ELEVEN!

It's Lunasdal Eve, 2012.

Lunasdal, (a.k.a. Lughnasadh or Lammas), the old Celtic feast of the grain harvest, has been my mini-New Year for these last eleven years, ever since I boarded a plane in Scotland and ended up in Maine on August 1st to begin my post-seminary life on a new coast. Each year at this time, I do my own bit of in-gathering as I consider the harvest the past twelve months have brought.

I hardly remember that first year, except for the waves of grief and despair that washed over me and lapped at the edges of every small, anxious attempt to explore new ways of working, thinking, loving and being. Just prior to my month-long Trip of a Lifetime in Scotland, I'd been told by the pastor of my home church that my gifts were not evident and my vocation to Christian ministry was unwelcome. Just prior to that, I'd graduated from seminary with honours in a beautiful ceremony that abounded with signs of grace, welcome, and radical inclusion. The pastor's words were a spiritual sucker-punch from which it took years to thaw out, heal, and recover.

The Scotland trip passed in a blur, my intended joyful adventure lost in a fog of pain and betrayal. How I'd love to go back and experience those things while fully alive, fully engaged, fully awake! Still, it was a good gift and I tried to make the most of it, intellectually if not emotionally. There was a week at Ceolas, the traditional Scottish arts school on the isle of South Uist. The Piper and her two sons travelled with me. During the days, I studied traditional singing with Margaret Stewart while The Piper and her eldest son studied with Allan Macdonald and other tradition-bearers. There was a week at Sabhal Mor Ostaig on the isle of Skye, where I took an immersion class in intermediate Scottish Gaelic with Muriel Fisher. There were wonderful rambles up and down and around the Highlands and Islands, with stops in Lewis, Harris, Mallaig and Oban. Finally, there was a week on Iona, place of dream-pilgrimage, heart-home of Celtic Christians the world over.

When I returned to the States, my head was buzzing with cultural riches and vocational longings, neither of which had any apparent outlet. I had only one firm plan in place: get to Maine and find a small place just big enough for my and my shadow to set up housekeeping. Essentially, I went underground, hoping that the old promises of seed and harvest would still prove true, hoping that time wrapped in darkness would one day lead to emergence and fruition.

It was not the darkness of death. My Piper lived only one town away, and her constancy kept the darkness warm and rich and full of earthy promises. Slowly, slowly, I began to put down roots. Slowly, slowly, my new life began to unfurl. The string of hand-to-mouth jobs included barista, deli worker, house-cleaner, nanny, farm-sitter, craftswoman, Gaelic teacher, concert promoter, and "educational technician." Yet there were also days spent tending The Piper's garden and talking together of how we might create a shared life, a shared farm. There were nights among friends, singing our hearts out and playing centuries-old tunes into the "wee smas." While my seminary colleagues were out serving churches, raising families, and organizing labour unions, I was arduously seeking my place in the grand scheme, listening for the sometimes faint, but always present, whispers of guidance from a loving Cosmos.

Many days, my conversations with God felt like the Burnistoun elevator sketch, where two office workers in Glasgow try to direct an elevator's voice-recognition system to reach floor number eleven. (Watch it here. Note: contains a smattering of terms common to frustrated Glaswegians.) There were so many things I wanted to share, wanted to give, wanted to offer up to my community and the world beyond, but I no longer trusted myself to communicate in ways that would reach others or be recognized. And then, one day, I found myself in church again--not the denomination I'd grown up in, but a different one, where I'd heard that all people were actively welcomed. Four years later, I have now passed my Ecclesiastical Council and Examination for Ordination in the United Church of Christ, and I'm now in the process of seeking a church to serve as a local part-time pastor. Yeeeeee-haaaaaaw!!!

Eleven years: eleven season-cycles of fallow time, planting, growth, and harvest. In that time, I've planted fruit trees and watched them bear, taught students and watched them thrive, served churches and felt the Spirit move in our midst. (In between, there have been plenty of failures, plenty of frustration, plenty of hand-wringing and exhaustion!) I've come to understand that my vocation to ministry includes this history-rich, nutrient-poor parcel of land on which The Piper and I have created our farm. Here, rooted in this place, surrounded by love and all the challenges and joys of our rural community, my spirit has been nurtured and restored. Other travellers have found their way here for a weekend, a fortnight, a season...and they have been restored and nourished too. Their paths toward wisdom have varied widely and rarely matched mine. This, too, has been a source of richness!

