Quaker Pagan Reflections

Some reflections on this summer's experiments in organic gardening.  Hint:  it's a jungle in there!

The very fact that I am writing this entry for Pagan Values Month --June, in case you missed it --is a testimony to the importance of relationships in Paganism.  Despite the fact that we are now eleven days into the month of July, I can't bear to let Pax down.  Not only is Pax a kind and generous-spirited Pagan writer, not only did he invite me to participate this year, but he has become a friend, although we have never (yet) met in person.  We have that so-important thing in my religious life: a relationship. So this one's for you, Pax--but also for the spirit of Paganism, that I think lives in our need to form and honor powerful relationships in the world. *          *          * My husband Peter, a biology teacher, has a classroom full of odd and interesting animals: a turtle, a gecko, two hamsters, and a ball python.  Next year, he's planning to get finches, to help him illustrate his annual evolution talks, and the references to the Galapagos Islands, and all th

I remember when I first learned that war was wrong. I was nineteen years old, in love for the first time, sexual for the first time, holding my lover in my arms.  I looked at his body, long, smooth, and perfect lying next to me, and I knew that it was Holy.  This body I knew so well, that could bring us both so much pleasure, was sacred for that, yes--but also because it was whole, and it was living and it was inherently a thing of beauty and goodness. And war, it followed immediately, which could shatter that beauty in an instant, was a blasphemy. All I needed to understand that war is a blasphemy was to love one human being in the flesh, as an adult. The peace testimony is different; my peace testimony took many more years to come to me.  But I have known from the age of nineteen that war is a blasphemy.           *           *           * Yesterday, I was in my kitchen making pickles.  What with boiling kettles of water and processing pounds of vegetables and brine, mak