Mystical Murmurs: My Interfaith Life

 My mother hated to cook. HATED it. In a later era, and with some investment and encouragement (which she never got), she might have been either a concert pianist or a college professor.  Instead, she was a secretary, and retired to be a housewife. I may be biased, and my own preferences may be showing (whoops!), but I don't think she was ever very happy. So, not liking her role, she read a lot and cut corners. She was the 1950s queen of frozen food. Canned foods were also high on the list -- green beans, for example, which were boiled until they were a sodden mess.  It didn't help that Dad was a picky eater, and wanted nothing more than, as the Brits say, "meat and two veg."  Though I do have a suspicion that the Brits ate much better than we did, most nights. Much better . Meat was always, always well done, if you consider that flaky brown stuff we had meat. I never knew meat had any taste, and to this day I lean vegetarian -- although veggies didn't have much ...

 My mother and grandmother loved the change of seasons, especially the arrival of fall after a long, humid Delaware summer. The minute the mercury fell into the 50s at night, out would come the blankets and comforters. The furnace would purr into life in the early, cool mornings.    Gran, who lived with us, would cut bouquets of pyracantha (which we called "firethorn") from the bush in the backyard and place them around the house. There was always one large bouquet on our hearth. It proclaimed the change of season in the heart of our home.  My mom even had different curtains for the cold season -- I think this was a thing in the 1950s and early 60s. I'd come home from school one day and -- presto! -- the whole house would be changed into winter garb. I wish I could say this is a tradition I've maintained. I'm lucky if I remember to wash all the linens, much less change them for seasonal ones.  And it wasn't autumn at our house until Mom called me into the y...

It’s a quiet night here on the porch. The sun will soon set (noticeably earlier every night now), and the birds are taking a last few nibbles.  Max is gone now. The treatment we hoped would work was not a success, and after hours of seeing his kidney values go in the wrong direction, we agreed with the vet that it was time to let him go.  It’s brutal. If you’re a pet lover, you know how bad it is. The grief just bursts you open. Breaks you. When I sit at my desk, the nearby armchair is empty now, for the first time in 14 years. It’s about all I can stand.  Grief is hard. Relentless, for a while. Grief reminds you of every loss you’ve ever endured. Other pets. Humans you also loved. The people affected (or killed) by Covid-19. Grief breaks all that open again. It’s a bad feeling, to say the least.  And yet.  Every loss, every breaking-open, presents a growing edge. Maybe we become more sensitive to others in their own grief. Maybe we are able to help.  We mo...

Here I sit on the porch, watching two sparrows on the seed sock and listening to a gentle rain.  My best friend gave me the seed sock for my birthday,  since I’ve  been trying to lure the local goldfinches. I saw one up on the telephone wire the other day, observing with his little head tilted while the sparrows fed. He seemed approving, but did not commit. I saw him later at the other feeder, where the big birds go. Come on, buddy! I’m trying to feed you here! My 14-year-old dog, Max, stayed overnight at the local animal hospital, to receive treatment for his UTI. We hope the damage to his kidneys can be somewhat reversed. If it were plain-vanilla organ failure that afflicted him, we would have had to let him go. But an infection? I feel like I should fix that. Last night he was responding quite well. Below is the photo the hospital sent me after they admitted him.  He’s at the Mt. Laurel Animal Hospital. I have never found a more caring bunch than these folks. They...

 This little cutie-pie is my mother in law, Grace Sterling (nee Lloyd), when she was all of about 20 years old. When I met her, Grace had returned to nursing after a hiatus of many years. She worked in the nearby community hospital in Hamilton, New York, and was greatly loved there. In due time, she spent nearly 4 years in the skilled nursing wing, where she was lovingly cared for by nurses whose lives she had touched. She passed away with some of them by her side on December, 14, 2011, at the age of 86. Grace could do anything, or so it seemed to me. On a snowy night, with a doctor snowed in at his home, she delivered a baby with not much on her side except common sense and her own experience of two births. "Well, maybe just push a little," she told the mom, and then caught the baby as he made his exit. I found this story quite exciting, since I'd had c-sections myself and found the whole natural birth process quite mysterious (not to mention terrifying).  Grace could al...

