Quaker Pagan Reflections

We're number six! We're number six! The anthology of Quaker bloggers, Writing Cheerfully on the Web (featuring, among others, yours truly!) made the top ten best-sellers this year at Quaker Books ! OK. Technically, that's way too many exclamation points. I would never let one of my writing students get away with that many exclamation points in a row. But we're excited around here, and we don't care who knows it! And, if you haven't done so already, how about celebrating the New Year with us by picking up a copy of this (Extreme Bias Alert!) massively magnificent book? "Topical and thought provoking writing from all the best Quaker Bloggers." (And I quote.) We're number six! w00t!

It's still quite difficult to blog; I'm used to sitting down for two or three hours when the writing fit is on me, and my spine objects to anything over ten minutes. So I'll keep this short and sweet... I celebrated my Solstice with a day off from my job--and I'm so glad I am openly requesting religious holidays at last. On my day off, I watched the sun come up through the line of white pines at the edge of the former pasture (now woodlot) behind our house. Then I put on hiking boots with cleats, and using a ski pole in lieu of my cane, I made the rounds of our quince and apple trees, with a libation of hard cider. That afternoon, I wandered three miles along woods roads and the ridge path, out to the pine tree with the bee hive in it. I didn't offer the bees anything--as far as I could see or hear, they were all asleep--but as I turned to hike home again, I noticed the oddest thing: Spiderwebs. It was perhaps twenty degrees outside, with brilliant sun, w...

The nearness of Yule has a different feel to it this year, our first year living by the woods again. Since my back injury , I have spent a lot of time walking in those woods, alone, or with Peter and our dogs. Pain pills help; the heating pad and orthopedic chair help more; however, the only thing that really banishes the pain for any length of time is walking, particularly outdoors. I love the woods and walking in any case, but I've really been putting on the miles this year. One thing I figured out a couple of weeks ago, when I found a spent shell along the trail, is that I'm not alone in these woods even when I am unaccompanied. It's hunting season, and these woods are wild enough and deep enough that they are in regular use by hunters. On a practical level, that means that I'm back to wearing special Pagan garb again: in this case, a blaze orange women's hunting vest . (It has marvelous pockets, intended for game birds, which are waterproof and easy to...

Illustration credit: Mikael Häggström Have you ever noticed how much the shape of a human spine resembles a dragon, with the head at the base of the spine, and the tail at the neck? I have. I have had reason to. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may be wondering: what happened to it? The Dragon happened to it, in the form of a post-influenza inflammation of either the sacroiliac joint or the L5 S1 disc, depending on which doctor you prefer to ask. And while I have had my share of back pain in the past, this is really my first encounter with chronic and serious pain. I have not been able to sit for more than a few minutes at a time for about a month now. When I sit still, or try to sleep more than a few hours, The Dragon gets me, with fiery breath and claws, and sharp electric teeth, up and down my leg from ankle to hip. I have come to dread my inner Dragon, my spine that will not tolerate stillness or rest. I have been back at work for a little more than...

Note: This guest post was written by David R. Forman, a longtime friend of Peter's and mine, whose wife Leslie died earlier this year. Like David, as someone who has felt the blessings of a good marriage, I am outraged at the notion of denying the love of any class of people as a "defense" of my own marriage. Like David, I am dismayed that the voters of Maine were unable to see in equality, not an affront to marriage, but the strongest defense of love possible. My imagination is beggared. I cannot understand how a subgroup of our citizen’s rights could be put to a popular vote in the first place. Should Jews be allowed to marry? Should post-menopausal women be allowed to marry? Should people who have once been divorced be allowed to marry? But given that such a vote was taken, I am at an utter loss to see how people could vote to strip their neighbors of the right to marry, in a country supposedly based on the idea that all are created equal. I have no rhetoric to sway ...

Photo Credit: David Hawgood I was talking to my grown daughter on the phone the other day. I told her that one of the unhappy things about getting older is that loss becomes just part of the scenery of life. I told her that I'd spent years of my life learning not to sweat the small stuff, the losses and frustrations that don't really matter, only to arrive at a time in my life that's filled with losses that do matter. Live long enough, and loss, real loss, is inevitable, after all. We know it, but we live in the happy illusion in our youth that it is not so, that death and disease are the aberrations. Middle age knows they are the rule, and that soon or late they come for everyone we love. But, I told her, there's an up side, too. The older I get, the better able to weather grief I seem to become. It turns out that in this, as in so many things, practice helps. Grief is a skill that grows better with use, if we dare to trust it--to feel it, acknowledge i...

When Nora, Peter's grandmother, lived with us , our household was the nucleus of an active local Pagan community. Over time, dementia eroded more and more of Nora's ability to retain anything she learned about in the present, so she wound up discovering again and again that she was living in a family of Pagans. Over and over, we would have made some reference to our Paganism, and Nora, having forgotten about it for the time being, would ask us to explain again what it was we believed. We would explain, yet again, about all of life being sacred to us, and nature being the source of our inspiration. Each time we did this, we would reach the point in our discussion where she would protest, quoting the line from Tennyson about " Nature, red in tooth and claw ." Nevertheless, we would insist that that was where we looked for the holy, and eventually, she would exclaim (just as she had the time before that): "Well, then, you're all heathens!" When we ...