speaker or the listeners always expressed frustration with the terms. Nothing was ultimately the right fit.

Then we went into silent worship. The quite bouncy, joyful music of a Cris Williamson song ("Song of the Soul") came into my head. I heard two fragments of lines: "Love of my Life, I'm.." and "Spirit Divine." For the first time ever, I realized that the first line referred not to a human lover, but to the Ultimate Lover. As I thought about what beautiful phrases both were for the Dancer of my Heart, suddenly all the other names I'd heard that day came spilling in, sung to the same melody, and I saw a lovely patchwork with the many names of the Unnameable One. In a flash, I realized that the difficulty of my task had been its impossibility. I remembered only then that the ancient Hebrews had a name which meant: "that which I refer to in order to refer to that which in unnameable." They recognized the egotism and impossibility (and sin?) of trying to reduce to a mere word the name of the Infinite One. The impossibility of our finite consciousness trying to embrace both eternal, infinite, and mysterious! I had to laugh at myself because I'd been trying to carry out this same impossible task.

But what joy! What liberation to realize I was free to use any name, to use all the names. Suddenly the whole vastness and powerfulness of the Infinite Horizon seemed to wash over me, no longer blocked off by worlds that limited or confined by relationship to and experience of the Divine. I felt the multi-level connectedness to My Mother that I had sought so long in "the right name". As I lived the next minutes, hours, days and years with this new insight, several other things have became apparent to me. One is that I use the name God when my head is talking about Spirit. I use it when I am reducing the Infinite to a concept, or when I wish to communicate to another by a familiar and acceptable term. It is a term I sue when I'm in my head, not when I am in the Presence.

The other side of that is if I listen in my soul, if I listen to "the Still Small Voice Within", then the name I will call will be my immediate and genuine experience of Spirit this moment of my existence. Such practice makes my prayer life far more powerful and makes my vocal ministry evocative. I now have a much deeper understanding of my the journals of early Friends are full of such phrases for the One who Covers Us since they worshipped in a Living Presence who was the programmer of every Meeting. When I first read Thomas Kelly's Testament of Devotion, I loved the phrases he uses such as "the Hound of Heaven," which he uses throughout his book. But I thought of them as marks of good writing, not as ways to call out to the Maker.

I now see them as guideposts for all of us of the intimacy possible with the Author of Living, when we seek to know Spirit minute by minute. What came to me in worship felt like a genuine opening, a glimpse of Truth that my mind did not figure out, but was revealed to me as a gift of grace. I am aware of the battle that rages in many Meeting houses over God language. In this battle many feel oppressed and disregard, others feel the Most Sacred is attacked and denigrated. Each side reels their most personal experience of the Parent is devalued. I offer, most humbly, that perhaps in my opining as an answer for us as a Society of Friends: that we will not find consensus on a "right name", that we cannot argue each other into compliance or a new or old orthodoxy of semantics.

All of the names we call are correct and spirit filled. But if we embrace this as an answer, it must be one of the highest common denominator, not other lowest. By this I mean that all parties not simply "accept" the names others call their Beloved , and not routinely continue to use the same name they have sued for years. Instead, let all of listen to the Still Small Voice to know by what name we will call out at this moment, and that we hear the Divine Whisperer in each message given at Meeting. I wish to share with others the infinite richness I have found in such worship.

This article is reprinted from Friends Journal June 1994

Balance and Spaces

The worship sharing I sat in asked us queries about our relationships: family, friends, work, community, nature, self, spirit, etc.  and if our relationships were in balance.  As friends shared it became apparent that balance wax and wanes in life with both predictable and unpredictable events: the birth of triplets, the loss of a job, a sudden health situation, changes for others in our life.  Some events allow us to grow in areas of our lives, others complicate things.  We ebb and we flow.

Later one man spoke of the role of grief in our process and spoke about grieving for some trees lost out of his yard after a storm.  I thought of trees that were cut out the 2nd Growth grove of trees around my Meeting when we did our remodel and also one big one that just fell in a windstorm.  The man commented that when trees leave they leave a space for light to come through.  That I thought was an interesting way to think about it.  At our Meeting when the tree fell some member asked if the "other trees had noticed" (and in fact grove trees our connected by their roots.  The sense then was of a space left that was grieved by the other trees, but now his comment suggested to me that with a new space, a place for light to come what also is now possible? 

