As much as anything, I'm experimenting, trying to see what it is like to post an image. This is one of my line drawings. I'd mentioned to Idyllopus that I sometimes think my line drawings amount to having created a coloring book. I generally imagine colors but lack the time, so there are many line drawings and no color. Last weekend, when I was with my family on vacation, my children were casting about for something to do in the evening. Though our place had a Very Large TV, there didn't seem to be cable, or at least not very interesting cable, and we hadn't thought to bring movies with us. So I began to draw my children while they were doing other things, like reading. And then I offered my drawings to them, told them if they were bored they could color them. Perhaps I'll scan those and post them.

Last weekend my family and I went to
Tybee Island. Tybee is a small island
along the small coast of Georgia. I've known
of Tybee Island for many years but had never
been there. I'd heard that it was less built up,
less trendy than many beaches.

It was good to go with our children, who'd
asked for us to go to the beach. At 17 and
19 years old, I think the occasions when
our children will want to accompany us on
vacations are dwindling and since we had
not been able to take our customary week
at SUUSI (Southeastern Unitarian Universalist
Institute) this year, in Blacksburg Virginia,
going to the beach, just the four of us, seemed
like a good occasion to be with each other for a few days.

We rented a small cottage, only a block
from the beach. It was hot as blue blazes
at Tybee last weekend, as I suppose it was
over much of the country. But our little
cottage was just right, nicely appointed
with all the necessary comforts, including
a lovely screened porch with rocking chairs
and a picnic table, as well as overhead fans.
The owners of the cottage had even thought
to supply their guests with beach chairs and
sand toys and umbrella and cart to haul
those necessities to the beach.

We spent as much time there as we could
manage and Roxanne got a surfboard sort of thing
and was able to manage to ride the waves in,
if not standing on the board then apparently
joyfully skimming the water with her body and
her board, in her own way.

Tybee Island is a rather ordinary place, only
modestly built up, with junky little shops in
its junky little downtown, the shabbiness
and ordinariness of it appealing to me. It is
not a place trying to put on airs, as it were.

Last Sunday, I awakened fairly early and
decided to take a walk along the beach
alone. I knew we'd be heading home in a
few hours and the solitude of an early
walk beckoned. The sun was up, the surf
skidding in, dolphins feeding not far from
shore and very few people, though the sun was up.

As I walked down the beach, I could see a
woman sitting on the sand, working on a
sand construction. Her clothing, even at a
distance, was distinctive compared to usual beach attire.
She appeared to be wearing a black sari. I could see a length
of fabric blowing in the wind. And I assumed
she was probably an Indian woman. As I got closer,
I could see that she was working on a sand creation
but that it was not a sand castle as seems to be
customary for people at the beach to build. She
was making what I recognized to be a Hindu temple. So
there she sat, in what I thought was a sari,
stitched with golden colored threads in a vine pattern,
working and smiling. Her buildings seemed familiar,
as if I'd seen them in books before and when I got
home, I looked up Hindu temples on the internet. The
one that seemed closest to what she was constructing
is known as the Lingaraja Temple. I walked past several
times over the next hour or two, to see her
progress. The final temple complex had three
buildings inside a sand wall she'd constructed. One
of the buildings was tall, flanked by two smaller
versions of that. Each was conical, but rounded at
the tip, which was topped by a shape that might be
thought of to look a little like a hat. There was an
arched entrance to the temple complex and within
the courtyard she'd fashioned three egg-like shapes
that were put together in such a way that it looked a
little like a cluster of leaves, with a round ball of sand
where the three shapes joined. She actually made
two of these objects, one in front of either of the
shorter conical buildings. The main building itself
had a rectangular opening one would be able to
walk through, if it were a full-scale building. Outside
the walls of the complex she created there was
another dome-like shape surrounded by a line
she'd drawn in the sand, in a form I recognized. I
could see that what she'd created in the sand was a
yoni-lingam. That's what would normally be inside
the main building of the temple and would be
adorned with flower petals or perhaps colorful spices.

