2009: A Term for the Verse

Today marks the Winter Solstice-- the year's shortest day and longest night. As the minutes slipped away prior to the Official Astronomical Event, I wormed my way under our new house for one last intimate encounter with the earth. (The practical reason for this ritual was that a faulty extension cord needed replacing; the shower drain--so carefully surrounded with heat-tape, insulation, and a tyvek-wrapped, earth-banked styroboard frost wall--would do us no good through the winter's whistling winds if the heat-tape could not be trustworthily plugged in!)

Now I am back inside the house, grubby but warm, relaxing into the knowledge that the last great ritual has been successfully performed and we shall henceforth be able to Hold The Wolf of Winter At Bay. (We won't make any bold predictions about any other wolves just yet, but suffice to say that we're really boning up on our wolf-wrangling skills and getting better every day!)

The Proper Activity of Northern Winter Folk is repair and creation: the careful tending of tools and gear, the mending of strained relationships, and the creation of things both useful and beautiful. My heart is ready, now--and if you will permit me a bit of creative indulgence--my rusty bardic muse is in need of some warm-up stretches. Like any stretch, the following will involve the potential of painful reaches and the appearance of ridiculousness, but these seasonal tasks simply MUST be done...


2009: A TERM FOR THE VERSE

January started out
cold and full of gripes:
Our year began with frozen folk,
cold house and frozen pipes.

February came along
with icy, sparkling jaws--
We went outside and froze some more--
for a worthy local cause.

March brought hard digging
and--finally--joy! Let
us now praise installers
of pipes, shower and toilet!

April--on windowsills,
seedtrays sat out,
dark soil dreaming
and sending up sprouts.

May--month of sweet melting
and warming and growing!
New piglets were bought.
In the fields we went sowing.

June--to market and home again,
all in a whirl
to host a church picnic
and the dear Wild Girls!

July started wet and grew wet enough
to douse any forest fire.
Pigs being pigs, in the mud they did dig,
and slipped out under the wire.

August brought an island journey--
oh, sweet farm-women's reprieve!
Our first home-grown bull met his meaty end:
a choice we did not grieve.

September: batten down the farm
and rush to catch a plane
For a family wedding we piped and preached--
so good to see kinfolk again!

October came to
a bittersweet end.
With bards and musicians,
we mourned a dear friend.

November brought the cold and dark--
a fearful time for the farm.
But oh! We gave thanks for our sweet new house,
where the woodstove kept us warm!

December sang softly of flickering hope,
now fanned to a stalwart flame.
We plan for years, fields, and friends to come.
Solstice Blessings! May you do the same!

--copyright MaineCelt 12/2009


(This post's images were taken during a visit to Trustworth Studios.)

Stuck.

STUCK

Down beneath the chicken pen,
Under many an egg and hen,
There's a shadowy sort of a glen
Just the right size for a piglet.

Under the floorboards, dusty and dark,
Free from the farmdog's pesky bark,
Down in the dirt, the piglets park,
Indulgently digging their diglet.

Nothing but noses poking out
As piglets under the barnboards scout
or doze with a now-and-then twitch of the snout
While chickens pass by, unperturbing.

But oh, how they grow, those dear little hams--
Just as their uncles and cousins and grams--
'Til half-way-out some porker jams
With a noise that's quite disturbing.

What's to be done? The shingles shake.
The terror-struck pig's sides heave and quake.
We fear for the hens. Will barnboards break,
In this battle between hog and hovel?

We look at the posts. We peer at the beams.
The pig in question screams and screams.
The farmer tires of tragic themes.
She leaves, then returns with a shovel.

Some jobs are little. Some jobs are big,
Some holes are harder than others to dig,
Especially round a stuck, thrashing pig.
But the critter was freed, fat and fine.

---

Now we're digging no longer for pigs, but for gold,
As onto our farm we strive hard to hold.
May our efforts bear fruit. May our strivings be bold,
And may all of our work turn out swine.


(Image and text copyright Mainecelt 2009)

Friday Five: Wind in My Sails

Sally, over at RevGalBlogPals, writes:
"... sailing is a family passion, we love the water and the wind, and take delight in the fresh air and quiet, but also in the competition, striving to do our best!
How about you?