On August 1st, English villagers celebrated the feast of Lammas, in honor of the wheat harvest. The term “Lammas,” in fact, derives from the Old English phrase, “hlaf-maesse,” or “loaf-mass,” when a loaf baked from the newly harvested wheat was blessed at the local church. Lammas was also the occasion of country fairs, often held with the intent of hiring new laborers for the continuing harvest season.  Of course this celebration, like many others appropriated by Christianity, is much older. Lammas, known as Lughnasadh in the Wiccan/Pagan cycle — the Wheel of the Year — honors the Pagan god, Lugh, on the occasion of his marriage. It is the first of three sequential harvest festivals in this tradition: Mabon and Samhain are the others.  We shouldn’t fail to notice that Lammas is a “cross-quarter day,” lying equidistant between the summer solstice, known as Litha, and the autumnal equinox, known as Mahon. By the time Lammas rolls around, we are descending into the dark, the seas...

This is day #134 of the Long Sorrow. I call it the Long Sorrow not because I have been deprived of my precious routine and activities, but because so very, very many have been deprived of their precious lives. And because many more people are now dying, and will die, largely because Donald Trump and his Republican cronies do not care.  My husband and I are older now, with  those famous "underlying conditions," so we began quarantining on the 12th of March, and we have not really stopped.  I have groceries delivered, and have ventured out, gingerly, to a few places, mainly to buy bedding plants. I did have minor surgery on the 1st of July. Oddly, I felt safer in the hospital than anywhere else, except at home. My husband is playing tennis again (outside only, and with great caution).  I am enjoying my garden and my front porch, and I'm very grateful that winter is a long way off.  Church is open again, with many rules and restrictions, but not many have chosen to...

OK, no I didn't! But I think you knew that. I hope you are all having a wondrously creative time in lockdown. Knitting up a storm, learning the piano, finally learning how to make a roux , n'est-ce pas?  I had all sorts of plans too, now that my favorite activities -- hanging out with friends, volunteering as a chaplain, church, choir, tai chi classes, and eating out -- have all gone down the tubes. I was going to redesign my front garden.  I did spread mulch and plant a few new things, but the result is much the same as last year. I was going to add a spiritual direction page to this blog, hoping to drum up clients from the spiritually fluid and/or the spiritual-but-not-religious crowd. I was going to weed my library in order to assemble a donation for the local public library (which is, of course, closed right now).  I thought I might learn an easy instrument, since using the vocal cords for singing seems to be way, way off in the distance.  ...

Above is a picture of my pisanki, highly-decorated Easter eggs given me by a dear friend. They appear in my dining room at the beginning of Lent every year, and never fail to grace my Easter table. I dyed some hard-boiled eggs as well, but it would not be Easter without the pisanki, those reminders of spring and resurrection.  Aside from the pisanki, nothing about Easter was normal, and I feel I turned into an Easter Grinch. Church, of course, was online. I’m getting adjusted to that, but my laptop kept notifying me that my internet connection was unstable. We had many attendees, which may have been a factor. In any case, audio and video kept freezing for me, especially during the sermon, which was unfortunate. I needed a few words of hope and glory! Grinch grumbling on my end occurred.  At dinner, there were only three of us this year. Our son’s girlfriend had been invited, but she is quarantined up in Bergen County, one of our New Jersey hotspots. Our daughter, her fiancé, a...

