Quaker Pagan Reflections

One of my fears in starting this blog was that I will eventually find myself under attack by either certain Pagans or certain Quakers who find it objectionable that I self-identify as a member of both groups. I think I'm more afraid of this coming from the Quaker side of the aisle, actually--probably because, having been a Pagan in some sense for most of my life, and in a formal sense for twenty years, I feel pretty comfortable in that identity. I've been around long enough, and accepted by enough men and women I deeply respect long enough, that I have no worries about being denied the keys to that particular castle. With Quakers, I'm a little more sensitive. Early on in my convincement process (to use the Quakerese) I posted some of my thoughts on it on an earlier website I owned, and joined a Quaker web ring. All was well for a while, until one day my link to the ring simply failed to function. When I contacted the owner of the ring for tech support, I learned that, by ...

There are a lot of reasons I'm starting this blog right now. But I think I'd rather jump in in the middle than at the beginning... I'm going to start with yesterday, and what came up for me over breakfast. I always listen to the news on NPR as I get ready for work. And yesterday, NPR ran a story about the sentencing hearing for Zacharias Musawi. As part of the coverage, they described the testimony of the surviving friends and family members of 9/11 victims... and I found myself reflecting on my own experiences at that time. I remembered my initial sense that, well, at least I didn't know very many people in New York...followed by the dawning realization of just how many people in New York I did know. Actually, it turned out that more people than I could have imagined were in harm's way on that day. I remember, for instance, telling my daughter, then in middle school, that her best friend who had moved to Queens over the summer was nowhere near the WTC--only t...