Later, after the temple was complete, I saw the
same woman, in her sari-like clothing, in the
incoming waves, that length of fabric waving
in the strong breeze.

I was so fascinated by her Hindu temple in the
sand. I think all I've ever seen at the beach were
sand castles or maybe some other sand construction.
I wondered if it is usual, in India, to make temples
at the beach, or just something that particular
woman does when she plays in the sand. And I
thought about the fact that here it is usually castles.
It seemed a funny contrast, too. Castles were or still are,
I suppose, symbols of political power and wealth. And
I suppose to some extent castles have a kind of
romantic appeal, perhaps conjuring ideas about
chivalry and knights and such. Seemed a funny contrast
to the woman's creation of a place of worship.

The rest of our trip home was done at a leisurely pace.
We drove into Savannah, with no particular place in mind
and no map of the city, looking for some suitable place
to each. We happened across a place called Firefly Cafe,
at Troup Square, I think, that had outdoor cafe
tables and was serving brunch. We stopped there
because it looked so inviting and dined at one
of the outdoor tables. The food was marvelous and
as it turned out, apparently it is one of the best
places for brunch in Savannah, at least according to
a local magazine article that was posted on their
wall inside. Ellen pointed out the bag of ice tethered
underneath the umbrella that shaded out table. She'd
heard it was supposed to help keep away flies, which it
did not, but even the flies did not dampen our
enthusiasm for the pleasant location and the good
food, though it did make me wonder if Fly Cafe
might have been a better name for the place.

Nina

It is not often that I find myself suddenly feeling intensely angry. Most things in my daily life are not of such importance that it matters if they are done this way or that. Most problems are correctable and I tend not to get overly overwrought about much. But I just answered the phone and it was one of those phone calls that leaves me angry and shaking. It was a call for my daughter. At first I thought it was just a friend of hers and I replied that she wasn't at home, and asked if I could take a message. As it turned out it was a recruiter, a Marine recruiter. Ever since the summer before her senior year of high school, they've called. It isn't just the Marines. It's the Army, and the Navy as well. I remember my daughter saying she had taken a test, had basically been required to take it while still in high school. I gather she didn't even really understand what the test was for but it seems it was to uncover aptitudes that might be useful to any and all branches of the military. So they keep calling her. I thought there would be an end to it after she became a full-time college student but no, she is still getting these calls. I informed the recruiter, through my clenched teeth and my sudden fury, that she is a full-time college student and to remove her name from their list. "But Ma'am, you don't understand, she asked for some information..." I am furious. She did no such thing. I'm not the least bit surprised to have him lying to me but I am still furious. Three times I snarled at him to remove her name from his list, that she is a college student. He was persisting in talking when I hung up on him in mid-sentence. I am furious. I want these recruiters, I want the president of this country to keep his damn war off of my children.

Call to Worship
"Seek to dwell in love and peace and truth with one another, and the gifts of the spirit shall enrich all and make no one poor; for in fellowship is strength, and immeasurable is the help that one can yield to another." --Rev. Frances West


Several times in the last week I've heard a bird's song I've not been aware of before. I've seen the bird perched on a telephone line as the daylight was waning but could only see it in silhouette. I could see that it was small, something like a sparrow. In searching through recorded bird songs, I thought perhaps it was a song sparrow but the song of that bird did not seem quite like what I had heard, which was distinctive and melodious. I noticed among the sparrows I could listen to there was one called a vesper sparrow and having listened to its singing on a recording, I think it's quite likely that's what I heard. How appropriate to be hearing it and seeing it as the daylight gave way to the first traces of evening.

Many years ago, my mother had decided she wanted to offer vesper services at the Unitarian Universalist church she was serving as minister at the time. She did so as a limited experiment, offering those services on a half-dozen Sunday evenings, around 7 pm, as I recall. None of these were ever well-attended and knowing my mother, that may have been discouraging to her but she did them all the same, attentive to the quality of worship without regard to numbers of people.