Last week, I joined a small meditation group hosted every weekday at noon by a friend with whom I went to seminary.  Meditation is always a good thing, but it seemed to me that I needed discipline and accountability with my meditation practice right now (since it tends to be spotty under normal circumstances).  The first week, the sessions were devoted to tonglen , a type of meditation involving breathing in the suffering of others, then breathing out compassion. It's more complicated than that, probably, but that is how we boiled it down for our own purposes. It can lead to a feeling of heaviness and sadness, but also to a sense of having added, even if by a tiny fraction, to the amount of compassionate, healing energy in the world. Since I'm not an essential worker, it gave me something purposeful to do right now, besides cowering in my house.  If you're interested, a resource is listed below. Yesterday, we tried something different: chanting with Amma....

So here we are, locked down and shut in, waiting and praying for the first wave of coronavirus to pass. As a kid swimming in the Atlantic, I learned early how to dive under the breaking wave, to avoid feeling its force, emerging beyond it safe and sound. That’s the point of sheltering in place, too: avoiding the virus, letting it pass by like the angel of death on Passover. I mind this enclosure much less than I expected to. As an introvert, I should not have been surprised. My husband and son are working from home, but I still have ample time on my own. There are so many things I could be doing around the house. I’ve done none of them. I can't seem to move. As a hospice chaplain and vigil volunteer, I think I’m grieving for people I don’t know. Working with dying people and their families, I know how important the gathering of loved ones can be to a patient’s peaceful transition. Family members telling funny stories, praying together, watching those last breaths: these a...

I've been retired for a bit over two years now. I love not having to get up and go into Philly every day. It's a special treat not to have to ride SEPTA, which was always the weak link in my commute. I miss the people I worked with, but most of them have now retired, too -- and we are all in touch. None of us is ready for the rocking chair, at right. But I have to admit, I haven't yet hit my stride. My schedule is minimal: every Tuesday, and every other Wednesday, I  serve as a volunteer chaplain in hospice inpatient units. I love this work! Yet I have no temptation to look for a paid position. My problem is that, barring a sudden disaster or diagnosis, most of what I would like to do can always be done tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or ... whenever. And so not much gets done. My garden is like me -- colorful but weedy. My house is not the cleanest. I have read my way through several mystery series this summer, but the serious reading I had planned to do has not...

Well, it’s been a year since I last posted here. Maybe my three constant readers thought I’d died. But no! Call it the Trump Effect. All I’ve done during the past year is watch the growing horror in the Oval Office clawing nearer to disaster with his tiny hands. I rode that wave of delight we all felt when the Democrats took the House. And I’m waiting desperately for Robert Mueller’s report (assuming we get to see it) and its nice, fat indictment for Trump.  But neither of those things may happen. Meanwhile, as I obsessed about the state of the union, the blog remained unblogged, the garden grew weedy, and I totally failed to do any work on myself (aside from tai chi, which I’ve done faithfully). No meditation, no hiking, no yoga, no Great Courses (I think I left off in the middle of a course on the Gnostics).  I’ve become a dry leaf, rattling in a gale.  So maybe it’s time to take myself in hand. Trump is not going away today, tomorrow, or the next day. Sprin...

One side of my family is from the south, from coastal North Carolina. Among other endeavors, they grew peanuts, and every autumn of my childhood we received a huge bag of raw peanuts, to be roasted and enjoyed. On visits to see these relatives, I also recall being driven at night through the Dismal Swamp, which impressed me as eminently worthy of its name. Like many of my other family members, those on the North Carolina side could be a bit eccentric. The one who sticks in my mind is Cousin Pearl, who at eighty had glasses like Coke bottles and rode a bike everywhere. In her house there was also a fascinating little room with walls lined from floor to ceiling by little apothecary drawers, in which she claimed to store “this and that. “ To this day, I have never learned their contents.  Cousin Pearl was a wonderful conversation partner for a young teenager. One topic, though, was off limits: the Civil War. Cousin Pearl mentioned this painful period only once, referring to it...