Eleven years--and was it really two years ago that we bought the farm, after all those years of agonizing? Last year, we bought a Highland bull, a Tamworth boar, and a Devon sow. This year, with the help of friends and WWOOF volunteers, we've raised two greenhouses and an artisanal outhouse. We've welcomed a new heifer calf (born at Bealtuinn/Beltane) and Welsummer hens. A friend stopped by for a music session a few weeks ago, sized up the new greenhouses, and said, approvingly, "You know, this place is really shapin' up to look like a farm."

Happy Lunasdal, Y'all. May your own hardscrabble efforts blossom and bear. May you be blessed with the riches of harvest, joyfully welcomed and safely gathered in.

In The Dark: A Celtic New Year Sermon

(I was invited to be a "guest preacher" last Sunday at my home church. It always seems a bit funny to serve the role of a guest when I'm already part of the family there! Since this month marks the start of the "dark half" of the Celtic year, and since one of this Sunday's lectionary readings talks a lot about light and darkness, it seemed natural to dwell on the interplay of shortening days and lengthening nights.)

Sermon for Proper 28A: In The Dark
(based on I Thessalonians 5:1-11, NRSV)

Every morning, as the light reaches in between the dark spines of the trees on the ridge, we watch and wait. First the rays of pale gold stretch across the dark hollow of our farm to touch the trees on Gloucester Ridge. Then, slowly, the angle of the light changes and dips down to gild the empty branches of the ash tree, the oaks, and the maples on our own land. Finally, the light spreads to the cold earth itself, and the hard edges of the frost begin to melt off the pasture grasses. One of us ambles down to survey the situation, then returns to the wood-fired warmth of the house. Every morning, lately, the other one asks the same question: “how many legs?”

We've been waiting for calves to be born. We know what day the bull arrived, but—I hope you don't think I'm being indelicate here—there are certain other details we seem to have missed. It's just as Brother Arnold warned us last year, when we went over to the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community to discuss their own herd of Highland Cattle and get some ideas. We'd told him our tale of woe, about the challenge of finding and affording a vet who could work around those wild-looking, big-horned beasties of ours, to say nothing of the challenge of timing. Brother Arnold nodded his head knowingly. “You won't see many signs of readiness,” he said, “Highland cows are...well, they're very subtle.”

Subtle, indeed. So, here we are, ten months after the bull moved into the pasture. It takes nine months for a calf to be ready, just like a human baby. Ten months have past and our two round-as-a-barrel cows show no sign of imminant calving. So, we wonder. We worry. We ask ourselves what went wrong, and what could still go wrong now. Sometimes, we dream: a new calf could offer so much to our farm: the expansion of our herd, the proof of their capacity for new life, and the promise of another fine full-grown animal to transform into needed income or good, homegrown meat.

So, each morning, we cast hopeful eyes out towards the pasture, and we count legs, looking for a sweet gangly little body tucked alongside one of the cows. “How many legs? Still twelve?” “Still twelve.” There's nothing we can do to hurry it along, and—although there are signs we can watch for—there's no way we can predict the exact moment of the herd's increase. We're kept in the dark about it. It's subtle. We have to keep wondering. We have to hurry up and wait.

This morning's scripture comes from another bunch of people-in-waiting. Paul is writing to the fledgling church in Thessalonica. That little church was caught up in in the fashion and fervor of the day, waiting for the Rapture, the Day of the Lord. There were signs all around them: earthquakes, floods, plagues, riots in the streets, cities being destroyed, governments shifting and falling, and different religions battling it out, each claiming to have exclusive access to the “Truth.” Sound familiar? And if you weren't sure what to believe, there were street preachers to tell you where you'd go and street vendors to sell you just the right handbasket!

It's hard not to be afraid when everyone around you is talking like that. It's hard not to let all the fear-mongerers and doomers get to you. When the loudest voices cry out, “pain and suffering! Death and destruction!” no matter how much you try to laugh it off, it gets a little harder to sleep at night, a little harder to keep peace in your heart.