I realized there are always little seedlings working year by year on becoming bigger trees, but we tend to ignore them because they seem so small and relatively insignificant compared to the bigger trees.  I realized though with more light they would grow more quickly.   We would notice the loss of the big trees and worry that there were "less" and "cannot be replaced", have a scarcity thought.  But in fact their replacement is already on its way and in the seasons of the woods there are always big trees and medium trees and small trees - in balance (unless messed with by humans.)   This Quarterly the adults were all pleased that half our attenders were children.  Long I have worried about the big gap of Quakers in their 40's, but somehow despite this....the children are now coming.  The promise of possibility is always there.

And so in our lives also where things maybe off balance and we cannot anticipate the next thing, the next change or the next possibility or the next lost.  Somehow it all does flow exactly as it needs to.

Of Holy Obedience and the River of God

In the fall of 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected President and in Jan. 1981, as a student on office campus study in D.C., I watched his administration come to town.  Thousands of Republicans swooping down on the city, with special hats and buttons, celebrating that “happy days” were coming again.  I watched in horror and shock as the streets were taken over on inauguration day by the military, including tanks, and it felt like a coup de tat. This was followed quickly by an avalanche of legislation to cut social services and the safety net of the poor, and his new budget came out proposing cuts that would take services back a decade or more.

The Community for Creative Non-Violence, a Catholic Worker house that served the poor in Washington, DC called for national days of actions, people getting arrested for days at the White House to protest these cuts.  I felt drawn to this action, but also nervous about the idea of getting arrested having never done civil disobedience.  I was leaving town soon and was mainly concerned about possibly needing to come back to town to attend court.

As part of wrapping up my stay in D.C., I did something I had intended to do for all the months I had been there: visit the Smithsonian Museum of History.  A friend dropped out the day we were to go, so I went alone.  I went through an inspiring exhibit documenting political protests in the US of many eras.  But then I went through an exhibit I will call “This American Life” although I don’t know what it was really called.  It started with a panorama of Native American images, then of life in the colonies, and on decade by decade showing the dust bowl, the great depression, many wars, etc.  Each a room of a home – some desperately poor some modestly middle class, some even opulent.  Slowly technology enters in and transforms.  My journey through it felt like a deeply mystical experience.  At the very end was a bench which I sat on for about 10 minutes aware that I was deeply centered as if in Meeting for Worship, aware of what I have come to call “the River of God”- the deep, eternal journey of humanity across all recorded history.  Of how people have always struggled for survival, for dreams, for a better life for their children, against wrongs real or imagined, and slowly, but surely eeked out a better world even while creating our next set of problems.

In that quiet on that bench I knew with absolute clarity that I would indeed participate the next day in the civil disobedience, that I was part of this eternal chain of humanity struggling for a better future.  I knew I was also part of the chain of protesters who had won the safety net for less advantaged and that it was now my turn to help protect it.

The next day I took public transit to the CCNV house, and met an affinity group from Buffalo who welcomed me into their group to be arrested.  Mitch Snyder drove of us in a Volkswagen bus over to the White House to wait in the tour line, because like a weeks worth of protestors before me, we were to go through and pick a place to sit down and be arrested.  Our group had decided to go all the way through and come out onto the lawn to be arrested.  To our surprise the Secret Service responsible for security at the White House, stood beside us (and no one else in the group) moving with us through the tour.  Clearly they had followed up from the CCNV house and knew who today’s arrestees were to be and were poised to pounce before we would “disrupt” people’s tourist experience of the White House.  I started to feel in this cat and mouse game like I was playing the game Clue:  “Will it be in the parlor with Mrs. White, or in pantry with Professsor Green?”   I think however by the time we got out the front door they thought we had lost our nerve and wandered off briefly, only to come rushing back when we veered onto the lawn against posted rules.

As we sat down in a circle on the lawn I quickly found myself in deep and centered prayer, with a sense of White Light all around me, really in one of the most holiest of moments in my life.   Faintly behind me as if coming from some other reality I could hear the voice of one of the secret service reading the rule against being on the lawn and warning us that if we did not leave within 5 minutes we would be arrested.  I almost laughed out loud because it seemed so funny to me that in this deep place of Holy Obedience that I found myself that this mere mortal thought he had the authority to move me from the place I was so anchored.