Yes, that's right. I am in search of my waist. It has gone missing! I lost quite a bit of weight in my fifties. 18 months of counting points. No ice cream. No peanut butter. So much rabbit food that I nearly grew a cottontail and began hopping around on the lawn at night. But when I hit my 60s, my body turned on me, like a villain in a cartoon. And now my waist has disappeared. It used to be in the normal spot, and I was able to encircle it with belts and skirts. Now the belts just laugh at me. A skirt recently suggested I was ready to try elastic. Now, I could lament this loss of my waist. I could go on and on about yesteryear, and how I was once a size eight. Or I could resign myself to the loss of my waist, and somehow ... somehow ... go on without it. I hope it has gone to a good home.

My next-door neighbor, Carolann, was found dead in her home on the 5th of August, when the police, having been requested to do a wellbeing check, broke down her door. They were in her home for quite a while, so we hoped she was simply going to be taken to the hospital again. But no. When the police finally emerged, they informed the small group that had gathered that Carolann had died. While there was no wailing or gnashing of teeth, we were all sorry to hear this news. We had all had dealings with Carolann's eccentricities over the years, and many of these occasions had me on my last nerve. Recently we let her know that we wanted to remove a dying tree on the edge of our property, to make installing a fence a bit easier. In the end we installed the fence around the tree, since Carolann would not permit our tree removal folks to set foot on her property, and declared that if any branches fell on her bushes, there would be trouble. In retrospect, these are small matters, and all...

Well, I did it! My last day at work was Friday, June 30th. For all my sentimental readers, I'd like to tell you that I woke up on July 1st and felt like I was dangling over the void. That the future stretches out before me like an undifferentiated, gray plain, wandered aimlessly by folk who have lost their reason for living. That I miss all the productive, life-saving work that I did in the law library. But I would never lie to you. I now feel like I can leap tall buildings, scale rocky heights (well, short rocky heights). And I can count with no hands the lives I saved over my career. Now I have time to read the morning office on my sunny front porch. Time to tackle little projects I have put off. Time to spend with my dogs and my husband (none of us is getting any younger). And I have volunteer work in a hospice facility that I find deeply satisfying. So don't hesitate. Jump! Why work one more second, unless you love your job? Take that leap! There's life on th...

I'll admit it: Despite having been born in 1953, I was one of those kids who knew nothing about the old, original Cold War. We had no family bomb shelter, and as far as I can recall, none of our neighbors had one, either. We had no food saved, except in the very small chest freezer. Water? If it didn't come from the tap, we wouldn't have had any. Moreover, the Bomb was never a topic of discussion at our house. At least, not in my presence. I did take part in Civil Defense drills in elementary school, of course. Depending on the location of the classroom, we either hid beneath our desks, doing the ole duck-and-cover, or we did the same thing out in the hall, with our heads up against the row of lockers. But I don't remember the Civil Defense drills being explicitly about the Bomb. I wonder if my classmates knew why we were doing this? I remember absolutely no discussion about it in the classroom, before the drill or afterward. I did realize the Soviet Union was full...

Spring begins tomorrow! A blessed Ostara to my friends who celebrate the 8 sabbats. Spring is something we can all celebrate. For more information about Ostara, click here .

Below is a photo of eager, premature buds on the little weeping cherry tree we had planted last spring. We never saw it bloom last year -- we bought it after bloom-time. So during our record-setting February warmth, of course, it started to bud. "Don't do that!" I thought, each time I went by. "No more buds!" My grandmother, who lived with us during my childhood, planted a magnolia tree on the front lawn. It was an eastern exposure, and the tree stood completely at the mercy of cold spring winds blowing across the Delaware River. In the 20 years Granny lived in our house, she saw the tree bloom only 3 times! Every other year, a late cold snap or snowstorm would cause the buds to blast and fall. In the morning, there they'd be, littering the ground around the tree. So I'm afraid the same will happen to our weeping cherry, as the storm named Stella sweeps toward us. Though the tree itself won't be harmed, our spring may be a bit less colorful th...