Remember how the Rapture was predicted by a radio preacher, who declared Judgement Day for May 21st, 2011? Did you hear about this? Did you find yourself checking your calendar? After the day came and went, he recalculated for October. When November came, did you breathe a sigh of relief, or did you get a little nervous, because now we're almost to December, rapidly honing in on the next big date for the End of the World...?

A good teacher once said, “What you contemplate, you imitate.” Whatever stories you tell yourself, whatever dramas or sitcoms you watch on television, whatever magazines you read, whatever ads flash in front of your eyes—all these things echo around inside you, the images shimmer and reflect, until it all becomes part of the way you understand the world. We can't help it—what we contemplate, we imitate. We tend to copy what we see and repeat what we hear. Now, that's one thing when you're a new Christian sorting through the competing tales of Roman politicians and travelling preachers. But there's a whole extra layer of difficulty in an age of mass-media and instant communication.

What if the stories we hear and and the images we see are mostly lies, carefully crafted by marketing experts? What if every commercial is a lie, a message that, by yourself, you're a weak, ugly nobody, but if you buy whatever they're selling, you could be SOMEbody, even somebody strong and beautiful? Bit by bit, the carefully-crafted lies eat away at us. The marketers sling mud until it covers our souls. We lose perspective. We give up our power. We learn to live in doubt and anxiety and fear. What you contemplate, you imitate. Little by little, we forget how to shine. We become children of the darkness.

Writer Jeffrey Pugh imagines a demon, writing a management guide from his basement office in hell. The devil explains his latest strategy:
“As part of my toolbox I’ve always used distraction to deter them from truly considering the world as our opponent wants it. I like it better when they become fascinated with the things that do not feed their souls. In the old days, of course, we had bread and circuses, but in the age of technology we have even more wonders at our disposal...We don’t want them to cultivate ways of living that bring them together. We want them torn apart, polarized, and at each others throats. Any question about how they should live needs to be buried under the scandal of the day... I want an entire planet entertaining themselves to death. No, seriously, I mean it. If they start to think seriously about the world they build and see the possibility that the world could be different, well, it’s time to Release the Kardashians!!”

Now, get that clever devil out of the spotlight and listen to the Good News:
But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake...

Children of the light: that is how God made us. There was a beautiful mystic tradition among the Jews and early Christians that God was the first, best and brightest light in the whole universe, and everything God made had God's light trapped inside: flowers, weeds, bushes and trees, rocks, rivers, snakes, salamanders, codfish, sharks, woodchucks, camels, even bugs—all just bursting with God-given light, full of sparks of divine fire.

That's true of people, too—not just the wealthy and powerful, but everybody: the bank president with the elegant shoes and the woman in scuffed sneakers at the laundromat. The construction foreman with the gleaming new truck and the greasy-haired guy who works nights at Gas-n-Go. We are—all of us—children of the light, all created with the potential to shine, to brighten the world with hope and healing, possibility and promise. Most of us maybe don't know it. Some of us start out knowing it, but we forget. We let our minds fall on other things. We dwell on failure and fear. We stop shining. We stop noticing all the other divine sparks around us. Our vision gets hazy. We get drunk. We fall asleep.

...we are not of the night or of darkness. So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation.

Do you hear that? Wake up! Listen up! WE—We, right here, all of us—are full of divine sparks, stuffed almost to bursting with God's beautiful, radiant, powerful light. Fear and anxiety are not our masters—God is! As soldiers discipline themselves for battle, so should we discipline ourselves for the challenge of making peace. Give the muscles of faith a workout. Build up the stamina of your hope. Get ready to love longer and harder and more deeply than you ever have before. Repent—change your ways—because the Beginning is Near!

For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ... so that whether we are awake or asleep we may live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.

As Paul says, “Build each other up.” In a culture geared to pettiness and appearances, it can be hard to make this change. I suggest an exercise, what they used to call a spiritual discipline: Turn away from the false and intoxicating lights of all the little glowing screens around us. Remember: what you contemplate, you imitate.