I went to all of those vesper services not because I had to but because I wanted to have that time of quiet worship. The idea appealed to me as a way of ending a weekend before turning myself back toward the rhythms and tasks of the work week. It was like a pause before resuming breathing, a quiet moment.

I remember one of those Sundays in particular. We'd arrived early at the church to set things up. My mother and I were the only ones in the building. The church is housed in what is called a Butler building, an aluminum sided building more commonly seen as inexpensive warehouses in industrial areas here. The sanctuary of that church is a large simple room--with windows arranged at regular intervals on either side, 3 to a side--and open to the pitched roof at the top, 20 feet up. The wall behind the cherrywood pulpit, which was made by a church member who had many years of experience in handbuilding boats, was plain, simple, white, adornment coming later in the form of a stained glass chalice another church member had made.

My mother had a large ceramic bowl, shallow and wide, perhaps two and a half feet across, glazed in earthy tones. She'd set it in front of the pulpit that Sunday and had asked me to fill it with water in order to float votive candles. There were other things she busied herself with in preparation for the service and our paths crossed as I made my way back and forth from the kitchen with water. I fetched the water in the container it was easiest to find, an ordinary plastic coffee pitcher, the kind you see in places like IHOP, coppery brown colored over most of its body, with the pouring lip and the flip lid colored black. I filled that coffee pot with water from the stainless steel sink in the kitchen and walked back and forth to the bowl, poured the water, out of one vessel and into another. There was something that particular evening, the dwindling light of a day that had been sunny, the quietness of the church, my mother and me at our tasks, the sound of water splashing into the wide bowl, all of those moments woven together into something lasting, at least in my memory, significant in those moments and significant in the echo of memory. As I fetched and poured water, I felt connected to all women, worldwide and through time, whose job it has been to fetch water. I felt the sacredness of this small, ordinary, and human act. I felt myself to be in sanctuary, as I do from time to time, unexpectedly, and blessedly.

I was curious about the word sanctuary, having thought of it in relation to that church, that moment. I've certainly had the feeling of being in sanctuary at other times in my life, have felt it so deeply, so sharply, so suddenly, that I've felt instantly full of tears not of sorrow but of gratitude, of safety, of beauty. I thought of the many forms of sanctuary, not just the space of a church, but of the way that word is applied to nature--a wildlife sanctuary, a bird sanctuary. Or of the safety, the sanctuary, offered to people who are seeking political asylum. In ancient Greek myth, Cassandra, who'd been given the gift of prophesy and cursed with never being believed, sought sanctuary in the temple of Athena after predicting many of the calamities that would befall her fellow Trojans. Even children incorporate this idea of sanctuary, of a safe place, into their play, running for "home" in order to escape being tagged "It" in chase games, touching "home" and making one presumably safe.

I'd looked up the word "sanctuary" which had me touching on other words, sacred, sanctify, and consecrate and leading me to an Indo-European root word "kailo", meaning "whole, uninjured, a good omen."

A few weeks ago, the Museum where I work held an event in connection with our current exhibition, Cradle of Christianity: Jewish and Christian Treasures from the Holy Land. The objects in this exhibition come from the Israel Museum in Jersualem and are about the shared early history of those two religions, their early similarities and connections. We'd arranged to have Bruce Feiler speak about the times and origins of early Christianity and its relationship to Judaism. Bruce Feiler wrote a book, and hosted a PBS series called Walking the Bible. He is a fifth generation Jew, from Savannah, Georgia, and member of the third oldest synagogue in the country, located in Savannah. He'd come to Trinity Presbyterian Church, our host for this event, to talk about this relationship.

I'd arrived early at Trinity Presbyterian, to get set up, to assist in whatever way was necessary. The church is located on a wooded lot and the summer afternoon was hot, the cicadas droning their late afternoon song among the golden light that filtered through the trees, pooling on the lawn. I'd needed to go inside and walked into the sanctuary, alone for a few moments, in the hush, that simple space, the late afternoon light, and felt awash with tears, thought of that vesper service with my mother so many years before.

