Quaker Pagan Reflections

I read poetry in the mornings. Or theology. Or I journal. Sometimes I meditate, occasionally I will put a prayer into words. It’s a daily spiritual practice, and it helps keep me grounded and centered and sane. It also draws me into thinking about the deepest levels of reality. I wonder about the relationship between human consciousness and the Divine. I read Plotinus and the Sefer Yetzirah and Erwin Schrödinger and I sit with their thoughts as I might sit staring into the heart of an intricate puzzle, working at it some with my mind but also just letting their insights soak into my unconscious. I’ve been carrying around Rilke’s Book of Hours the way some Christians carry around their Bibles, and lately I’ve been going back to the original German and hammering out my own translations. It leads me into a much deeper reading, and here and there I think I’ve picked up shades of meaning in the text that were missed by more literate translators. They are poets reading m...

S tunned. A week later I still find myself waiting to wake up and find it was all a bad dream. I hear on the news about Trump’s transition team, and I think, wait a minute, where’s Hillary’s transition team? I’ve been processing. Not putting feelings into words, because I need to let the knowledge settle enough so that my feelings aren’t the flash-in-the-pan of incredulity and anger. Let those burn off, then take a good long look around at what my America has become. What we lost by electing the bastard: Health care, environmental protections, regulation and accountability for Wall Street, and any chance of overturning Citizens United. And the Supreme Court. But even if he’d lost, the bastard would have done much of his damage just in running. Defeated, he would still have made hate speech part of ordinary political discourse. When his followers admire him for “telling it like it is,” they mean he’s not pretending a respectable tolerance he doesn’t feel and not ...

February Sun. Peter Bishop, 2012. "Do we take time away from the press of society, the demands of peace and justice concerns, the obligations of the workplace, and even our family? The word retirement can call us to a time of refreshment, not the end of our work. This may be as simple as a period of meditation in the early morning or before we go to bed… " …Making retirement part of life includes times of retreat – personal retreats especially where one can take a day or a few days alone, in the quiet, to renew inwardly. Similarly, when I take time to write in my journal at the start of the day, or sit quietly and clear my mind, the whole day goes much better." (From " A Tender, Broken Meeting," by Margery Post Abbott .) I have been writing this post in my head for a very long time. In the months that have passed since my last post, my life has spun out of control.  Not everything has been bad, but any sense of calm and order I have had in...