In this season of darkness, seek illumination from a different source. Light a candle. Sit with that small flame and pray. Reflect on the light. Make space for God's light to stir and shine within you. Wipe away the mud and clear away the debris until you find the deep smoldering goodness of your own soul. Breathe with it. Feed it. Let the wind of the Holy Spirit stir it, like a sudden gust across the coals of a campfire, until sparks catch fire and dance up into flame. Wake up each morning ready to search the landscape for signs of new life, ready to celebrate the wonders that may be born on this day of New Beginnings. We are Children of the Light. We are brothers and sisters of the Light of the World. Let it shine! Let it shine! Let it shine!!!


(All images copyright Mainecelt 2011 except for Calvin, borrowed from here, and handbasket, borrowed from here.)

Quoth the Raven: Galore! Galore!

Samhain comes at sundown. The Celtic New Year signaled, for our ancestors, the end of a half-year's intense outdoor labour. Samhain ("sow-when", literally "summer's end") heralded the onset of the year's dark half, a time to come indoors, gather around the fire, share stories and music, and re-weave the deep roots of cultural wealth and wisdom that bond us to this dear old Earth. Samhain--or, if you prefer, "All Souls' Night"--is also a time to honour our ancestors and all other dear ones who've gone before us, a time to acknowledge and even befriend our grief. Older reflections may be found here and here and here.

It is a time to embrace the gapped and tattered nature of life. On a recent foraging walk in the woods with two of our WWOOF volunteers, one of them noticed that, in the woods, almost everything was nibbled at the edges. Every leaf, stone, hump of earth or bit of bark was food or shelter to some living thing. Most of the mushrooms we found had been delicately edge-munched to satisfy some itty-bitty appetite, but creatures seemed content to share. Nothing was left perfectly whole, but neither was anything eaten down to the stem. Just as all foodstuffs of substance were nibbled, so too were gaps quickly mitigated: an ongoing dance of presence-absence-presence. Edges were quickly claimed by lichen, mushrooms, and insects. Other creatures claimed hollows as water or food caches, hiding places or homes.

There is a word for this strange harvest-time ache of awareness, the wisdom that comes from working with bushel baskets and sharp-edged knives. The word is GALORE. It comes from a Gaelic term variously spelled gu leir, gu leoir, or gu leor. It means both "sufficiency" and "abundance." In the Gaelic worldview, we are surrounded by abundance--and we are also expected to honour this abundance by living within the limits of the goodness the natural world provides. There is no need to hoard or overconsume: with goods gathered sufficient to our needs, we have wealth galore. The key is to perceive and celebrate this basic truth: Enough IS abundance. Or, as a related Scottish proverb says, "enough is as good as a feast." Perhaps our greatest "sin," as humans, is our tendency to forget this truth, to hoard and grasp too much, to dwell in the illusion of scarcity so masterfully crafted by the magicians of merchandising. When we take only what we need and give the rest back, the anxieties dissipate and we are freed to unclench, to recreate, to heal and dream.

We have gathered in the gifts of the earth. We have harvested herbs, flowers, and vegetables from our gardens. (The land was gracious and merciful: when all of our squash vines withered, pumpkins and butternut vines sprang forth from last year's pig-grazing range and mostly ripened in time to harvest before the frost!) We have gathered berries and apples and preserved them for the cold months to come. We have respectfully raised and butchered birds for our winter meat. We have taken five well-tended pigs to the butcher so we may feed other families as well. We have foraged for wild mushrooms and harvested them gently, always leaving some for the rest of the woodland creatures to enjoy. Now the larder shelves and freezers are full and the dark is rapidly descending. Music of thankfulness wells up in us. We dwell in remembrance of all the lives that enable our own.

So it goes. We enter the dark half of the year ready to share stories, ready to sing, ready to dance. We carve pumpkins as our ancestors carved turnip-lanterns: a creation of absence and presence, of wholeness made hollow and emptiness illuminated, all to shine the Old Souls home to the Land of Plenty. Welcome to the season of Samhain. May you all be graced with sufficiency and abundance, goodness and grace galore!

P.S. Buidheachas gun sgur-- unceasing thanks to Andrew, Amy, Robert, Antonn, and all of our other WWOOF volunteers who have contributed to our sense of abundance. Without your contributions of time, enthusiasm, curiosity, and energy, we would have much less to celebrate!