Meditation
"In this quiet space, let each of us be aware of our separateness. Let us acknowledge our importance to ourselves, let us bless our uniqueness. Let us also be aware of the presence of others here in this quiet time with us. Of those whom we love, how can we show our love more simply and genuinely. Of those whom we like, how can our friendship bridge the space between us. Of those whom we dislike, how can we understand them better. Of those whom we fear, how can we find courage to face them constructively. Let us also consider the larger space beyond this room. How may we help create harmony in a disharmonious world. Amen."--Rev. Frances West

Benediction
"May faith in Goodness give you joy, and sustain your every moment. Amen"--Rev. Frances West

I woke up early this morning, around 4:30, and got up. I worked about the house, made breakfast for myself, read a little more of Numbers. I've been reading the bible from the beginning, a little at a time, this in part because of a new audio-guide the Museum where I work is about to release for public use. The guide is a series of brief commentaries by various members of Emory's faculty from the departments of religion, theology, and middle eastern studies. Their comments draw links between biblical passages and biblical history and objects we have in the permanent collection. I've found it fascinating and had been led further, reading for myself, thinking, seeing connections between ancient Egypt and the beginnings of other religions. While it was still dark this morning, I decided to take water to the yarrow and the lamb's ear my father and I planted on Saturday in my garden. I filled the plastic pitcher with water from the kitchen faucet and walked out into the early morning night. The moon was bright, a few days past full, and the air was not quite warm, a breeze moved here and there and I walked barefoot, felt the coolness of the dew in the grass and found first one yarrow and then another, and the lamb's ear, carried several pitchers of water to them all. As I tended to them, I thought of Saturday and planting them with my father.

Last fall, when a second crisis forced many issues with my parents, I had pretty well had to abandon my garden. There just wasn't time to tend to it. My father had had to give his garden up when he and my mother sold their house. So both of us had lost something that mattered to us. Winter came. I told my father that when the weather got warmer, if he felt like it I'd be very glad to have him come to my house and help me work in my garden, that I could use the help. Saturday everything aligned perfectly--weather, time, and my father was ready and willing. I picked him, since he no longer drives, and brought him home with me. He asked about tools, so I showed him the two shovels I have. He selected the rounded one with the long handle and noted that the shovel's blade was bent. He said it needed sharpening. I hadn't ever realized that shovels require sharpening. I fetched a file and he sharpened the blade. He asked where I'd like first one and then another of the plants. And he prepared the soil, loosened it, considered depth and width. While he worked, I pulled weeds, rapidly, with a new tool I'd gotten.

My father has lost a lot of weight over the last couple of years. He's lost muscle mass, too. He's not as tall as he once was and he can't hear well. He's also losing memory and knows it. But on Saturday he taught me things I hadn't known and to me, he felt whole and it felt good to work alongside him. We sat together so he could rest a couple of times. He doesn't have the stamina he once did. I told him I'd learned things from him that I hadn't known before. He said he hadn't known them either, until his father taught him. That meant a lot to me. It was like having his father there with the two of us. His father died, was murdered, when my father was 19 so I never had the chance to know his father. Learning from my father some of the things he'd learned from his, it felt like he was there with us, too.

On Sunday morning, I went to church. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to be there but I'd needed to take my daughter, Roxanne, because she had agreed to help with the Easter Egg hunt and I stayed for the service. I'd hoped for a flower communion service. I've grown accustomed to that service over the last 20 years or so, and love it for the beauty that each person brings in the form of flowers, love the symbol of beginnings a flower represents, love that each person takes away a flower brought by someone unknown other. But the new interim minister didn't include a flower communion this year. Instead he talked about the story of Jesus' resurrection, from the book of John. He spoke of the part where Mary Magdalene goes to the tomb and discovers that Jesus' body is gone. And then Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene only she doesn't recognize him, mistakes him for the gardener. The whole sermon was about this idea of Jesus as a gardener, and of the paradise that is here and now.

