In the Dark of the Year

I just went down to get an early morning cup of coffee, and this was the view that greeted me from the kitchen window. No matter what kind of rotten, sad, grumpy or grinchy side of the bed I might wake up on, the God of wonder can yank me to the other side in a heartbeat.

A New Year to Celebrate

New Year's Eve. That traditional time to remember, to check out the highlights, laugh over the spilled-milk goofs, cherish the tender moments. And then we begin celebrating the coming new year. Frankly, I think we use it mostly as an excuse to have a good time. Other than the dangers inherent in drunk driving, I'm all for celebrating for celebrating's sake. We need it.

There's not a lot to cheer about. A doubtful, dangerous, destructive war waged under the most spurious of circumstances. 40,000 babies dying every day from hunger and its deadly companion ailments. A consumer-based "civilization" that threatens to plow through the last of the Earth's precious resources with hardly a nod to its own culpability. No wonder we tend to grab for the nearest alcoholic beverage before we can make merry. How else could we possibly face the truth of the mess we've managed to make in our own nest?

Given that gloomy reality, you might wonder why I think celebrating is a good idea. I rejoice that, as long as we're still hanging around as a species, there's hope. Hope that we might look backward some New Year's Eve with a sober, unflinching eye and decide to make some real changes in the months ahead. To live as if the Earth mattered, as if we aren't disconnected from those starving children, the poisoned water, the filthy air. What if we decided to figure out what we truly need, and buy only those items next year? What if we committed to producing half the trash we did last year, personally? What if we all gave Christmas gifts of a heifer, or a tree, or a year's worth of breakfast for an AIDS orphan? What if we awakened to the fact that food doesn't have to be locked up?

Sounds radical, I know. It will take radical to bail us out at this late date. But radical doesn't mean impossible, and it's in that wee little difference that my hope lies. So grab a noise-maker, strap on a silly hat and have some fun, knowing that next year could make all the difference in the world.

In the bleak mid-winter

For those of you who don't know the hymn "In the bleak mid-winter", it's worth researching. It's a haunting, lovely Christmas carol, vying for my favorate rating with "And every stone shall cry".

Ah, Christmastide.

I've morphed into something of a Scrooge over the past fifteen years or so when it comes to the celebration of Jesus' birth. Here in the convent our traditional practices ran along the lines of let's-see-how-much-we-can-possibly-cram-into-two-days. I think we're now easing up on that, but the hectic preparations, the long hours and scant rest of Christmas have taken their toll. I've developed a Grinchy heart.

It doesn't help much that the daylight hours have shrunk to about nine. Brewster is as close to the Arctic Circle as I can bear. Our lovely December snow has been rained down into a few dirty patches of ice. Everything is either gray or brown. There's mud everywhere. Waking the ducks up in the morning now takes nearly forty-five minutes. Drag the hoses from the pantry to the back porch. Fill the pools. Remove yesterday's duck leavings from the porch. Uncover the hay and schlepp it around to all three duck-house areas to provide a safer, cleaner roost for the coming night. Feed them. Crawl into the Triplets' house to reconnect the light they managed to pull down again. Empty the outside hose and drag the inside one back to the pantry. I usually love this work, but in these darkened days it is naked drudgery.

The only fun part is looking for an egg or two. Another duck is laying, probably Petra, and searching the tell-tale "nesting holes" in the hay brings back a touch of my childhood Christmas wonder. Will there be a surprise this morning?

I know this is the heart of the Christmas story — finding a gift in the hay of the animal house. And against all reason and hope, there it is. A tiny spark of life. A promise. A possibility.

I have to remind myself several times a day that winter is not only the season of my discontent, it is also the Earth's time for transformation, when everything appears to be hopeless but big changes are afoot. Those precious few reminders are all we get to keep us plodding along through the mud. That and a huge amount of trust in the wisdom of the Universe.

Here's to gifts and trust and surviving the bleak mid-winter.

EGGS!

FINALLY!! After weeks of checking the nesting boxes, we have our first eggs! We're lucky that either Macrina or Petra (they don't sign their work, so who knows) used the boxes so carefully made for this purpose. After all, every night it's a not-very-friendly race between Bernie and Basil to see who gets which nesting box to sleep in. The girls wait out the war; eventually one or the other takes the third box. I don't see this part, so I assume the odd duck out just snuggles down somewhere nearer the warm light bulb. Smart duck.

Sadly, Simon dispatched our smallest (and clearly female) duck from this life a few weeks ago. Slave to those old murderous genes, he caught her in the open field, and she was too small to fly away. She came down with a nasty cold early in her life, and spent several days in the cat carrier in my bathroom. I hoped that filling the room with warm steam would help her breath more easily. Miraculously she made it, though she was clearly way behind in her development. Nature — hard at work maintaining sturdy stock.

That left Teresa, whom we've been calling Terry, thinking s/he might be a drake. It's still up for grabs, but we got two more females, half-sisters to her/him, and they are the same size — a major gender-determining factor. All three of them are white, like Bernie. Maybe we're going to luck out after all and the Triplets of Belleville will join Macrina and Petra on the egg production line when they mature.

We're lucky to have found these eggs for another reason. Muscovy ducks are famous (or infamous) for depositing eggs anywhere but a nesting box: a pile of leaves, any grassy area, under the bushes ... so these may not actually be their first eggs. But we're going to hang on to that belief anyway.

It's so amazing. Years of buying eggs at the grocery store, and I never marveled at what I was doing or what I was getting. Now I pick up a "free" egg in the back yard, rather nasty-looking until cleaned up, and am just blown away by the miracle of it. How sad that with the onslaught (an apt choice of word) of factory farming, we consumers lost all sense of the mystery that drives energy exchange. Eggs are good, but when we eat what is produced by "our" ducks — after watching them grow up, traipsing (or flying) around the property, learning their routines and watching them establish relationship with each other — well, that makes a difference in my consciousness. I'm deeply aware that eggs, though plentiful, are still miraculous.

Only humans could (and did) dream up the idea to start charging money for the natural gifts of creation. Only humans could (and did) set up factories that had to squelch their workers' ability to see birth, life and death as miraculous in order to treat the animals and plants in ways that would enable huge profit-centered production. Oh, I know we can't all set up mini-farms in our back yards; we know how very, very fortunate we are to have access to the land that allows us to do that. But we consumers have lots of power; we could stop supporting factory farming, and start encouraging local farmers again.

We've been lulled into believing that factory farming provides cheap food. That couldn't be more wrong, especially when we consider the cost to the Earth and all her living systems. Big business marketing also purports to provide healthy food from its mega-system, but that is wrong, too. Mass production demands a whole array of drugs and chemicals to keep its "products" going, and our bodies don't need, nor can they handle, that kind of assault.

So, yes, when we pick up fresh, organic eggs just out back, it is a miracle — and a precious gift.

Nap time

The pressure's on: the first frost is looming, and the garden needs to be put to bed for its long winter's nap. Move the greens to the greenhouse or into the seed rooms on the second floor; mulch the strawberries, shore up the fences, harvest all the last-minute stragglers, transplant some herbs and harvest the rest, enlarge the kitchen garden, move the lilac and azalea, cut back the peony leaves and stems. No need to bother cutting back the hosta; the deer have kindly done that for us all summer long. Now no self-respecting slug would come near them for their long winter's nap.

We didn't get it all done. And by sundown yesterday three of us were walking like we'd celebrated our centenaries several years ago. Shoveling rocks and moving big pots full of wet dirt and cold-sensitive plants will do that to a spine.

But, oh, what satisfying work it was, painful backs notwithstanding. Things look almost too trim, now that most of the wild greenness is gone. The neat raised beds are obvious again, the mad profusion of sweet potato vines and marigolds gone to compost. Even underground must look different to the voles. I can hear them now, "Hey ... what happened to those yams??" Sorry guys, they're safely tucked into boxes in the basement for our winter consumption. You should have planted your own.

It seems only days ago that we were madly trying to get things planted, that there was no Duck Lane or Duckville Manor, that the trees were still bare and the days too cold to get the peas into the ground. And here we are again, winter lurking around the corner. Soon we'll be collecting maple sap and filling the house with the sweet smell of class A syrup.

Spring leaps into summer, which passes in an eye-blink, and there's never enough time to be bored by autumn colors before the first snow, which heralds the impending mapling season that hints of spring. I can still feel March's subtle disappointment that I hadn't tired of snow before it was gone.

I needn't have worried. It snowed today.

Outcasts

Basil [r] spent last night on the chapel roof.

We're fairly certain this is happening because in the tradition of barnyard fowl pecking order, Basil's on the bottom. Everyone picks on him, literally. So I guess he finally got fed up with it and decided to hang out in the only other fairly safe place he could find.

It must have been miserable, since this roof is metal and is always wet. His feet may be frozen to the roof this morning; we'll just have to wait and see how he fared. But I know he's still there, because I checked on him at 4:15 when I got up, and he was still up there, standing just like he was at 8:00 last night.