1. Is there a sport/ hobby that is more of a passion than a past-time for you?
I've never been one for sports, although I do like salt-water swimming and Messing About In Boats and I adore a good game of Extreme Croquet.
My hobby/passion is the exploration of folk culture and traditions--especially those of the British Isles. (I come by this anthropological bent honestly-- growing up in a multi-ethnic family with three adopted siblings, intercultural study was simply a part of daily life, and provided a goodly portion of our family fun.) With some like-minded friends, we even started a nonprofit organization to support our folk culture habit, although it's in "sleep mode" while we finish building our house. The Piper and I have justified the purchase of many a CD and weighty ethnographic tome by saying, "It's all for the Ceilidh House library, of course--and we'll use these as reference materials when we teach our bagpipe and Gaelic language students!"

2. Outdoors or indoors?
Outdoors: festival-going, "ethnically-correct" gardening and orchard-tending with heirloom plant varieties, and staying close to the salt water that bouys my spirit and connects me to my ancestors. Indoors: delving into books, gathering with other folklore enthusiasts, swapping stories, and having great music session around the woodstove.

3. Where do you find peace and quiet?
Not sure right now-- it's been a hard year. I seek peace in the slow intake and release of breath, the comfortable closeness of my partner, the gradually-revealed beauty of our almost-finished house and the slowly-emerging health of our land. Quiet is easier to find than peace--I am thankful every morning and every night that I can begin and end my days surrounded, almost entirely, by natural rather than human-made sounds. (I'll relish the quiet more fully when I can find my missing whetstone and "take care" of a couple of extra roosters, if you know what I mean!)

4. A competitive spirit; good or bad, discuss...
A competitive spirit is like fire: a good servant, a terrible master, and dangerous to play with. I appreciate its ability to overcome inertia and get a person moving towards a goal, but I don't like the way others tend to be left in a person's wake. I should come clean and declare, right here, that I am a vicious card player, but fortunately my commpetitive streak is matched by a tendency toward distraction and terrible bad luck in the dealing of hands.

5. Is there a song a picture or a poem that sums up your passion ?
I've posted links to Richard Hugo's poem, Glen Uig, in previous posts. It captures some of the essential pain and joy of reconnection to one's past. Here's another poem from Cathal O Searcaigh, translated from Irish Gaelic by Gabriel Fitzmaurice:

A Portrait Of The Blacksmith As A Young Artist

I'm sick and tired of Dun Laoghaire.
Of my bedsit in Cross's Avenue,
A pokey place that cripples my wordsmith's craft
And leaves me nightly in the dumps
Scrounging kindred among the drunks
Instead of hammering poems for my people
On the anvil of my mind.
Almighty God! It's gone too far,
This damned silence.
If I were back in Caiseal na gCorr
I'd not be awkward, half-alive.

No way! But in the smithy of my tongue
I'd be hale and hearty
Working my craft daily
Inciting the bellows of my mind
Stirring thoughts to flame
Hammering loudly
The mettlesome speech of my people.

--found in Writing the Wind: a Celtic Resurgence: The New Celtic Poetry, ed. Thomas Rain Crowe.

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What the Gussuck Said

I went to college in Alaska, where the Alaskan Native students sometimes referred to us pale-skinned incomers as "Gussucks." The word was sometimes a playful jest, sometimes a stronger epithet. I understood it to mean, to them, what "Yankee" means to a Southerner and what "Sassanach" means to a Gael. Even when used among friends, with winks and grins, the word has a cutting edge. It was not, shall we say, a compliment.

This morning I participated in a sunrise ceremony to cap a week of indigenous observances known as "Wabanaki Days." The clergyman who usually shares in the service was unable to attend, so I was invited midweek to step in. I was asked to offer a Gaelic invocation and a brief homily that would acknowledge the connection between Euro-American immigrant heritage and our state's indigenous peoples.

This was not an easy situation--Native elders would be participating with drumming and prayers from their traditions, and I was not only the new kid on the block, ceremonially speaking, but a gussuck as well. The invocation wasn't worrying--I had a volume of the great Hebridean ethnographic work, Alexander Carmichael's Carmina Gadelica, and it was full of prayers honoring the elements, creatures, and Creation. I drew on prayers to the sun and the new moon, as well as a blessing that speaks of "power of raven, power of eagle...power of storm, power of land, power of sea..." These ancient prayers allow the Gaelic tradition to speak for itself, while affirming other indigenous earth-centered traditions.

