Quaker Pagan Reflections

I dreamed yesterday morning of the land where I grew up. The land where I grew up was not a family farm. We're all allowed to romanticize a family farm. We see something admirable in families trying to maintain ties to the old homestead, when it's a farm that's been in the family for generations. But my home was not on an old home place, just a two acre plot of woodlot, lawn, and garden with a somewhat boxy two story house put up in the sometime between 1920 and 1940, at a guess, with a beautiful oval rock garden, three tall clumps of lilac trees, four apple trees, two pears, and (when I was young) a plum tree. There were hemlocks, swamp maples, one sugar maple, and many towering ash trees standing guard at the edge of the property, along the tumbledown fieldstone wall. Our house was brown, with a hardwood floor my father put in himself, and kitchen cabinets and formica countertops he put in as well. There was a porch that ran all along the back wall of the house,...

So here I am, back reading more of Marcus Borg 's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time : Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally . I'm making a slow job of it--in part because Peter has had the book for a while. Partly, though, I just find Borg... thin. I may have to stop every two or three pages when I'm reading a meaty Quaker writer like Lloyd Lee Wilson , just to reboot my head after I hit my personal limit for Scriptural references, but I can feel the weight of both thought and Spirit pulsing through the pages. Borg is easier to read, on the one hand... but less absorbing on the other. I take it that he's the the theologian that fundamentalist Christians love to hate . His two big insights--that the Bible is most useful for it's metaphorical truths (what I, a Pagan, would call myths, in a positive sense) and for its metaphorized (mythologized) history of a people's relationship with Spirit--seem pretty straightforward to me. And the reading...

Teaching World History II The voice weaves in through my open doorway from the classroom down the hall. Like talking wind, or seeking vines, or blackberry canes with thorns. He's a midway barker, a sword swallower, a fairground carnival ride. Yesterday, I saw him juggle One orange, partly eaten A paper-clip, and a single battered copy of Glencoe's World History II . Child Left Behind You ain't got nothing to teach me. No, I don't got to sit down. I hate this class. I hate this school. Why can't I go to the lav now? I ain't got nothing to learn. All I was doing was looking. What? I wasn't doing no thing. That wasn't fair. It wasn't me. He did it first. That wasn't mine. Why are you just such a bee-- ---atch? All I was doing was laughing. No, I don't got to sit down. You ain't got nothing to teach me. I ain't got nothing to learn. Won't let you have nothing to teach me. Don't wanta have nothing to learn. .

I have been enjoying the conversation swirling among several Pagan blogs, at least partly in response to the Spontaneous Blog Carnival that I wrote about on MetaPagan . It has taken a while--about six months, by my rough reckoning--but MetaPagan seems to be doing what its founders hoped it would do: facilitate a thoughtful, intelligent conversation in the Pagan blogosphere. Comments are up--cross-posting is up--and Pagans are listening deeply to one another as we talk about things that matter to us. But one thing may be missing from MetaPagan --your participation. What is MetaPagan ? It's a daily roundup, not of links to Pagan writing or to stories about Paganism, but of the very best of Pagan blogging. Participants learn how to use our del.iciou.us tag system--it's not hard, and we've got a guide to get you started--and whenever they come across something that's truly outstanding, they flag it for you to read. There are hundreds of Pagan blogs. But--can we tal...