We humans do it, too. "They" (that is, the latest out-group) don't belong here. She's so weird. He doesn't fit in. They aren't as smart as we are, they're a different color, their sexual orientation or gender identity isn't "normal" (though by whose standards?). They are from the wrong side of town. The reasons are rife, and the consequences usually mean.

In any number of ways, "they" are from across the border. Locally there is a big move to get rid of people from Mexico, Ecuador and Brazil. They are "illegal aliens" — a sweeping generalization (and a completely artificial differentiation) that is supposed to justify their place at the bottom of the human pecking order. Much of our exclusionary behavior is based on human construct, not on reality. This is my place, and you don't belong here. Interesting.

But check it out — there are no borderlines on this planet. We are all expressions of Earth, which is one of many expressions of the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of many expressions of the Universe. The Universe: the One Story. In spite of our long experience of acting as if it were not true, there is no out-there, no not-me. We are all differentiated expressions of the sacred One.

We aren't behaving exactly like the ducks, though; they are obeying genetic instructions that say each drake needs three or four females to preserve a healthy reproductive environment. The other ducks don't hate Basil; he's just one too many on the male side of the ledger at the moment. Should Bernie become duck a l'orange for a local coyote some day, the remaining ducks would immediately rearrange themselves into a new community, and Basil would no longer be the "outcast". It's not about him, it's about what works to sustain a healthy duck community.

We humans might want to rethink the practice of separating ourselves by artificial borders. It really isn't a very good idea. We may find ourselves on the equivalent of a cold wet roof someday, alone, unable to reach out to or communicate with each other. Which would be truly sad, since we are blessed with wondrous gifts of differentness, one of the immutable manifestations of the essential nature of our Universe. And it well may be that solutions for our current dire environmental straits will arise from within that blessed richness.

So today I think I'll watch myself closely, on the lookout for my own ways of creating separateness where none exists.
__________________________

[6:30 AM update: Basil had flown over to the convent roof—and appeared to be his usual sweet and chipper self—when I went out to ring the Angelus this morning. He may occupy the low rung on the duck family ladder, but he's one tough bird.]

Design Flaws

I've been taking a six-day retreat, and today is the last day. I awoke this morning, troubled by a question I had been asked several weeks ago during a program Sr. Heléna Marie and I gave in Arizona. The question has been rolling around deep inside my psyche, and this morning it finally popped out into my consciousness: the words "intelligent design" were clear as a bell at 6:00 AM.

"So you believe in intelligent design?" asked one of the women. Alarm bells rang in my head as I answered, "I wouldn't use that combination of words, for sure; they are loaded with a particular 'baggage' that I don't wish to carry."

This is incredibly dangerous territory, and I've been mulling over just what bothers me about the whole intelligent design theory. I know in the ground of my being that intelligent design, as preached by people and institutions (like the Discovery Institute in Seattle), is off-kilter. There is an inherent deception about their efforts, and I cannot trust or believe in a god (or its followers) who condones deceit to establish its validity. I have a jaundiced eye for a god who would apparently disappear if it were not for human interpretation, verbal lid-banging, vilification of others, and behind-the-scenes manipulations.

ID proponents attempt to use their traditional adversaries — the legitimate scientific community and an increasing body of amazing scientific knowledge — as proof for its not-always hidden agenda. There is more than a whiff of political maneuvering among the ID folks that intensifies my suspicion — ties to politically obvious groups who want to turn our schools into boot camps for government-by-theocracy, for example.

An interesting (and probably dangerously simplistic) explanation of intelligent design is one that uses a picture of Mt. Rushmore, where the pattern of the rocks below and on either side of the carved faces is ascribed to natural law and chance, whereas the faces themselves were created by intelligent design. True, but the design for those faces came from humans, not God. Somehow the ID folks want to be sure that the human, above all other aspects of creation, maintains its current elevated status over creation; a status that was created by itself, by the way, and is proving to be phenomenonally destructive. ID people would like us to believe that that devastaion, the result of "materialistic science" they claim, can be corrected if we'll only let them take over education and government by way of religion.

"Intelligent" design theory is not one most intelligent people would subscribe to. But it does get sticky. When one studies that vast body of scientific empirical data — quantum physics, "seeing" the leftovers from the original fireball, amazing photography from traveling cameras zooming around our galaxy, the development of a planet that for most of its four billion year life transformed its wild, chemical-rich seas into palm trees and anteaters and the Rocky Mountains without one human helping hand to do it — one has to wonder. Is there not wisdom in this Universe? A force that yearns toward complexity and self-revelation? In my mind, absolutely everything in this Universe is an expression of the Sacred, the Numinous.

What is not useful is to sustain the belief that one set of ideas should hold sway over another, that one group has the "right" knowledge and must therefore wipe out or control the others. Behind-the-scenes, under-the-table machinations and ill-disguised political dance-steps for power are not useful.

What might be more useful would be to step back and observe creation with awe and wonder, to celebrate the beauty and wisdom of it all, to honor and respect everything that shares this lovely, sacred, "fragile Earth, our island home" — yep, even the ID folks.

Sunrise Moon

Any of you who follow my blogs or visit our website know that I'm enamored of sunset skies. We are halfway up Joe's Hill and have a marvelous west view, so we are treated to a lot of spectacular twilight shows. But early Friday morning I looked out back and saw this lovely sight.

When the sun hovers near the horizon, day or night, the sky can transform into breathtaking artistry. Today the rising sun bounced pink and yellow off the western clouds, Earth's shadow was still discernible (just above the trees), and the barely-waning moon stood out as brightly as if it were midnight.

Jet contrails across the sky to the south and east were bright pink, too. Toward the east, the clouds reflected deeper yellow tones as the sun cleared the horizon but not our hill.

I absolutely never tire of looking at the sky, whether it's the characteristic deep blue of dry air, heavy with water-logged thunderheads, blazing with hot red sunset clouds, or vast with the awe-inspiring galaxy-studded blackness of night. I seem to be eternally fascinated by the sky.

Sometimes I just stand there, unaware of the time or weather, awed into wonder and silence. Never, in the entire four billion year history of the Earth, has the sky looked exactly like this. And it never will again.

Don't miss it.

A Sleeping Giant

Macrina took a looooong flight today. I was standing in the little ducks' pen when I heard the familiar sound of flapping wings. I looked up to see her about 200 feet away from me and 30 feet or so in the air, skirting the edge of the trees to the north. Clearly she had been down in the woodland near the athletic field. This is a major flight distance for her. I assumed she was heading back to the rocks and stone benches where the big ducks spend most of the morning, but she never wavered. On past the house and out of sight she flew.

Though all the big ducks do fly, Bernie rarely does (I think he's too heavy to enjoy it much), and Petra and Basil only fly short distances, and then only when it suits them. So far I've seen no (human) logic in what triggers these short forays into the air.

"Well," I thought, "there goes Macrina." And I meant it literally. She's gone. She's discovered the lure of a larger world, and it's a lot more interesting than home. I worried. It's a lot more dangerous, too. The wild geese and ducks will peck her to death. She'll get lost. The coyotes/raccoons/hunters will kill her. She'll starve to death. She'll never want to come home again. She'll be injured in some painful, horrible way that causes her to suffer for hours. Maybe days.

Wait a minute. She's a duck in a beautiful duck environment. I was standing there, worrying like a human mother for a child heading off to college. Macrina is barely domesticated, really, and her ability to survive is instinctive, not something she needs to learn the hard way. Of course awful things can and do happen. Everything in the entire Universe is subject to destruction, and eventually it will happen to each of us, for some a prettier process than for others, but it will happen nonetheless.

There is something deep within us that cares for the other, for beings that appear to us to be not-us, which is an illusion, of course—we are all infinite expressions of the One. That means caring is instinctive, hard-wired within. It is a powerful and necessary force for survival. Over the past 13,000 years or so we've done a dangerously good job of putting this tendency toward caring to sleep, but it's still there.

It may be a sleeping giant, but thank goodness it's not a dead one.

By the way, Macrina finally appeared soaring in from my left. She'd made a huge aerial circuit through the woods and around the house and school. She was checking out her environment, taking risks. And this time she came home.

It's Hard to be New

As promised, here are our two newest duck family members, Terest (L) and Avila (R). They are new in several ways: new to the Earth, new to this home, new to the ducks who already live here. Their covering is new: soft, fluffy, not-very-protective down that is still (mostly) duckling yellow. Almost everything they do is new, at least to them. New home, new pen, new yard, new food, new pond ...

Being new is tough.

The big ducks are pretty sure they don't want the newcomers to stay, even though I don't think they are entirely sure just what these little yellow critters are. But they understand that the fuzzy little invaders want to hang around, eat their food, play in their water — and generally act like little sibling annoyances.

