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Showing posts from July, 2011

New at No Unsacred Place: Disturbing Miracles

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

Pagan Values Month: Living in Relationship

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

Happy Fourth of July

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