Autumn Thaw

The frost has come. The last late raspberries have been hoarded like a handful of rubies into the freezer. The pigs snuggle close in a nest of old hay, the cows lumber across the pasture in a quest for the year's last green tidbits, and the chickens scramble no longer for fresh worms and juicy bugs, their morning treat limited to scatterings of old bread. In the lower garden, all that remains are a few stalwart cabbages. In the upper garden the beets wear purple leaves in mourning for the black skeletons of tomato plants, recently uprooted and laid to rest on the damp branchy base of this winter's burn pile.

The land's production has ground nearly to a halt. We move slower too, weighed down by feedbags and slopbuckets, gathering firewood in the frosty air. But something strange is taking place, just as the cold weather sets in: we are starting to thaw.

When you live for years under the ax, waiting for that dull blade to fall, you becomes well-acquainted with fear, despair, and depression. The threat--in our case, the threat that our farm would be lost--becomes a familiar, if not friendly, presence, and you forget what life was like before the sky was marred with that great hanging wedge of cold metal above you. You forget how to walk outside without bowing and wincing and wondering when it will finally fall...

And then, one day, the ax disappears--life changes, new possibilities appear, the loan comes through and we finally buy the farm--but we're not sure how to stop bowing and wincing every time we step outside. We experiment with lifting our heads. We flicker an experimental gaze now and then at the sky. We say to ourselves, "We're safe. This farm belongs to us. We belong to this farm." We try to say it like we believe it...once in a while, we succeed. We flash each other a grin--but the next minute we're ducking our heads and wincing again, returning to the movements and rhythms we know.

Call it a crisis of faith. We have forgotten that hope is a free gift, not an exclusive commodity. We are enduring the long-awaited thaw of frozen dreams, and our movements are still stiff and unsure.

Bear with us. Samhain, the Celtic New Year, has come at last, carrying the promise of warm fires and songs in the deepening night. Our spirits drape themselves near the woodstove, gradually unfreezing like a pair of trapper's mittens. We are stirring, humming, and warming to life's possibilities.

Whaur Will Ye Bide?

The song was based on the words of Maggie Cameron and other Travellers in the midst of a wrenching struggle for their dying way of life. Their stories were gathered by Ewan MacColl and others in the 1960s, recorded on cumbersome equipment in potato and berry fields and along British byways their people had traversed for centuries. These so-called Tinkers and Gypsies had moved between time-honoured camps and resting places as they plyed their traditional trades... but the old ways were changing and new laws turned their traditions into punishable crimes.

From their own words, Ewan wove a Winter Song that later came to be known as "The Terror Time."

Heather will fade, and the bracken will die
Streams will run cold and clear
And the small birds, they'll be goin'
And it's then that you'll be knowin'
That the Terror Time is near.

And whaur will ye gang, aye, and whaur will ye bide
Noo that the wairk's aa dane,
And the fairmer disnae need ye
And the council wilnae heed ye
And the Terror Time is here.

--from the BBC Radio Ballad, The Travelling People (1964)

We have lived all too close to the aching reach of this song. These last few years, in the same span of joyful animal-tending, seed-planting and upbuilding, we have lived daily with the knowledge that this land was not entirely in our grasp. We have lived knowing it could all be taken away.

The woods give no shelter, for the trees, they are bare.
Snow's fallin aa aroond
And the bairnies, they are cryin'
For the straw on which they're layin'
Aye, it's frozen tae the groond...

And you need the wairmth o yir ain human kind--
You move near the toon and then
The sicht o ye's offendin'
For the police they'll be sendin'
And ye're on the road again.

Because we are history-minded, because we are singers of old songs, we knew there was nothing unique in this, just a gnawing, echoing sameness that linked us to Dustbowl farmers, hurricane victims, and thousands of other faceless losers-of-land-and-homes. We tried to steel ourselves. We tried--and failed--not to love this particular piece of land too much. We tried to keep our minds open to possibilities and our hands always working, our eyes and ears always searching for that job, that program, that business or organization that might make it possible to bind ourselves to this land forever. Mostly, the words we heard were "no" and "sorry..." or just...nothing. Into this emptiness came the song's haunting refrain:

And whaur will ye gang, aye, and whaur will ye bide
Noo that the wairk's aa dane,
and the fairmer disnae need ye
And the council wilnae heed ye
An the Terror Time is here.