So Bernie, Macrina and sometimes even Basil (Petra, as ever, is gentle with everything) go after the little ones. Once Bernie and Basil got them cornered and something ruthless clicked in their pea-sized brains. Luckily I was there and stopped the frenzied and brutal pecking almost as soon as it began, but it was a little scary. I actually had to push Bernie away, and he rarely lets a human get close enough to whiff his tail feathers, never mind execute a serious shove. Thankfully, a nine-pound testosterone-poisoned duck is no match for a ——— well, never mind how much I weigh, but I definitely have the edge on Bernie. He knew I meant business and he quickly came to what little sense he ever has. He calmly wandered a few yards away and nibbled politely on the smart weed. "See?" he seemed to say, "I wasn't doing anything ..." Yeah, right.

It will be several weeks before Teresa and Avila are big enough to endure the inevitable tail-feather-removal pecking that will establish Bernie as the Main Man. Then everything will settle back into a routine that includes our little newcomers.

I remember the misery of starting a new job. I hadn't any idea what I was doing, where to find things, how to remember all those names. I hated feeling new, and my first days as a newbie were intensely and exhaustingly focused. I just couldn't bear to look foolish, and I hated the feeling of not belonging. Inevitably, there was one co-worker who seemed to go our of her way to make me understand that my place, whatever it turned out to be, would be less than hers.

It's the same here in community, where (thankfully) we have new woman joining our little family fairly regularly. They are powerful women, coming from strong business and professional backgrounds. Yet in a way it's back to step one for them, and they struggle to embrace the profound differences between living independently in a secular world and living faithfully in a family of flawed humans, engaged in their own struggle to move into a new monastic vision. They can feel picked on, as more experienced Sisters bring errors in reliigous practice to their attention. Lord knows we're not perfect, and we're not always as welcoming as we'd like to think we are.

It's not exacty a picnic. It can feel like having a rug yanked from under your feet, like having your skin rubbed with sandpaper, like ... well, like being new, I guess. So I watch our little ducklings, and I watch our brilliant newcomers in community, and I pray that all of them will weather the storm of adjustments, eventually nestling happily into a nest that no longer feels so darned new.

The Angelus

Every day now we ring the Angelus, which is a series of eighteen strikes on the chapel bell, in a particular rhythm. We encircle our day by ringing the Angelus at 6:30 AM, as the day begins with an hour of meditation (which we call The Hour of the Wolf); at noon (a respectiful nod to the tradition of Angelus-ringing); and at 6:30 PM, at the close of our evening meditation (The Hour of the Deer). The traditional monastic practice is to stop whatever you are doing at the first bell to say the prayers [see below] as the bells are rung.

I most enjoy the noon Angelus, because that's when we might be engaged in any number of daily tasks: Pia's been finishing the hermitage renovation and making a new pen for the ducklings; Sr. Lilli Ana might be cleaning out a guest room or planning an afterschool program; Sr. Heléna Marie and Sr. Donna Martha might be pulling weeds, planting, harvesting or otherwise tending the garden; I might be doing laundry, raking leaves or paying bills; Sr. Claire Joy might be cooking or shopping; Sr. Emmanual may be riding herd on the lunchroom at school. And then, suddenly, "CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!!" sings the ship's bell we use for chapel, and simultaneously, seven woman stop in their tracks to pray.

When the Angelus began at noon today I was looking out the window of my office at the changing leaves. I could see Sr. Donna Martha working on fencing under the apple tree. and suddenly there we were like children playing "statue" — me with a cup of coffee in hand, Sr. Donna Martha with her hands full of deer netting and fence post. And there we stood for the next few minutes, two nun-statues, praying the same prayers together. Just then I felt the deep connection between our little family of Sisters, all of us standing quietly, praying words steeped in monastic tradition.

Old and new, shaking hands across the ages, joining time-tested tradition with emerging vision. It doesn't get much better than that.

Prayers for the ringing of the Angelus

The pattern of ringing is three sets of three bells, rung fairly close together and with a pause between the sets for the completion of the Hail Mary. After the three sets of three, nine bells are rung evenly but spaced further apart for the final prayer. (Imagine a bell ringing at each asterisk.)

* The angel of the Lord announced unto Mary
* And behold she conceived by the Holy Spirit
* Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, prayer for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

* And Mary said, behold the handmaid of the Lord.
* Be it unto me according to your Word.
* Hail Mary ...

* And the Word was made flesh,
* And dwelt among us.
* Hail Mary ...

* Pray for us, O holy Mother of God,
* That we may be worthy of the promises of Christ.
* Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have * known the incarnation of your Son, Jesus Christ, * announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his * cross and passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection * who lives and reigns with you * in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, * now and forever. Amen.

The Community Grows

Well Bernie the Duck may be in love with Petra (or at least in lust), but there's no love lost between him and our two newest duck family members: Teresa and Avila, who arrived this afternoon, all yellow ducklette fuzz and brash mini-quacks. They are about four weeks old.

They can probably hold their own ... but "probably" isn't enough for me. Once I saw how aggressive Bernie was being to them, I just couldn't risk waking up tomorrow morning to fuzz-less ducklings, or, worse yet, dead ones. Back into Smooch's cat carrier they went, and up to the second floor just outside my room. It may smell like a barn up here, but I think I'll put up with it until I know they can hold their own against a testosterone-saturated nine-pound bully.

[CHECK BACK NOW AND THEN — I'LL GET A PICTURE OF THESE LATEST ADDITIONS TO DUCKVILLE.]

God's Promise

I do love a good storm, especially when I can lie in bed and listen to the hiss of raindrops falling on the brick patio below my window. But during the past week, as the rainfall pushed toward ten inches, my passion for stormy weather began to fade.

A small locust tree halfway down our back hill fell over in the saturated soil. The clothes never got quite dry, hanging down there in the basement. I began to think about large boats and pairs of animals. Sara, our friend from New Orleans, was beginning to feel like The Flood Jinx.

So being able to see tonight's sunset brought joy well beyond the delight of a gorgeous evening sky. This small community of sunlit clouds and blue sky sang of hope and possibility and trust. After days of flood control, chilling damp air and low-slung sooty clouds, we have been reassured that, as Dame Julian noticed all those years ago, "... all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

Amen.

Love in the air

Two days ago I was out before breakfast, enjoying unseasonable early-morning warmth, when I heard a frantic quacking from the back yard. That was alarming, since our ducks are Muscovies, which don't really quack at all. They make a soft, whirring noise at most. Uh-oh.

I ran back there just in time to see Bernie climbing on top of Petra. Apparently nature is firing up Bernie's hormones, and this seemed to be the cause of the racket. Petra wasn't entirely sure she wanted to become the object of Bernie's affections, however. By now Bern probably weighs in at around nine pounds, compared to Petra's svelte five or so. The process looked a little too aggressive and unbalanced to me, and I was pretty sure Petra wouldn't have opted for this amorous attention if she'd had a choice.

Bernie didn't seem too skilled in his technique, either. His position made effective mating anatomically impossible for one thing. He was having a hard time balancing with his feet halfway up Petra's back, and occasionally he slipped sideways until he was perpendicular to her. His idea of foreplay was to peck roughly about her head, focusing (cruelly, I thought) on her damaged eye. It took a lot, but I resisted the temptation to yell at Bernie and chase him away from Petra.

Trust nature, I kept telling myself. It may look impossible, ludicrous and mean, but they'll sort it out eventually.

Finally Petra managed to bounce Bernie off her back, quacked madly and made off for Duckville Manor. Bernie wasn't deeply enough in love to follow her up the ramp, and his testosterone rush seemed to wear off quickly. She reappeared in the duck yard within minutes and life returned to pre-puberty levels.

But a line has been crossed. Soon the relationship between the four ducks will change permanently. Adult juices are flowing: eggs will be laid, the boys will fight each other, the girls will divide their time between incubating and foraging.

Something in me felt a little sad. Oh, I'm looking forward to delicious breakfasts of duck-egg omelets all right, and it's exciting to watch our duckies grow up ... but I'm not quite ready for them to take on the serious business of reproduction, with its competition and harshness. I like my ducks sort of daft and adorable.

Maybe it's time for a few more new ducks.

Water

Yesterday we finally got rain. Oh boy did we get rain. It poured all day — so much that I needed to sweep the excess water off the patio (four times), much to the great disappointment of the ducks; drag all the hemlock needles out of the second floor gutter drains (thankfully, just once); pull the leaf dams out of the sewer drains out on the road (twice); place seven wastebaskets in various places under the leaky school roof; spend almost five hours today dispatching a third of the pear tree that fell during the storm; and generally enjoy the soothing sound of a steady, pounding rain.

I couldn't have been happier.

By late afternoon I was playing in the rushing water along the curb. We have a sweeping curve in our driveway; rainwater flows toward the forest on one end and toward the road on the other. I was fooling around with the broom, sweeping water along so that when it reached the lip of the driveway where it spills into a little rivulet in the woods it would make a great splash.

Earlier, when I was pulling leaf piles out of the road grates, I was treated to the satisfying rush of a hundred-foot-long run of water released into the underground "box" the city installed years ago. What a sound! There was so much water and so much power in it that I was darned careful about where I was standing. Oh, there was no danger of being dragged into that box of roiling water, of course, but I sure could have been knocked off my feet, and I'm just a little too old to think that would be fun.