The homily was harder. I knew the sight of a clergyperson in an alb could trigger anger, distrust, and generations of resentment. I debated whether to wear my alb at all, but I wanted to wrestle with the challenge-- the challenge to myself, to conduct myself with utmost humility and respect, and the challenge to them, that my witness might move them to reconsider their long-held assumptions about the general toxicity of anything associated with the Church. My offering of words would be a part of that witness...but hey, no pressure, right?

When we arrived, the stone ridgeback of the point was shrouded in heavy fog. Only barely could we make out the shapes of others emerging from their vehicles in the pearly half-light of dawn. I saw one of the elders cast a disapproving glance my way as I pulled on my alb over my regular clothes. A couple minutes later, she came up to me and asked what church I came from. I said, truthfully, that I'd worked with many different groups and gatherings, but I was a part of the U.C.C. (United Church of Christ.) She leaned close and looked me squarely in the eye. "Is that one of them conservative churches, or liberal?"

"Progressive...er...liberal." (I tend to stumble when using the L-word, as I find it an unhelpful and troublesome term, but I knew she was waiting to hear one or the other of the words she'd offered me.)

She leaned even closer, her eyes squinting slightly, pinioning me with her glare. "So, which kinds of folks does your church exclude?"

An unintended smile of pure relief spread across my face. Of course she had every right to be suspicious, to be angry. But what a wonderful question, and how deeply satisfying to say, with absolute honesty, "why, we belong to this church because it doesn't exclude anybody! We welcome everyone!"

It wasn't the answer she was expecting. She actually looked a little disappointed, a little unsettled by my response. But by then people were joining the circle, gathering to take part in the ceremony. We both turned our attention to the work at hand: the acknowledgement of arrivals, the hailing of honored guests, and the clearing and blessing of this sea-carved, salt-washed, mist-wreathed sacred space.

There were words of welcome. A match was set to a small bundle of sacred leaves cradled in a seashell, and the smoke wafted among us, ritually purifying all that it touched. The drummer lifted his drum and sang, in its rhythm, words our bodies could all feel even if some of our minds could not comprehend. Two elders shook rattles in time to the drum. They spoke more words, some in their native languages and some in translation, for the benefit of us gussucks. At their invitation--a nod in my direction with the statement, "Now, I guess we're gonna hear some Christian-churchy-Lord-in-heaven prayers..." I offered the Gaelic invocation I'd prepared, along with an English translation. Two tongues, two languages, slowly revealed the meaning of the prayer, and with each stanza their eyes widened. "Oh King of the elements, be ours a goodly purpose toward each creature in Creation..."

Perhaps they felt a little of the shock of recognition I felt, when first I discovered those words more than a decade ago. My Pacific Northwest upbringing had exposed me to the stories and teachings of many Native peoples, and the words of Black Elk and Chief Seattle were regarded with the same respect accorded to the Christian Gospels. I grew up hungry to embrace teachings that honored the Earth, yet I was fiercely aware of the innate wrongness of "playing Indian." Only when a visiting bard--David Whyte--gave a lecture series on "The Celtic Imagination," did I discover the mythic characters of Salmon, Raven, and Deer in a context I could wholly embrace without borrowing the cultural trappings of others.

Other words, silence, and music followed. The Piper offered her own musical gift, and as she struck in to an eerie tune on the pipes, the elders reached out and signaled for all of us to take hands and make a circle around her. The thrum of the drones, like the beat of the drum, moved in our blood and our bones as well as the mist-laden morning air. It seemed like a suitable and satisfying end. I tucked my now-damp folded notes behind my back, hoping I was off the homiletical hook. No such luck. The same elder who had confronted me at the beginning fixed me, once again, in her sights. She nodded to me. What was I doing there? I was no elder, no great storyteller. Surely I didn't belong... But she was, after all, in charge, and she was telling me to speak. I took out my notes, apologized for relying on them, and began:

We are border people. Like a basket's woven design or Celtic knotwork carved into stone, our life shows most clearly at the edges. What beauty we have lies where pieces are split and broken, where the ragged ends are tucked and woven in.

We are journeying people. Along these edges we move, back and forth, backward and forward, and we carry this history on our back. It weighs us down, like a creel full of seaweed. It pulls and presses, like a basket heavy with stones.