But now, in the Dark Half of the year, there is a rumour of light. There is a whisper of music. There are signs of hope. We are not out of the woods just yet, but neither are we alone. We are blessed to find ourselves surrounded by friends, by well-rooted and winged things, by good friends and Wise Tiny Creatures. We are beginning to walk, ever-so-tentatively, on something that feels like Solid Ground.

It feels funny, this placing of the feet with unaccustomed confidence. We do not know how to move this way. It feels awkward and strange. We are people who have walked in darkness...perhaps we might yet learn to rest, to trust, to see each other's faces by the light of a bright star. Perhaps we might yet find a way to dance down the path, to stumble astonished across our own threshold, and call it Home.

Into the Gap...

The Bluebirds of Gappiness showed up again on Saturday. This time, it was a mated pair, flitting between milkweed stalks and fenceposts by sudden, urgent turns. I wonder how much longer these messengers will remain before they start their annual migration, leaving Wise Old Raven behind as official mystic courier of the Frozen North. Perhaps they'll make the switch at Samhainn, (pronounced "sow-when"), which literally means, "Summer's end."

It's almost time... which, as a person with so-called A.D.D., is a state of being with which I'm most familiar. (I prefer to think of myself as "multifocal," since it's not a lack of attention, but non-singular attention, that best describes my style of engagement.) One book about A.D.D. describes the afflicted as "hunters in a farmer's world." While it's true that hunters spend a lot of time scanning their horizons, I don't buy this idea either. I've never met a farmer who DIDN'T have to keep their minds on a hundred things at once.

The more I study my Celtic roots, the less my so-called disability distresses me. Celts, it seems, have always understood the complex and flexible nature of time. Celtic philosophers and theologians have long recognized time as an embroidered tapestry, a mesh of the interwoven, the knotted, and the wrapped. An old Gaelic hymn to the Christ Child includes the declaration that, "although You are not yet born, people are praising the great things you've already done." The Divine Child is both "already" and "not yet." This speaks deeply to me. It describes my state of being, much of the time. It also reminds me that, as a Chronos-bound creature, I have my work cut out for me. I know, full well, that I can't afford to stop TRYING to do things "on time." I will never stop struggling to do business promptly and show up prior to the official start-time of shifts, classes, and meetings. This may never be an arena of particular personal grace.

Yet Grace does come--and it comes, most often, when it's "About Time." It is when I am most awkward, most unsure, and most open that the Holy Spirit shimmers and flutters and blazes into view. Poet Ted Loder calls this, "teetering on the edge of a maybe." I perch on the edge of self-doubt, which strangely doubles as the edge of cosmic acceptance. Grace unfolds in those awkward spaces between naughts and oughts. I am challenged, continually, to live more fully and step more willingly into the gaps.

And now it is Almost Time for one of my favorite Gaps of all: Samhainn, the Celtic New Year. Like Christmas and Fat Tuesday, this has long been celebrated as a "time beyond time" when the shackles of society are shaken off in favor of wildness. Yes, there's a sinister side--tricks can be cruel and damage may be done--but the essence of this time is a holy one. Where and when else, in our fast-paced, artificially brightened lives, are we given permission to see and acknowledge the dark?

Like the Jewish people and many other ancient agricultural societies, the Celts recognized darkness as the necessary time/place for all beginnings. Each new day begins at sundown. The year starts when the cold creeps in, the light wanes and the hard labours of harvest come to an end. It's a welcome respite, a seasonal sabbath. Seeds rest in the soil, new life sleeps in the dark womb, and all wise people take time to laugh and rest, doing the crucial work of re-creation, singing and sharing tales among deep shadows and flickering light.

Among the shadows: not an easy place to be. Yet our shadows demand attention, as our brightness continually invents them. Samhainn may wear the disguise of No-Man's Land, but what it really offers is Common Ground, a place for honest hopes and unreasonable fears to meet. Here is one meeting I will not miss. Here is one lesson for which I dare not show up late. (Hurry! Finish the wiring in our new house, so we can turn off all the lights!) Now is the time to step into the darkness, dance and wrestle with the darkness, shake the grief loose from my bones, mourn for all things returned to earth, and dream of new life that shall spring.

Happy New Year! May this "Almost Time" become a celebration. May we dance and weep around the bonfires of loss, feast on the richness of our memories, and--in dreams--step into the future's blessed embrace.