Water is amazing. In a hurricane it can bring incomprehensible devastation. In a pouring rain, it provides gentle, soothing sound. On a winter pond it is ground for skaters, a slide for otters, and protection for fish and other semi-hibernaters. In an iceberg it becomes glorious shards of blue light, crashes into the sea in the impressive act of calving, or takes out a gigantic sea-going vessel like the Titanic. Rocks are carved, smoothed, even worn completely away by the patient passing of the smallest steady trickle. Yet water will give way to a clump of newly fallen maple leaves, finding itself a different course around the blockage.

I've always loved water, even when it appears as an impressive gusher in the basement during a heavy storm. You just have to love something so versatile, unique, and mysterious. Everything else has the decency to follow the rules: shrink when you get cold, expand when you get hot. But not water. And thank God for that, because if it followed the rules we wouldn't be here. And precious little else would be, for that matter.

Once again Earth teaches me. Be like water. If it is beneficial to live by a different set of rules, give it a go. Know when to hang in there long enough to wear down something as unyielding as rock, and when to step aside for a tender possibility like a clump of leaves. Once in a while sweep someone off their feet, even if they think they are too old to enjoy it. Be flexible. Be playful. Be useful. Be beautiful. Sing a haunting, soothing song.

And once in a while, be ferocious. It will keep others respectful, compassionate and resourceful.

Morning glory

"Arise, shine, for your light has come; and the glory of God shall break upon you." [Isaiah]

Not all of our morning glories did well this year; the purple ones under the crab apple tree, for example, just didn't get enough light. But the one you see above has been having a blast all summer. She's "glory-ous" indeed; her electric blue trumpets announce a new day every morning. And what a great message that is.

Every day these flowers appear, looking a lot like they did the day before. But they are not the same. Recognizable, yes; we know they are morning glories. But something changes every day, and by now the plant looks nothing at all like the frail little shoot that poked out of the ground several months ago.

And that's the way we are meant to be, too. A little shift here, a new leaf there, a bit more stretch, a little bend around the pillar, a tiny lean toward the sun. A minimal difference each day seems hardly noticeable. But over time all those little shifts and bends and stretches mold us into the beauties God had in mind. Every morning really is a new day — a new opportunity to step into our greatness, a new chance to begin afresh, a clean slate upon which to write our lives.

Arise, shine — let the glory of God break upon you.

Another peek at our place

I've been working outside a lot this summer, and part of my effort has been to give Major Haircuts to some of the plants around the convent. In some cases, that meant cutting the plant right down to the ground. We have a glorious porch that wraps around three sides of the house, and we decided to create an area where we could sit and watch the day go by, just for the fun of it. Here are a couple of pictures showing the result of those efforts.

I'm not a great fan of destroying plant life, but on the other hand, if destruction results in the transformation needed to open the door to something new, I'm willing to participate. At one point a large azalea and two rhododenrons were sacrificed, partly due to their ill health, partly due to their invasive behavior on their neighbors, and partly due to their willingness to house a large next of stinging creatures.

Life moves on.

Transformation

The following blog entry is a copy of a short article written for our AweWakenings newsletter.


A couple of years ago I was thinking about life processes, particularly from the perspective of “deep time”—the full thirteen-plus billion year history of our amazing Universe. While studying what was happening throughout that long history, I began to see a pattern in the journey that all life makes.

I had always thought that resurrection was the natural and logical progression from death. The awareness that transformation is (and always has been) an essential and thrilling ingredient of existence was an entirely new concept for me.

Suddenly I recognized the great circle of life: birth leading to life, which leads to death, which is the door into transformation, out of which flares an infinite geography of potentialities. With the selection of one of those rich possibilities, resurrection flares toward the realized experience we call “birth”, which leads to life, which leads to death ...

On and on, round and round, the glorious wheel of life spins through time. From grape seeds to galaxies, there is no beginning and no end: the hydrogen that flared into existence shortly after space and time and everything else in the Universe began, has been recycled through supernovae, moons, giraffes, smart weed and me. I don't look anything like smart weed or a star, but that's because my perception is limited by the particularity of my species.

I don't know why it never struck me before, but I found myself feeling the affirmation of Jesus' own experience. Between the crucifixion and resurrection Jesus experienced transformation—how could I possibly have missed that? I once thought of the “harrowing of hell” as a job Jesus had to do; but what if our scripture is the best effort of Jesus' followers to report their understanding of a process Jesus had to experience? And what about the inability of Jesus' friends to recognize the resurrected Christ? Surely he was transformed—the same, and yet not at all the same.

Transformation does occur within the capability of our human senses, but I think we see the process so often we don't particularly notice it. When we do, we take it in as “ordinary” rather than as the sacred miracle it reflects.

A maple tree seed flutters to the ground and lands in a pile of leaves, which mix with the soil and rain to bury the seed in protective mulch. Over the winter the seed appears dead, but the promise of a tree stirs in that “dead” matter, and when that promise awakens to the call of sun and spring thaw, a tiny green shoot struggles through the soil. There under our foot is proof that transformation has occurred.

Every child born is entirely new and entirely unique thanks to Mystery and the miracle of transformation. Yet every child born is made from star dust that has witnessed the unfolding of the Universe for billions of years.

We live in an essentially transformative Universe, constantly manifesting reflections of the Divine Mystery that comprehends and brings into existence something new every moment. From a scientific perspective most of our Universe, from quarks to quasars, is not matter at all but a “fecund nothingness”, a soup of creative energy out of which particles appear and disappear as if by magic. The way I see it, the vast majority of our Universe is occupied by transformation in action.

I have barely begun to understand the science of the stupendous transformation process, but I readily accept that the creative nature of God floods us with its glory, and that we are made from the Mystery that dreamed an entire Universe into being and set its circle of life spinning through time. Whether we are mystified by quantum physics or awed by the birth of a child, transformation weaves its magic from under our noses to the far reaches of the Universe.

How could anything so marvelous and miraculous and seemingly impossible as transformation escape our notice, our reverence, our respect, our praise?

Night Prayers

Good heavens, August 13th. Is that really my most recent blog?? Where have I been and what have I been up to?

Time really does speed up as you age. This is provable in the theories of quantum physics: everyone now knows that the faster one travels through space, the slower time goes by; and the slower one travels, the faster time moves. OK, so as I age, I'm definitely moving slower and time definitely moves faster. See? Quantum physics rules.

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the following blog entry.

We've once again changed our schedule (well, yes, I suppose that does have to do with time), and switched from a "combined Office" (a combination of Evening Prayer and Compline) to two separate visits to chapel. That makes Evening Prayer occur in the late afternoon, while there is still light enough to read in our electricity-less chapel.

Compline, on the other hand, is experienced the same way our brothers and sisters of old did it: by the flickering light of candles and oil lamps. I confess that I've added a high-tech booklight to my prayer equipment, though. I probably could sing Compline in the dark, which is precisely why these traditional night prayers were designed to be simple and consistent. But I'm more comfortable with a little more light and a lot less dependence on my memory. Like the rest of me it is slowing down.

There was more than candlelight and monastic atmosphere present tonight, however. Tonight we were joined by our non-human neighbors. During the silent pause between halves of Psalm verses, and in precisely the same key, a Barred Owl inserted her "who-cooks-for-you" hoot from the trees surrounding the back meadow. And as our Compline prayer drew to its quiet close, a pack of coyotes off in the forest tuned up a yelping, howling chorus.

Night Prayers: the vocal offering of God's creatures in reflection and hope and joy. Thanks for a peaceful, safe day. How about a good rabbit for dinner? Any mice or voles available?

Sometimes the sound of our own voices is prayer enough to get us through the night.

Sticky Stuff

Garlic. Cooked milk. Two natural items I've always thought would make great glue. Now that I'm living much closer to the Earth, I'm discovering more really sticky stuff.

Like duck poop.

Okay, this probably isn't the most gracious of subjects, but it fascinates me. Earth wastes nothing, so the tail end (so to speak) of food processing is no less important than the gorgeous greens and corn that begin it. Ducks produce high-nitrogen fertilizer, and are quite efficient about making sure it's applied usefully. For one thing, there is quite a bit of it. For another, it's applied in liquid form and then solidifies on its own. For a third, it's sticky as all get-out. This is great for the Earth, assuring abundant and fairly even addition of nitrogen to the soil.

It's not so great for shoes, though, which is probably why all the duck books suggest changing foot attire when entering the duck pen. Not realizing all the implications of duck doo-doo, I ignored the books and learned about this the hard way. Please take my word for it: getting the soles of your shoes free of this amazingly clingy stuff takes quite awhile. And while you're doing it, you probably won't care at all how much the Earth enjoys receiving all this nitrogen-rich help.

But it gave me a lot of time to think about sticky stuff. It seems that "poop" of all kinds attaches itself to us like glue. Wanting to hang on a lot of stuff we don't need now, and probably never did. Knowing good and well that being angry or judgmental or pouty or a drama queen will get us nowhere fast, but we still do it. Thinking our own ideas and plans should be listened to and followed by everyone else. Always.