My ancestors were Scottish and Scots-Irish immigrants to Maine. They came on ships from the lands of their people, the coastlines and hillsides that knew them best, held their stories, held their bones. They came as unwilling passengers on packet ships. They arrived awkward and ignorant and scared, like many of their fellow immigrants, having been burned out of their homes and pushed off their land by poverty, circumstance, or government agents.

A story: The British government spent years conducting military campaigns against the Scots and the Irish before they made their raids on the so-called New World. Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and others used Ireland as a proving ground, a convenient neighborhood of savages to be cleaned up and cleared out. After four years on the blood-soaked frontier, one English correspondent sent this description back:
“Out of every corner of the woods and glens they came creeping forth on their hands, for their legs would not bear them. They looked anatomies of death; they spake like ghosts crying out of their graves... in short space there were none almost left and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void of man or beast.” The “void” meant vacant lands for English resettlement. This was the Irish frontier in 1596.

Meanwhile, the SSPCK--the Society in Scotland for Propagating of Christian Knowledge--was intent on stamping out “the barbarian tongue” of Gaelic, the first step towards civilizing the “Wild Scots” of the Highlands. They also busied themselves with New World heathens. In 1735, they began a search for a missionary to preach to Native Americans in the Colonial territory of Georgia. They settled on one Reverend Iain MacLeoid. A Gaelic-speaker, they believed, would be able to converse with the natives quite easily--one barbarian to another.

Less than a generation later, my ancestors came. Like other immigrants, they came for many reasons. Some were good reasons. Some were less than good. Whatever their reasons, they did not arrive entirely without skills--they may have known how to weave and spin, how to carve stone or tend livestock, how to write or keep accounts, but they did not know all that was needed to survive in this unfamiliar land.

Some were so used to fighting, they never learned how to unclench their fists. Kicked out of their own land, they signed up as soldiers to shove other people off their ancestral lands. They remembered how to fight, but they lost touch with the ancient codes of honour that once governed their battles. We cannot be proud of what they did, but we can try to understand the reasons behind their ignorance and fear. We remember them as we remember the dark length of our shadows in the clear light of the rising sun. We cannot shake their darkness away from us. It will follow us always.

Some of our ancestors did not forget the old ways. They remembered that, at the shining heart of their culture, there were sacred rules of hospitality. They understood what it meant to offer food to hungry wanderers, to offer shelter to a stranger. They were humbled to receive the compassion and care of this land's Native Peoples. Without this kind and patient guidance, they would never have survived the biting cold and the bitter winds. With it, they endured beyond the edges of starvation. And because some of them kept the old ways alive, they understood that such actions bind people together and create community, as surely as two colours interwoven become a beautiful design.

We are still travelers, still border people, living at the thresholds of land and sea, standing between cultures, standing at the threshold of survival itself. We still reach, blindly, in our dreams, for that sweet promise of a land called home. We still struggle to find our place in Creation's intricate design, a place in the great pattern of justice and peace where we genuinely belong.

What we must acknowledge is this: we have not made our own way in this world. We arrived here and survived here through the care of countless others, people who helped us over the threshold, cared for our bodies and souls, and ensured our survival in a thousand different ways. We live as a result of their risks, their gifts, their love.

This, then, is how we honor your ancestors and ours: we come back to this place of rough edges, and with the Creator's gracious Spirit and the Travelers’ tales to guide us, we remember. We strive not to repeat the mistakes of our oppressors, who called everyone savages and brutes and other less-than human names. Instead, we humbly recognize that we share this land and this fully human story. We humbly acknowledge that we must listen more deeply as stories and old ways are shared. We are called to move together in this open space, to weave together, from our rough edges, a design of healing and promise, a design of wisdom and beauty.

--copyright Mainecelt July 2009

Source notes: this homily made use of material from the following history texts: Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America, (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1993)

Michael Newton, We’re Indians Sure Enough: The Legacy of the Scottish Highlanders in the United States, (Saorsa Media, Auburn, NH, 2001)

Photo of Alaska Native mask found here.
Basket image from Diane Kopec collection at the Abbe Museum.

