The Smell of Forests

It is unseasonably hot today, and humid. More like late June than early May. And I have realized that it is the sugar maple that says "summer" to me. Now that the

familiar shapes of sugar maples have taken back their female roundedness on the hillsides and edges of fields, my heart says it is summer. Even when the mercury drops again--as it surely will, as it always does in early May--I will be in summer now.

It is Beltane, and the woods are awake and full of life.

Walking in the woods today was like nothing so much as making love. Never mind the tracks and sounds and movements of animals, or the many small flowers on the forest floor, the smells of the woods were sensuously overwhelming. I kept opening my lungs as deep as I could, breathing in the scent of May woodland the way one can breathe in the scent of one's beloved.

It made me remember the weekend, when Peter and I were in the first, utterly-stoned-on-love stage of our relationship, when we stayed at Temenos together. I remember being wrapped around each other, damp with sweat as I am tonight from the humidity, smelling the scents of the forest around us and hearing the rustling of the leaves overhead, tangled together on the small deck at Knoll Cabin.

Bursting with lazy delight, we invited in the God of the Greenwood.

Deep in our hearts, we heard him laugh. He was too big, he seemed to answer. (Of course, a god can be any size he wishes. Perhaps he meant, we were so in love, the size of the god we were reaching for was vast--as large as the forests of all the world.)

Images: Maple leaves, Bruce Marlin, Creative Commons License 2.5; Green Man, Sally Holmes, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Fame

(Note: there were so many thought provoking comments in response to this post that it generated a second-round of ideas. You can read the follow-up post here .) I have a confession to make. I want to be famous. Well, sort of. I don't want to be famous, famous, and ride around in a limousine and have to hire security and that sort of thing. I just want to write a book, have it published by somebody other than my mother, and bought and read by somebody other than my mother, and maybe even sign a couple of autographs along the way. Mom can have one autographed, too, if she wants. It has to be a spiritual book. A really moving and truthful book, that makes people want to look deep inside themselves, and then they come up to me and say something like, "It was all because of that book you wrote! It changed my life!" And I would say, no, no, really, you did all that, you and God/the gods --I'm a little fuzzy on whether the life-changing book is for Pagans or for Quake

Peter on Grief and Communities

Well, that was unexpected. For the last year, ever since my mom's health took a sharp downturn, I've been my dad's ride to Florence Congregational Church on Sundays. That community has been important for my dad and the weekly outing with me was something he always looked forward to and enjoyed, so I didn't mind taking him there. It meant giving up attending my own Quaker meeting for the duration, but I had already been questioning whether silent waiting worship was working for me. I was ready for a sabbatical. A month ago, my dad was Section-Twelved into a geriatric psych hospital when his dementia started to make him emotionally volatile. I had been visiting him every day at his assisted living facility which was right on my way home from work, but the hospital was almost an hour away. I didn't see him at all for three weeks, and when I did visit him there, it actually took me a couple of seconds to recognize him. He was slumped forward in a wheel chair, lo

There is a Spirit Which I Feel

I was always a "rational use of force" gal. For most of my life I believed that the use of force--by which I meant human beings taking up arms and going off to war to try to kill one another--was a regrettable necessity. Sometimes I liked to imagine that Paganism held an alternative to that, particularly back in the day when I believed in that mythical past era of the peaceful, goddess-worshipping matriarchal societies . (I really liked that version of history, and was sorry when I stopped believing in it as factual.) But that way of seeing reality changed for me, in the time between one footfall and the next, on a sunny fall morning: September 11, 2001. I was already running late for work that day when the phone rang; my friend Abby was calling, to give me the news that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center in New York. So? I thought to myself, picturing a small private aircraft. Abby tried to convey some of what she was hearing--terrorists, fire--but the mag

Quaker Pagan Reflections

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