This might be what Jesus was talking about when he told the young man he had to let go of everything before he could be really free. Some of our sticky stuff can be quite useful to others, once we get unstuck from it. A lot of it should just be abandoned.

Either way, getting the duck poop of life off your soul can be hard work. It's really sticky stuff.

Fire in the Sky

My office/"cell" has a west window, but I have to be in a rather contorted position to see much besides another side of the house and the little chapel. Purely by accident, I was in that contorted position tonight, and was stunned to see a little slice of this sunset in progress. I tore down the stairs, grabbing the camera on my way.

Once in a while the sun, the western clouds and pure chance combine to reflect our local star's fire back to my eye; all the variables are exactly tuned to this kind of display. When it happens I seem to have trouble breathing.

I just can't imagine any purpose for this spectacular show other than to awe and silence us. As far as I can tell, humans are the only creatures who even notice such a thing, and if we're at all conscious, we stop whatever we are doing and stare, transfixed. We dare not look away; within minutes the light will go out and we'll be left with a burning memory that we aren't completely sure really happened quite the way we remember it.

If we are indeed the only creature aware of this prodigal beauty, we should be responsible and respectful enough to celebrate — yes, to praise — the astonishing glory of our Earth, and to do so for all her living systems.

We should do this, just because we can.

Star singing

We all worked hard yesterday. Of course we all work hard every day, but some days have a special quality about them. I don't know what causes or triggers it, but we seem to move through the hours like a single dancer, whirling about to a piece of music no one can hear but everyone feels. On those days we absorb bad news (like the death of our large freezer) with facility and grace, a few wisecracks, and a brainstorm session about how to use the body as an underground root "cellar".

Some days are just crammed full of grace.

A sense of celebration and joy takes hold. Yesterday, when our little spot on Earth finally rolled away from the sun, we made guacamole (with the season's first garden tomatoes) and tortilla chips, and sat on the patio to watch the evening sky show. Soon one of our summer guest/helpers brought out the guitar and a singing session got underway.

Crickets and tree frogs provided the shruti note for our voices, and song became a blessing to the night, soaring out over our little Bluestone Farm. Gospel laments, folk song, show tunes — braided with jokes and memories — drawing us ever more deeply into each other's lives, filling us with peace that we carry into a troubled world.

By the time we called it a night, the sky was dotted with the light from galaxies light-centuries away from us. All that vastness and mystery, singing its own melody, gift of the Master Singer.

The Universe is a song-strong place.

Of Ducks and Wasps

Petra is still hanging in there; she's a tough little bird, all right. We added two more Muscovies in the meantime; Basil (another blue) and Macrina (same coloring as Petra, though "Mac" is larger). I suspect both of the new ducks are females, but I'm basing that on their sound production alone. Probably not a sure-fire gender predictor. Bernie seems to have plucked the ends of Basil's wings clean, behavior not uncommon among ducks getting acquainted. Seems unnecessarily rude to me, but I'm not a duck.

It has been about ten days since B and Mac arrived, so I think the Pecking Wars are over and, though Bernie is a control freak about the pools and feeding trough, all four are getting along. Petra is decidedly smaller than the rest, and the loss of sight on one side hampers her foraging. But Bernie has taken a bit of a shine to her, and that may be enough to keep her going. We hope so.

llllll

A few months ago I mentioned having been stung by a yellow jacket; yep, the one who was rude enough to fly up my skirt. That encounter left me with a doctor bill, an EpiPen, and some scary information on how dangerous both a sting and the treatment could be. Just what an already sting-phobic soul needs. Today I got to check out my theory that my "allergic" reaction was due to the chemicals sprayed into the nest rather than to the venom. If I had trouble breathing this time I would inject the epinephrine, eat a bit of crow, and head for the nearest emergency room.

Here's how it happened: I decided to tackle the side of the house that fronts the driveway. This area has been growing without human intervention for years, and was in bad need of a haircut. Actually, what it really needs is radical surgery. By 7:00 AM I was half-way though a major trim job on a rhododendron. Forty-five minutes later I was putting a second rhody out of its misery when I dragged a large branch through an overgrown azalea, which was next on my Extreme Landscape Makeover list.

What I didn't know was that a large colony of bald-faced hornets (which are also called white-faced wasps, but which are neither hornet nor wasp, but an aerial yellow jacket) had taken up residence in the azalea. I also didn't know, but found out fast, that bald-faced hornet workers are fierce protectors of their paper nests. I was fortunate that I was only stung once — these guys are really serious about keeping bothersome intruders away. I ran for the ice (which I highly recommend to quell the immediate pain of the sting), and decided to wait out the reaction before I grabbed the EpiPen. Gadgets like that scare me.

Sure enough, my reaction was classically "normal local", and there was no indication of any systemic involvement. Gosh, I love to be right. Of course, "normal local" for a bald-faced hornet is ugly enough. I still have ice on it to keep the swelling down, it itches like crazy (thank you, God, for Benadryl), hurts to touch (or scratch), and is a fashionable shade of pink.

In spite of all that, I went back out to work for a few more hours. I stayed away from working on that rhody, the azalea, and an andromeda on the other side of the azalea. But I did spend some time watching the activity around that nest. The hornets quickly went back to their own normal behavior, zooming in and out of the nest as they foraged for food and wood to increase the nest size. As long as I didn't disturb the nest, they left me completely alone.

It made me think about my reaction to the raccoons who made the murderous assault on our ducks. I was angry for days; I even enjoyed seeing raccoon pelts hanging in a cabin at Connor Prairie (Indiana), a sight that would normally have pulled at my heart. But once my bald-faced neighbors knew I was no longer a threat to their home, they forgot me entirely. One non-fatal sting and it was back to business as usual for the hornets.

I used to think of yellow jackets, hornets and wasps as being intentionally vicious, capable of harboring a grudge and willing to pursue something several gazillion times its own size just to get even. [Ahem ... just a little anthropomorphism there.] Non-human critters are rarely mean for mean's sake. Attacks are almost always undertaken in service of survival and abandoned as soon as the threat is gone.

I think we humans still have a lot to learn.

Petra update

Here's the latest Petra update: she will probably lose the sight in one eye, she was covered in scratches and the feathers of one wing were completely stripped. It's rather amazing that she survived the attack — I like to think that Bernie protected her, but I rather suspect she has her own inner toughness. Sr. Lilli Ana often reminds me that an accidental step on a plant will either kill it or toughen it up. Petra may turn out to be one tough bird.

She has spent the last two nights in my room, which smells a little too much like a barnyard right now. I'm playing nature sounds on my computer for her. I suppose this is more for me than for her, but it makes me feel like I'm contributing something to her well-being.

And she is doing well. The eye still looks pretty bad, but she eats and drinks (a very good sign), and she chirps happily, allows us to administer her medications with a minimum of fuss, appreciates our attention and shows interest in what's going on around her. I think she'll make it. Last night she snarfed up a good-sized bug I found in my room. Death for life. Energy exchange.

I spent some time researching raccoons today, trying to find an acceptable place in my heart for them. They are an aggressive, occasionally violent animal, in spite of their rakish, cuddly appearance. They are sort of the cockroach of the mammal world. They give as good as they get, and occasionally go out there and attack just to remind everyone else they are there and a serious life contender. They can cause major headaches for humans, taking houses apart as well as killing ducks. They can muck up a chimney in no time, and are almost impossible to remove. I suspect the next attack will occur in our garden, probably on our tender corn crop.

But this is how the Earth has always worked: competition among species sharpens the senses and the skills and wisdom of all the participants. As Brian Swimme says, be sure to pick a worthy "enemy" if you want to grow and thrive. It will demand your very best. And it will demand your respect, too.

Prophesy and bandits

It was the raccoons, not the coyotes.

Last night for the first (and probably the last) time we forgot to close the door to the house in Duckville. We all feel guilty about it; irrationally, I wish I hadn't written what I did here yesterday afternoon. I wish I had not just assumed that because I could see the ducks in the house, and the gate to Duckville locked, they were safe from predators. I wish I had followed my own advice and looked out for the little ones.

This morning Lynne found them — Brigid, Graham and little Blue. Bernie's fine, but little Petra looks roughed up and seems to be in shock. We'll have the vet check her out this morning. Lynne and Sr. Emmanuel buried the other three, and I picked up a lot of feathers — white and downy, with rust-colored stains on them.

If the coyotes had killed our ducks I could handle it better. Oh, I'd still feel guilty, no question. But coyotes kill to feed themselves and their young. Raccoons seem to kill just because they can. They did the same thing to birds in the cloister and fish in the pond several years ago, leaving the little bodies for us to find in the morning. No wonder raccoons wear masks. Nasty little buggers.

But just because I don't understand it doesn't mean this apparently gratuitous behavior is, in fact, without purpose or meaning. It makes no sense in my world, but perhaps in the raccoon world something necessary happens. I hope so. I want Brigid's and Graham's and Blue's deaths to have been — I don't know, worthwhile, I guess. I want to feel better about what happened, and I can accept violence and death with a purpose. If anyone out there understands raccoon behavior, let me know.

