Quaker Pagan Reflections

One trait I've always had is "buyer's remorse": that tendency in human nature to regret commitments made, and to wonder if we haven't made a terrible mistake as soon as a decision is irrevocable. For instance, when I brought home Morgan, our 185 pound English mastiff and the dog of a lifetime, I spent at least a week fending off a sinking feeling that I had ruined my life (and this dog's), and that it would never, ever work out !  It did--Morgan eventually joined me in my therapy practice, working with me and with my trauma-survivor clients on a daily basis.  She was enormous, she slobbered, but she could sense a painful emotion a mile away, and loved nothing better than to rest her head on someone's knee and look up at them with the big, sincere gaze of a mastiff, telling them without words that she would never have treated them that way. Of course, there is a difference between a dog, a living, breathing animal who can give and receive love, and...

Mmmm... supper! I started by baking my own bread, in an attempt to get affordable bread without all the plastic packaging.  One thing led to another, and I returned to making my own pie crusts, as I had in college--only this time, making one to use now, and freezing the second--buying local produce and freezing it, then pickling it and turning it into jams and jellies, and finally into getting pretty much all of my produce local and organic. But it's almost winter here in New England, and my favorite farmstand has closed for the winter, and I'm reluctant either to give up fresh produce, or to go back to buying the stuff hauled in from California, plastic-wrapped and ready for me at the local supermarket. In fact, if all goes well, tonight's salad may be the last grocery store lettuce I'll need. My fingers are firmly crossed; I've never been much of a gardener, though I lived with one as a child, and I know how much better home-grown anything tends to be. But I'v...

I just came back from a walk in our woods, and for the first time, I have seen a bear. Photo credit: Mickael Brangeon Oh, I've seen cubs before, even before we moved out of downtown.  As woods have grown up around the small cities in Western Massachusetts, bears have found places to live that are awkwardly close to humans; about a year ago, for instance, the wildlife police had to remove a mother bear with cubs who had made a den in a drainage culvert in the heart of a thickly settled neighborhood.  We even had a treed bear in a sidewalk oak tree just off Main Street a few years back.  That took some pretty skillful work to remove the bear cub without killing him. And it's well known that only a fool leaves a bird feeder in place once the snow starts to melt.  Bears love bird feeders.  And garbage, so it's a good idea to plan accordingly, especially if you have dogs or small children. All that is common sense.  So, yeah, I've seen bears ...

OK, so I'm not Catholic.  But it has been a very long time since my last confession here--meaning, the last time I posted our weigh-in of plastic trash and recycling.  (Why do I count recycling?  Because, although I do recycle everything I can, plastic is not like aluminum or glass that can recycle endlessly; plastic actually "downcycles" and becomes, essentially, hazardous waste for thousands of years after only a handful of reuses.  So it all counts, sooner or later.) The last time I posted our weigh-in was back in July: a two-week tally of 3 lbs. 1 oz. In the ten weeks since then, we have generated 6 lbs, 7 oz. of trash, which would average out to about 17 lbs of plastic waste per year per person for each of us... in comparison with an American average of over 80 lbs per person. Of course, I'm not counting my totaled automobile in that amount.  I have to hope that many of the plastic parts will be salvaged, and used on other cars. But I am counting the dead t...

Last April, as I may have mentioned, Peter and I planted a sort of mini-orchard of eight semi-dwarf apple trees. Our new old house sits on a main artery.  Behind the house are literally hundreds of acres of woods, filled with deer, red squirrels, bears, and every sort of tree--including a few old, abandoned apples, and even some lingering chestnut trees.  Before you've gone a quarter of a mile into the woods, the road sounds have faded away, and there's nothing left but the sighing of leaves and the clacking of branches, the cheeky tunes of chickadees and the perpetual scolding of jays. By the house, however, especially at rush hour, there is a regular flow of sometimes noisy traffic.  Last year, there was often trash in our yard, thrown out of the windows of passing cars.  And the constant flow of traffic makes the yard feel somewhat too exposed and public. It was for those reasons we decided to plant some trees, hard up by the road, though back behind the sal...

We have set aside most of our usual business agenda, and are holding instead something we are calling " Meeting to Hear God's Call ." We are hearing a lot of messages about world suffering, economic injustice, environmental destruction.  We hear a lot of despair. Some of the messages feel rooted in Spirit to me; if others are, it is not in a way that I can discern.  I wrestle with my own anxiety over doing "enough."  I know that I live in a manner that is far more comfortable than 90% of the planet's humans ever will; I know that my lifestyle is unsustainable.  I know that I have not sold all I have and given it to the poor (though I'm also grateful that, as a non-Christian among Friends, that one is not a given for me, but one whose social justice message must prove itself to me on its own terms, not just because Rabbi Yoshua said it back in the wayback.)  (Mind you, it's message is pretty damned compelling.) I am in the weeds; I am in the ta...

I appear to be completely incapable of writing my impressions of NEYM Sessions this year. *sigh*