We were arrested, held for a few hours and released to our own recognizance, and a week later at our trial plead nolo-contender (meaning I do not admit guilt but do not contest the truth of the charges.)  We were given suspended sentences and sent on our way.

Today almost 30 years later as I study the economic crash of 2008, and the slow destruction of the middle class that has taken place over that time, of the ever widening inequality gap in this country between the rich and the poor and the very deliberate strategy on the part of the Koch brothers and other members of the most rich elite of this country carried out over those thirty years, I see that indeed that moment in time was a turning point.  I am once again convinced that Spirit led me to just the right spot and the right moment on the White House Lawn.

As we face Climate Change we are again at just such a pivotal time and some of us will again need to heed our place in the chain of protestors who have acted to protect life, and we will again need to find where
spirit would have us sit or act to say No to destruction.

Pineapple's and Butterflies

When I was 13 or 14 I sat on a bench in Meeting looking out the window wondering if there was a God.  Out the window I could see a purple Iris with a drop of dew on it with the light glinting in the drop to show a rainbow.  I started to think about how light refracts, about how water evaporates and then becomes clouds which become rain returning to nurish plant life.  I thought about how bees help plants reproduce, and I felt overwhelmed by the perfection of creation, and in that moment I knew there is indeed a Creator.  I have also since then not seen a purple Iris without knowing that there is God (One of the reasons I carried them at my wedding.)

It use to annoy me that people said " God bless you" when everyone sneezes.  I thought of it as a foolish superstition going back to old beliefs that when we sneeze the devil can enter our body.  But I decided one day:  "What if I just take the words literally, as God blessing me.  So sneezes have also become a reminder for me of the presense of God.

In an event that happened so long ago I no longer remember all the details, I was having a very spritual moment and a butterfly landed on me, and then flew off almost leading me somewhere.  After that event I have chosen since butterflys do not come by that often, to let them also remind me of the presense of the Holy One.  These three signs have seemed like the right number.

Photo: Fay Anderson

                                                              
But on Sunday pineapples took on a new meaning for me - no not about the presence of the Divine, but rather the absence.  In our Meeting we have a tradition of someone bringing flowers which sit in their vase on a small side table in front of the picture windows looking out on the 2nd growth 100 year old woods.  Some times if the person designated to bring flowers forgets, we have a vase on a back table with a couple of small branches of a tree that have small origami paper peace crane's dangling from them.  We bring that vase forward.  On this Sunday our Meeting was full of visitors come for Yearly Meeting Coordinating committee, and it appeared someone had forgotten the flowers.

I sat for a long time debating in my head whether I should get the vase of paper cranes or if someone was just late.  Eventually the children left and I realized that I had been worrying about this for 10 minutes!  I thought:  "this is ridiculous...either go get the vase or let this go."   I decided that it would be a good spiritual practice of detachment if I would let it go.  So I let it go.  And the very next minute in came a Friend carrying a pineapple and three small votive candles which she with difficulty lit in front of the pineapple.

It occurred to me that the next time I saw pineapple it would be a reminder to check how I was doing on releasing the things that keep me from worshiping My Creator.  What things serve for you as reminders of the presence of God?

Growing Towards the Light

Yesterday was a beautiful first day of spring.  I went outside to survey the garden.  In the fall my husband and son had replaced some logs that held a bank in place.  They had dropped cut pieces on the ground were months before flowers had been.  However, now in spring those same bulbs had tried to come forth, only to find their tender buds under boards.  I moved the offending boards to find that the plants, sensing a small crack of Light, had grown sideways till they reached the edge of the board and then up - in a sort of backwards L.

Hmmm,  I thought: Life is kind of like that.  We sense the Light, even when it is only a small glint of it, and we grow towards the Light.

Recently for our anniversary my husband and I were looking at the photoes from our wedding 4 years ago.  Everyone is familiar, but older.  In the kids cases, they are a foot taller now and more "mature" looking, but for most of us, it means more grey hair and more wrinkles.  Yes, I thought, the slow march towards death.  Huh, how does that fit with my previous thought that all life grows towards the Light?

Then I realized - oh yes, it is the same.  Our slow march towards death is also the path back to the Eternal Light.  It seems some of us will live shorter lives than we thought we would and others will live much longer than they thought they would.  So what of the march - does it matter if all our days our numbered, how we spend those days? How do we make our days count?  I think it is not some "productive doing", but rather have we lived those days with Love and with Light?  Have you grown towards the Light today?