Shall We Dance? A sermon for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost

“...When those who bore the ark of the Lord had gone six paces, he sacrificed an ox and a fatling. David danced before the Lord with all his might; David was girded with a linen ephod. So David and all the house of Israel brought up the ark of the Lord with shouting, and with the sound of the trumpet.
As the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal daughter of Saul looked out of the window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart.
They brought in the ark of the Lord, and set it in its place, inside the tent that David had pitched for it; and David offered burnt offerings and offerings of well-being before the Lord.
--2 Samuel 6:13-17 (NRSV)

What is up with David, dancing like that? Has the leader of the Israelites cracked up completely? Maybe it was too much of a strain, going from shepherd boy to soldier to court musician to ruler and priest. Look at the guy, would you? He has an army to lead, a rag-tag nation to manage, and he's out there building a tent for the ark, inviting thousands and thousands of people, calling up noisy musicians, and leaping around half-naked like some holy idiot, like some freakish pop star with only one glove...

I have to confess, when I first read this story, I fell right in next to David's wife, Michal. She's the one up in the ivory tower, far from the madding crowd, watching the party and feeling utterly appalled. Michal was raised to be proper. She was raised to do what people expect. She respected her elders and followed their commands, even when it didn't match her wishes. Even when it made her life really hard. Even when it kept her from making her own choices at all. So when she thought about her parents, her teachers, and her proper role, and then looked out at her beautiful, unpredictable husband, whirling and leaping half-naked in the midst of the crowd... I can understand her distress. I can feel some of her frustration. I can see why she let her own decorum slip as her bitterness rose. This woman, this pretty little pawn of kings and princes—her reputation and her husband were the only things she could claim as her own. And there he was, whirling wildly in ecstatic prayer, sharing too much of himself with all those common servant girls, playing the fool in the name of God?!?

Growing up, I was never much of a dancer, and, outwardly at least, I was never really wild. Knock-kneed and pigeon-toed, I was afraid of mistakes, afraid of being out of step. I was intensely aware of what others might be thinking of me. I was so focused on their imagined “shoulds” and “oughts” that I couldn't feeli the stirrings of my fledgling spirit, flapping blindly towards God. I was unsure of the rhythm in my heart, mostly deaf to the music surging in my soul...
I was the one at the window, all prim and proper, saying, “Come inside. Stop all your wildness. What will people think?”

But God's Wild Spirit kept dancing around me. First it was the music on the radio: three days of live broadcasts from a folk festival, that touched my fearful heart, opening me to the creative joy that transcends cultures. Then there was a folkdance class that welcomed beginners. They taught me how to join hands and move with the shared energy of others. Later came community theatre shows that taught me to care about lives far different from my own.
As I wrestled with my vocation, I watched space shuttles zoom above and bumblebees bumble along, blissfully ignorant that their flight defied the laws of physics. I heard of Nelson Mandela's liberation. I stood at the edge and heard the roar of the ocean unchained. I discovered little weeds cracking the pavement and the Berlin Wall coming down.

In other words, The Ark of God kept rolling in front of my nose, moving me, dazzling me, urging me up and out. I tried to stay indoors, but people kept up such a noise outside, harping on themes of freedom. I tried to keep my nose in a book, but people kept handing me shovels. I tried to stay on the sidelines, but God took my hand and led me into the dance! I put my right foot in...took my right foot out...did the Hokey-Pokey and shook myself about... Lo and behold: turning around— turning around my thinking and my fear, turning to the work of justice and peace-making...really WAS what it was all about!

The years have unfolded. I've learned right foot, left foot, right hand, left hand...I've gotten to the point where I'm even ready to put my whole self in, knock-knees, pigeon toes, and all! I still need to shake myself about a lot--that's part of the reason I have a farm. All that hard work, all that playing in the dirt, shakes off the inertia and keeps me moving. It keeps me feeling whole and connected enough to reach out to the rest of the world.

Recently, our farm had two visitors -- two young women from different parts of the country who wrote, independently, to ask for a week or two on the farm. It seems they'd been having their own crises of confidence, like Michal's bad day at the big Israelite Jamboree. They were both struggling in that very hard space between the demands and expectations of others, their own surging feelings, and the aching hunger of their spirits for a more meaningful way of life.

Jokingly at first, we christened our time together, “The School for Wild Girls.” We made it our business to talk about everything under the sun as we played in the dirt and learned to use power tools. Together, we raged about the inequities of the world and the embarrassments of daily life. We teased each other. We encouraged each other. We drank Moxie. We sang hymns and old folk songs. They went out to the pasture, amidst our long-horned, shaggy beasts, armed only with curry combs. They literally took the bull by the horns.