We certainly learned something and, sad as it can get, learning from our more serious mistakes is the most effective (I hate to say "best") way to remember a lesson.

You can bet the farm at least six of us will be checking all the Duckville doors every night from now on.

The Ducks of Bluestone Farm

I haven't posted any pictures lately, so I thought it high time to introduce the newest five members of our Bluestone Farm family: Brigid, Graham, Bernie, Blue and Petra. These are our five Muscovy ducks. Here's how we arrived at their names: Brigid (of Kildare, my favority Celtic saint), Graham (Quacker, of course), Bernie (we got these three on Bernard Mizeki's memorial day), Blue (a blue Muscovy and half our name) and Petra (Greek for stone, so we have "Bluestone" ducks).

In the photos, Bernie and Graham are the two large white ducks in the blue pond. Brigid is the other mostly-white Muscovy in the black pond, and the two little ones with her are Blue (the lighter-colored small duck) and Petra. You can't tell it in these pictures, but Petra has irridescent green wings.

Duck wings stay small for awhile, though Muscovies eventually become good flyers and will head for the trees to scope out the joint when they get a little older. Ducks are fascinating to watch; they stick close together and watch out for the little ones. They move from place to place in a line, Brigid in the lead usually, with Blue and Petra in the middle. Every now and then all of them will stretch tall and flap their wings, for no apparent reason I can fathom. This is an impressive display for the larger ducks, but for Blue and Petra, with their stubby duckling wings, it reminds me of children playing dress-up, trying to look like the adults.

We have to trust these wonderful creatures to the vagaries of life outdoors. We do secure them in their new house in Duckville at night, but during the day they pretty much have the run of the world if they want. They forage a bit farther from home each day. I know the dangers that lurk in our woods — coyotes, hawks, raccoons — but this is how life works. We live in harmony with our surroundings, but that doesn't mean the coyote family won't have duck for dinner some night. Or that we won't ache with Lyme Disease. It's all a balancing act, and you pays your dime and you takes your chances.

Just the same, we keep an eye out for the little ones.

Seeding the Future

I've been awake since about three this morning, my brain in high gear for some reason.

One of the mental trains I've been riding is about saving seeds. The winter and spring crops and early flowers are bolting — going to seed. Odd that we use this phrase in a rather pejorative way with ourselves. Going to seed in the natural world is actually a time of fabulous abundance and promise. Because we at Bluestone Farm are committed to preserving as much of Earth's wisdom as possible, we have instituted a seed-saving program.

Each plant has some ingenious strategy for propagating itself. One of my favorites is the columbine. Not only is it beautiful (and the state flower of Colorado, my home sweet home), but its seeding design makes gathering a breeze. As with many flowers, the base of the flower becomes the seed "womb". The base of a columbine looks like a cup formed of tightly rolled petals. As the seed matures, the petals unfurl to form a pretty little open cup.

The cup remains upright on the stalk, so it takes a passing animal or a heavy bee or dragonfly to tip the cup and drop the seeds to the ground. For human gathering, this design allows me to simply tip the cup over my own little gatherinng bowl and out come the seeds.

Each flower has about six petals to a cup, and each petal holds about seven to ten seeds. Let's see ... that would be somewhere between forty and sixty seeds per flower, right? Our columbines have somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty flowers going to seed on each plant at the moment, which means the columbine plant knows it will take 1200 to 1800 seeds to insure that at least one new plant will make it to adulthood, flowers and seeds, next year. Whoa, is that abundance or what?

Or take the broccoli raab plant. When it bolts it looks like an entirely different plant. Gone are the tasty green leaves and little yellow flowers. When this plant goes into seed production it transforms into stalks with long slender seed pods growing on a short stem along the main stalks. Brocoli raab pods hold about ten small seeds each, and to get them you have to wait until the plant — stalk, stems and pods — are thoroughly brown and dry. Then comes the fun.

The stalks must be carefully cut, since their pods are designed to burst open at the slightest jarring. What with deer, turkey, coyote, raccoon, voles, wood rats, swooping owls and God knows who else playing near the plants, this design strategy is a great one. Makes human gathering more of a challenge, though.

Carefully, carefully select the driest stalks and place them gently in a roomy container. Carry this gingerly back to the harvesting table. Now at this point my own harvesting strategy differs from Sr. Heléna Marie's. She goes with the oldfashioned way: hop into the roomy container and stomp on those pods until all the seed has fallen out. Then toss the pods and stems carefully back and forth between your hands to free any lingering seeds; throw the chaff into a bag for future mulching duty and admire the seeds left at the bottom of the roomy pot.

Now I prefer a more refined approach. I carefully use my hands to squeeze the pods (OK, it's more like crushing them) open over a collander in a bowl. Then I use a classic threshing move (like TV chefs do with food cooking in a frying pan) to remove the seeds from the chaff. If I'm really being anal-retentive, I then use a fine strainer to remove dirt from the seeds. A perfectly ridiculous process, since the seeds will be going into the dirt again next year anyway, but I think it looks better. I'm all about appearances.

Back to the number-crunching: ten seeds per pod, an average of twenty pods per stalk, and maybe twenty-five stalks per plant ... um, that's ... 5,000 seeds. No wonder I'm making so many seed packets for broccoli raab.

Earth wisdom says if a few seeds are good, a zillion must be better. It's a great survival strategy. Even humans are given to amazing abundance when it comes to reproduction: millions of sperm are produced every minute in males and a few thousand eggs form in each female fetus before birth. Given the odds against eggs and seeds surviving the perilous reproduction process, abundance is a very good thing.

Lots and lots of potential babies mean that the whole system can sustain itself. A few aren't high quality, some never get to the right conditions, many are consumed to provide energy for other species, lots of them root and grow, but never make it to adulthood ... we are flooded by the message of abundance, and yet we humans seem to hang onto a scarcity context for ourselves.

Pretty hard to live in this abundant Universe while holding on to the belief that there's not enough — of anything.

The Wright Brothers

I know, I know, it's been entirely too long since the last blog. It's not for lack of material, for sure. Life just spins all around me, filled with oddities, miracles and wonder. I've been so busy enjoying all that I just haven't plopped myself in front of the computer. As whizbang-fantastic as computers may seem, they just don't hold a candle to Life According to God.

Here's the kind of encounter I prefer: a few days ago I was driving along the north edge of the Danbury Airport, of which there was much recent ado in the news. Seems a young lad, given to a tad too much alcohol consumption and with a yen for flying, "borrowed" someone's plane from said airport and flew it down to Westchester, at night, with two friends on board and enough alcohol in his blood to fuel the flight and earn him a place of honor in the local jail to boot. Bad business. Dangerous as hell. Sad, too. He seems a bright and worthy young man, wandering a bit too far down a dangerous road. Misses his mom. Has a dad who cares and can't figure out how to help his son find a safer, more promising direction for his life.

Of course the news folks leaped on this opportunity to notify any lurking terrorists too dumb to have already thought of it that small airports might be a good source of transportation for their next US mission. Let's kick that fear level up a notch. Let's implement big-city security at every little airport in the land. Think of the money that will change hands. Ah, consumerism at its finest.

Oops, sorry. I'm off my own trail.

What I wanted to write about was what I saw in the sky the other day. Thank goodness for a long stoplight, because watching the sky while driving is generally a poor idea. But I'm glad I let my eyes wander, because right there above me was a small plane, flanked by a turkey vulture. The little plane flew a nice, exact, gentle curve toward the airport. The vulture, however, was having a blast, gliding with the air currents — up, down, sideways, up over the plane and down the other side, swooping and diving, lagging back and speeding up ... I just know that bird was laughing at the odd little machine that used all of its energy simply to stay in the air. What kind of fun is that? A lot of noise and not much beauty in just staying up there.

How can we possibly believe we can compete with God's design strategies? Yes, our planes do a pretty good job of staying in the air. But sometimes they don't and when that happens disaster strikes. A turkey vulture in bad weather, or on a collision course with another bird, just makes a minor adjustment and keeps right on going. God forbid the bird encounters a speeding bullet, or a nearly-invisible power line. In that case it, too, crashes to the ground. But at least only one being dies, not two hundred.

Look, I'm not against airplanes. But I do think we lose a lot (too much, actually) by acting as if our plans are so great they should take precedence over the rights, needs and very lives of all other living systems of Earth. That's a whole lot more dangerous to us than we know. Let's not find out the hard way that turkey vultures can teach us something, not only about flying, but about living.

Oddities

I'm in retreat today, which means that I spend the entire day in silence. What a fabulous gift this is!

The clouds of the past weeks finally gave way to the sun, so I sat for awhile on the back patio, working on a little counted cross stitch I'm making for a gift. The birds soon accepted my presence and let their incredible music fly around the yard and forest. I'm not very good at bird recognition, but for sure I heard cardinals, chickadees, robins, a mockingbird and a hermit thrush. Glorious.