On Midsummer's Night, we had a bonfire with our Wild Girls. We invited over some musicians—no tambourines or cymbals, but we did have a harp, bagpipes and fiddles—enough for some joyful noise. As the flames crept, then leapt and swept over the tree-prunings, old pallets and busted chairs, we thought about fire: the fire hidden in our Spirits, the embers seldom exposed to God's wild, igniting wind. We thought of all the fears that held us back from our own callings. We wrote them on slips of paper and threw them into the flames.

The piper struck up the pipes. One of our musician friends impulsively grabbed my hand, told everyone else to join in, and led us, dancing and laughing, around the fire. We stumbled, we wobbled...our steps weren't always in time, but the music lifted us out of all our griefs and anxieties. We grinned like the fools that we were. We shouted with unfettered joy, there in the circle, there in the wildness and warmth. We danced in defiance of all our fears. We danced in defense of all we loved. We danced in devotion and prayer. And we danced with all our might!

When they stepped away, at the end of their visits, they had to return to their own people and places. But they went with new confidence and strength—yes, with Moxie. They had taken the bull by the horns. Like the Ephesians, they had gotten a glimpse into the promise of a Renewed Creation. They had been not just welcomed, but adopted, into a new family. They had left Michal's shadows, stepped across the threshold, and joined The Wild Girls.

Now our church is having its own Michal Moment. Here, in this time-worn structure, built by our forebears and maintained by our own hands, we gather, framed by shadows. We've heard the reports of wise advisors, and everything is shifting. We know our status is tenuous, and our efforts to hold our place have exhausted us to the point that we can hardly think beyond bake sales and beans. How can we manage? How shall we survive?

Listen again to the Good News in Paul's letter to the Ephesians:
"[God] has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, just as [we were chosen] before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before [God] in love. [We were destined] for adoption as [God's] children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of [God's] will, to the praise of the glorious grace that [God] freely bestowed on us in the Beloved... In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance...so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory...This is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God's own people..." --Ephesians 1:3-14, excerpts (NRSV)

This letter speaks of Adoption...Praise...Hope...Redemption...Glory! This is what we're called to be about! We are called to open our arms, to roll up our sleeves, to wave our banners of welcome and do the hokey-pokey!!! We are called to focus NOT on our woes, but on our wondrous mission: to be the hands and feet of God, dancing the Good News into the world! Too tired? Lean on the Holy Spirit. Let it move you. Not a good dancer? Leave your fears behind. God has enough grace for all of us.

It is hard --it is hard-- not to stare like Michal, clench your teeth or your fists, roll your eyes at a dance or a parade. And it's hard to figure out if there's a place for us out there in that great celebration.
It can seem daunting to step outside of what we're used to—exhausting, even.
But it also takes energy to hold yourself back. Have you ever noticed this?
It costs a certain amount of effort to get your dander up and dig in your heels.
Anxiety, fear, resistance...they're not fuel-efficient. They can nickle and dime you, wear you down, push you to the limit, consume all you have to give, and deplete your spirit, without ever moving you ahead.

On Independence Day, many of us stood on the church lawn and watched the parade. But we didn't lurk in the shadows. We were right out front, up close to the action, waving back to the folks in the parade. You see? We already understand how to do this! Instead of a dark, sleeping sanctuary, a church on its deathbed, onlookers saw a witness, a dedicated crowd serving up a feast!

Our challenge, now, is to carry that shining ark of God's promise out from the shadows, to keep it visible, in broad daylight. We may just be shepherds, or soldiers, princesses or servants, maybe all of the above. We may have come to this place out of duty or obligation or just the need for a share of the food, the rumour of some kind of feast. But here we are and...did you hear that music? Do you feel like joining in? We will have to fill out our dance cards together, think about who we can invite, where we might look for potential partners. We will likely need to learn some new dances with some unfamiliar steps. We will need to think about the wheels on that cart, and plan for where we want the ark to go.

It may feel like a wilderness, a desert, but hold on: God is here with us! We were there, in God's creative wildness, at the dawn of time, as adopted and beloved children. God's Spirit even now moves among us. Somewhere in between Michal and David we stand, on the threshold of the future. We can wring our hands, or we can open them. We can stay in the shadows, or we can step out, get the wheels turning, put up a tent, praise the Lord, and dance with all our might!

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.