As I looked down at my sewing, I noticed the shadows of carpenter bees (yes, they're still at it) flying around me. Little pale blue butterflies bounced past on their way to the herb garden. The last of the dogwood petals fluttered around my feet. Soon the shadow of a red-tailed hawk caught my attention, and I looked up to watch it soar in search of lunch. I wasn't getting much sewing done, but I has having a fine time.

Then something odd appeared. A bat. Now there's a sight you don't see much at 1:00 on a sunny afternoon. In fact, there's a sight you don't really want to see on a pleasant May afternoon. Bats are definitely night creatures, and they are supposed to be safely tucked in their little beds during the day. I immediately thought "rabies". For sure, this awful disease causes creatures to act strangely, doing things they'd never be caught dead doing otherwise. Like flying around in the daylight when you're supposed to be sawing logs in a safe roost.

"Never be caught dead" is an unfortunate phrase, since being caught dead is most likely what will soon happen to this marvelous creature. I can't think of one other reason why a full grown, large-ish bat would be zooming around with the sun shining through its amazing wings. My fascination overrode my apprehension, and I sat there watching it dive after insects. I often watch our little brown bats coming out after sunset, but I've never seen a bat in the full light of day, and I wasn't going to miss this opportunity. It flew over my head several times, but I guess I wasn't interesting enough, even to its diseased brain, to investigate further.

Good thing for me.

Finally it headed off to the woods. I'm really sorry this creature is probably very sick. Rabies can't be much fun. But I'm oh so glad I was sitting there in silence, letting Mother Earth show me a few of her wonders, when this bat made its rare appearance.

Eat well, my friend. And may your death be quick and peaceful.

Genetic lessons

Simon caught a chipmunk today. If you've ever watched chipmunks for long you know that's a nifty trick. Simon is, oh, about 520 times their size, and though I wasn't there for the chase, I can imagine how incredibly fast and nimble Simon appeared as he ferreted (or chipmunked) out the little creature.

That's what Simon's ancestors were trained to do — find little furry critters who discover too late that a burrow in the ground is no match for a Weimaraner. This one wasn't in her burrow, though; she was crossing our porch. I'm sure she was out shopping for the kids because that's what's happening in the chipmunk world this time of year. It seems to be a full time job for chipmunk moms. (It may be for the dads, too; honestly, I can't tell the boys from the girls, so I'm shamelessly anthropomorphizing that feeding the 'munklettes is a motherly task.)

Catching is only half the job, though. These dogs were also trained to kill what they caught, and millennia of genetic coding can't be ignored. Simon dispatched the little body quickly and efficiently.

But there he stood, his prey at his feet, just staring down at her. Or him. These dogs were trained to kill for killing's sake, not for nourishment. I suspect the behavior was developed to make human life less complicated — let the dogs rid the place of rodents. So Simon wasn't sure what to do next. In fact, I don't think he was sure what he had just done.

I've seen Simon ecstatic, and I've seen him when he's angry (he bites the door when he's not allowed to come with us in the car), and I've seen him sad. I know these are human emotions and words, but the stimulus and response of a dog are suspiciously very much like our own.

Simon looked at that little chipmunk, and he looked at Sr. Lilli Ana, and he look at me. His ears were "hanging low", a sure sign he was feeling lost and unhappy. He loves animals, and I wonder if he just couldn't figure out why he, of all creatures, had just committed this violence. Of course I don't really know what he was thinking, but he moped around for hours afterward. Very uncharacteristic Simon-behavior.

I felt sad for him, and I felt sad for the little chipmunk and her babies, and I felt sad for Sr. Lilli Ana who had stood witness to the whole thing, helpless to stop the inevitable. But there's more to this than sadness. We humans have fooled around with Earth's life systems so much that we have no idea what should be or might have been if we'd participated as one species among many rather than as clumsy tinkerers and destroyers. We'll never know.

But I do know that violence has always had a place in this sacred Universe, much as we'd prefer it otherwise. Death is the only door to transformation, the only way for the adventure of life to proceed, for diversity to blossom, for vital energy to be exchanged. So I buried the little chipmunk in the fertile soil of the forest, blessed her life and her death, and thanked her for gift to the Earth.

And I hoped that chipmunk dads do go shopping.

Fishing in the Garden

Did you know that if a really, really big giant came along and tried to pick up the Earth in her hand, she couldn't do it? Nope. The Earth isn't solid enough; the "hard" ground we walk on is just a thin, fragile layer of rocks and soil — everything else is fluid or mighty close to it. The Earth would just run right through her fingers, like an egg with no shell. Pretty amazing.

That's a little hard to accept when we've had to call in heavy-duty equipment just to till our backyard for this year's expanded garden. Looked pretty solid to me. Felt like it, too. And in this little corner of our bioregion there seem to be more rocks than soil.

Our rocks were deposited here by glacial movement, so when we found a patch of small-ish rocks, we were pretty sure the mother rock wasn't far away. Sure enough, we'd soon hear that solid "thunk" as a shovel met up with her. When you dig long enough in this soil, you learn to guage the size of a buried rock just by the sound the shovel makes.

When we'd come across one of those, the work changed from tilling the soil to digging around the edges of a boulder. Little by little she was revealed ... a bump here, a shelf there, an odd craggy place over there. When a large rock is being unearthed, there is a stage where it looks like a whale surfacing for a breath of air and a little look-see.

The soil holds other wonders, too. Every handful contains millions of organisms. Most of those are too small for us to see. But the ones we can are numerous and darned interesting. Dark maroon millipedes twist and spin through the loosened soil; earthworms are everywhere, beetles, roly-polies, teensy spiders, grubs and ants of at least three different varieties are swimming around just under our feet.

Even the rocks move constantly, boiling in slow motion toward the surface. The rich layers at the top of Earth's crust aren't any more solid than the Atlantic Ocean. Just because we can walk on it, our perspective says "solid", but for the life that teems in its midst, the soil is beautifully fluid.

Maybe we should call it the Earth Ocean.

The Pause that Refreshes

As I reworked our daily schedule for the next few weeks, I discovered something. I've always known that as spring progresses the days get longer faster. I always thought that was true until June 21 when, on the journey around the sun, Earth's axis tilt begins to cause the northern hemisphere to lean further away from the sun, making the days shorter again.

But here's what I didn't know: during May, the times of sunrise and sunset are changing pretty dramatically — about a full minute each day. This is consistent throughout the month. OK, so far so good. But at the beginning of June, everything seems to just stop. From beginning to end, the sunrise change is zero! Here at Bluestone Farm the sun rises at 5:23 AM on June 1, and it's still rising at exactly 5:23 AM on June 30.

During the month there is a little bit of time wobble, a minute here or there. On several different days the sun will appear three minutes earlier, but that reflects the entire swing. Amazing. There are perfectly good explanations for this, of course. But why is it so? It certainly could have been different — but it's not.

I was taught that ancient folks were simple-minded and superstitious, and thinking that anything other than another human could "speak" with them was just one more proof of their backwardness. But I imagine early peoples on Earth noticing this little quirk in the sky; its irregularity must have communicated something important to them, as all things in the natural world did.

I'm beginning to learn a few things about Mother Earth myself, and I know for sure that the natural world does communicates with us, all the time. We just decided to quit listening. (Well, mostly ... all of you who bake bread know that the dough "tells" you when it's ready to be set aside to rise, right?)

Somewhere in our past we resigned our membership in the Earth community of life and began to become our own teachers. We just stopped learning from the marvelous planet that gave us life and of which we are one of many expressions. Instead we decided that everything on Earth except us is either unconscious or completely lifeless, unimportant in itself, and available (in fact, meant to be) for our use.

We are a species long on verbal communication, but a little short on wisdom.

So, what about the little strangeness in the sunrise time? I can only tell you what it whispers in my own ear. When something in my life is about to undergo a complete change of direction, I've found it best to hesitate on the brink. Wisdom speaks in the midst of that kind of stillness, for one thing. And there is also something delicious about balancing on the knife-edge between surrender and anticipation. I guess that's why every roller coaster in the world begins with a steep hill that gives one that moment of hesitation at the crest, stretching out the opportunity to think about it before plunging onward, a chance to feel the drag of the upward pull and grab a look at the thrill ahead at the same time.

Before I know it, it will be June. And I'll have a whole month to think about it.

Transformation

I walked outside early this morning to check out how the garden liked yesterday's rain. It was still windy, and like a new mom, I worried for the little seeds I had sown during the week. But generally, children are supple and resilient. In fact, my own little "babies" had loved that cold rain and were doing fine.

I remember being supple and resilient myself. Not that I'm fragile these days, but working in the garden revealed a few changes. I had to stand up regularly to ease the pain in my knees; walking on the uneven ground takes just a wee bit more care than it used to; garden gloves, a big hat, sunglasses and long sleeved shirts are a must. I think the days of physical labor from early morning to late evening are behind me now.

As I stood quietly admiring our handiwork and God's prodigal design for life, I listened to the sounds made by the huge trees that surround our yard. Most are just now beginning to bud out, and together it looks like a huge wad of pale green gauze has been caught in the top of the trees. This is not primal forest, but these beauties are old by my standards — many have stood out there for at least two hundred years.

In the wind they sway slowly back and forth. And they creak loudly. They aren't fragile yet, either, but their creaking speaks of changes afoot. Little saplings don't creak in the wind. For all of life, change is the name of the game. Without it, there would be no concept of "life" at all. Existence would be dull and repetitive to the point of madness, with no way out. Change means surprise, creativity, beauty.

The "prime" of life isn't just one segment of one phase of being — it's the whole thing, from the birth of the Universe some thirteen billion years ago to this moment and beyond. Wow.

Carpenter Bees

I don't remember who it was, but years a go a neighborhood friend and I were sitting outside eating our sandwiches. All of a sudden he screamed and threw his sandwich on the ground — a bee had found its way into the egg salad and didn't take kindly to being eaten. Fortunately, my little friend wasn't allergic to bee stings.

I was young enough that this made an immediate and unshakable impression on me. I suppose I could have spent the rest of my life being terrified of egg salad sandwiches, but my child-brain settled more logically on fear of the stinging creature itself.

I've been stung myself a few times in these intervening years, and though it's not an experience anyone enjoys, it obviously didn't kill me, either. One time I stuck my bare foot into a shoe and discovered that solitary wasps can sting repeatedly. Another time a yellow jacket, dazed by chemicals sprayed into its nest a few days earlier, flew up my skirt and rudely stung the inside of my upper thigh. That one did cause a nasty reaction, though I'm not convinced it was allergic on my part; I think the poor creature just returned our toxic favor. But now I carry one of those bee-sting injection kits, just in case.

Last year I discovered carpenter bees. These are impressive fliers, since clearly their bodies are much too large for those filmy little wings to support; they are encumbered with a ponderous, shiny black rear segment that looks like armor with a rather attractive purplish or greenish patina. In spite of their hefty build, they zip around like humming birds, hovering motionless in the air for long periods of time before zooming upward or sideways or just disappearing so quickly I can't tell where they've gone. They sound like mini-helicopters to me. Impressive.

Our school/convent building was designed by a California architect, so naturally it's redwood. Boy, do the CB's like that. Just about this time each year they wake up and begin preparations for mating, which means the males scout out a nice wooden locale and then begin to bore amazingly precise 1/2" holes in it. You can actually hear them drilling. If left to their own devices for years, they can take down a building.

But I'm more impressed with the creature itself. The males protect the nesting site by hovering menacingly outside. The larger the site, the more boys hang out in the 'hood. There is usually only one female causing all the activity. The males behave as if they have testosterone poisoning — even their buzzing sounds mean and aggressive. They make a beeline (sorry) for anyone who comes too close to the nest entrance, and if you didn't know any better you'd back off in a hurry.

The problem is these guys have no stinger. Not even a little one. Lots of bark but no bite. I think the only damage they could cause would be to fly in your eye, and that's not very likely. Now the queen can cause a lot of trouble, having a quite meaningful stinger; but she only uses it if she's actually handled roughly, a feat no one is likely to try anyway.

I just love Nature, don't you? Here are all these aggressive, macho bees dive-bombing humans and skunks and anything else within reach (and pretty much scaring the daylights out of all of us) ... but they can't do anything more than look and sound dangerous. Amazing. A wee tick can make you miserable without you even knowing it has buried its head in your skin; a honker bee can chase you twenty feet in about one second, yet is capable of little more than ruffling your hair.

Wouldn't it be just grand if humans could holler up a storm, but couldn't figure out how to build bombs or what to do with an Uzi?

Our Friend Mary

This probably will sound tacky coming from a nun, but I've always wanted to do a retreat based on the bumper sticker "Shit Happens". Needless to say, the few Sisters to whom I proposed this idea when I first thought about it some fifteen years ago were not amused. But I think there is a huge truth in that sticker. Horrible things happen to people who, no matter what skeletons may lurk in their historical closets, don't deserve it.

Our Community has a wonderful friend who has visited us for years when the New York Marathon happens. She runs it. This has always fascinated me, who has run one mile once in my entire life and I still think of it as a major achievement. But our friend Mary runs twenty-six miles, and she does it every year. God knows how many miles she runs in between the marathons.

Mary is a lot more than a runner, of course. She is a physical therapist, a gentle woman, a good soul. Before I moved north I always looked forward to marathon time, just to have her quiet, solid presence in the house.

Now she is caught in medical hell betwen two diagnoses, neither of which is particularly hopeful. Both involve the degeneration of her muscles. I'm angry, and I'm sad, and I'm scared for her.

I don't believe in a God who picks and chooses people to punish or reward. And I for sure don't believe in a God who is capricious and mean. But Mary's situation seems particularly cruel to me, and I want to blame Someone.

I'll never forget the year when the weather for the race was beastly — freezing cold rain fell all day. Many runners dropped out because the conditions were so brutal, but Mary hung in there and finished. She didn't, and probably never will, come in first. Winning isn't the point at all, it is just getting it done. Trying something difficult and finding out you can do it. It is getting through the hard stuff, the hills, the sleet, the feeling that you can't take one more step.

But you do.

I guess Mary's going to need all that experience and self-knowledge over the next weeks and months. The marathon's grueling one-step-at-a-time training has become the basis for the one-day-at-a-time life she has been thrust into. The sparks of grit and determination and present moment awareness and trust that live deep within Mary will continue to guide and strengthen her.

So yes, "shit happens". It pays no attention to the person or the circumstance or anything else. It just happens. But it doesn't happen in a vacuum; it doesn't rule the day all by itself.

Thank God for Mary and for marathons and for freezing rain. Thank God for resilience and friends and hope and love.

Hope for the Flowers

"Roses", Maria Felicitas, CHS

Remember the wonderful book Hope for the Flowers — a delightful little gift we adults exchanged with each other back in the 80s? Children's literature is fabulous stuff, and I suspect moms and dads and aunts and grandpas and other adult friends buy these books as much for themselves as for gifts. Why is that?

I'm not sure, but I think the ability of a child to observe the world with eyes of wonder and hearts wide open is something we adults have just about forgotten.

But not quite. And that teeny hint of memory just might save the world.

Imagine what life would be like if we adults could once again shut out everything around us except a daddy longlegs or a hollyhock or a tire swing over the pond on a hot summer day? If following an inchworm were more valuable to us than squeezing one more task into our busy days? If we allowed ourselves to be captivated by the glory of the rest of Earth's life community for an hour or so?

The next time you get a chance to hang out with your favorite child (and if you don't have one of those, by all means go find one), give your adult self a break. Share a child's view of Life.

My, what an idea.

Plundering

I didn't sleep much last night. Just one of "those nights" where, in spite of feeling exhausted when I retired, I awakened wide-eyed and refreshed ... at 1:30 AM. Ah, well.

I did what I always do when this happens: I read, practiced relaxation meditation, roamed around in my thoughts, and petted the dog, who is extremely generous in this regard. I figure my body knows what it needs — and what it doesn't. If I'm not sleepy right now, I will be later. This I learned in my twenties, when I was plagued by insomnia, and the approach continues to serve me well as sleepless nights become more frequent in my later years. I think of it as found time and try to use it respectfully.

Part of last night's musings sprung from watching The Corporation for the second time, and from reading Genesis Farm's latest newsletter cover article. [If you're not on their mailing list, by all means sign up. And participate. And contribute.) Both sources call our culture into question.

We are a nation of plunderers.

We are certainly not alone, as nations go, but we lead the way in many of the most destructive practices in existence today. I keep telling myself we aren't bad people, we're just unconscious. But our Community facilitator constantly reminds us: "that which is unconscious is unjust". I have yet to be able to prove her statement wrong.

"Just unconscious" is not an excuse, and it's a sorry explanation. In service of our own desires, we are pushing all of Earth's life systems into steep decline. I don't mean for this blog to be a scolding, or a warning, or a judgment. I have spent most of my own fifty-plus years contributing to Earth's demise, and I know speaking from arrogance is self-serving and worse than useless.

We might try asking ourselves if there is a way to live differently.

I think we begin to make necessary changes not through action but through passion. As in Christ's passion, where Jesus submitted himself to judgment and death without seeming to stand up for his rights. He was trying to show people what it means to live differently, to step away from destructive ways of being, such as slavery, discrimination, and exclusion. Two thousand years ago, no one could possibly have imagined what is happening on Earth today. Yet Jesus tried every way he could to teach us to live with compassion and respect for all of God's creation, to love with such intensity that one would sacrifice the self in order to reveal the Self of creation and possibility. Jesus was trying to set us free.

If we were to practice passion ourselves, we would have to back off from our impress on the Earth. At this point, we'd better be backing up pretty far and pretty fast, because there really isn't much time left.

Pay attention to what you buy, what you use, what you discard and leave for others to deal with. What is your personal impress on Mother Earth? That should give you an idea where to begin in your own life, which is the only thing you can really change anyway.

We live in bondage to a life of consumerism and competition. The first steps to freedom are exciting. Take a few today.