I often feel as if my life has little variation, little that is likely to be of interest to others, taken up as it is with the concerns of aging parents and raising my children, working. Yesterday I'd had to run errands after work. Drop off film to be developed for Roxanne so she'd have negatives to print from at her photography class later this week. Pick up baby wipes for my mother, write a check to pay the caregiver, visit with my parents. I was hungry and it had not been a good day at work. I bought what is, for me, comfort food--a sandwich from Chik-fil-A, and drove to the parking lot at Target to sit in the quiet of my car and eat, enjoy the brief respite before completing my errands. And as I sat there among the parked cars, the expanse of asphalt, looking at the beautiful blue sky, I noticed a hawk, seemingly suspended in the air, facing my direction, somehow magically stationary. I watched with wonder for maybe ten minutes as that hawk held itself in the sky, facing into the wind, the sun.

I clocked out from work earlier today, to walk
to the Emory post office and get a book of stamps
so I could mail some bills. As I passed by one of the
buildings on the quad a woman emerged, descend-
ing the steps, cell phone glued to her ear. I heard
her say, with fierceness, "choke the SHIT out of
him...". I wandered on, Doppler shift in effect,
whatever she said after that trailing away into
nothingness relative to me.

At the post office I bought the stamps with a
$20 bill. The woman behind the counter
handed me my change, which included a
new $10 bill, and commented cheerfully,
that I was getting one of the new
ten dollar bills. I remarked that I thought it was pretty.
I don't know why our exchange seemed so
pleasant but her smile and our few words
added to my already good mood.

I walked on to the food court, bought some
greens to bring back to work to eat, but took a
longer way back to the Museum, trying to get
in a 15 minute walk before being chained
to my desk for the next few hours. My last
stop was the Old Admin building, to buy
a can of diet decaffeinated coke. I call it
denatured soda, because it is stripped of
all the stuff people usually want--sugar
and caffeine. Two women were eating
their lunches as I walked in. They were
talking. One said, "so how do they
get from [and here she described
briefly some sort of problem] to talking
about breathing?" To which the other
woman replied, "yes, how do they get
from that to breathing? It's all in the
perception."

I'm posting this link to Meanwhile Back at the Ranch, to an article about efforts to save a beautiful tree in Atlanta. Here's the link

http://www.idyllopuspress.com/meanwhile/?p=257

Once, long ago, on Sunday afternoon I had time to work in my garden under blue skies, in golden light, with a breeze for company. In my garden I made a home for two lilies of the tiger sort and one named Atlanta Moonlight. There were rooms enough in my garden for globe amaranth and the irresistable-to-butterflies pentas; for elegant yarrow and three artemesias which took up lodgings among my canna lilies. I looked for a good place for the brown eyed susans and when I found it, I pushed my shovel into the mulch, turned it aside, discovered a cache of small, white eggs, maybe as many as fifteen of them.

The eggs were small, no more than a half inch each. I reached for one and expected its shell to be hard the way a bird's egg would be. Instead I was surprised to find it felt soft and cool and tender. I worked quickly to move the scattered eggs back together and covered them once more with mulch, though not as well, no doubt, as their momma had. Having discovered the hidden nest, I looked for a new home for the brown eyed susans, one that wouldn't disrupt the nursery---of what, I wondered? Snake? I'd seen one the day before. It knotted up when I pulled a clump of weeds away, looked disgruntled before untying itself and slithering away. So I looked for a new home for the susans, pressed the the blade of the shovel in, turned the mulch and found a second clutch of eggs, this one comprised of only five or six. I was marveling at this second find when a skink emerged from the mulch and scurried away. They were skink eggs.

I did eventually find a suitable home for the susans, not far from the skink nest.

I turned to look at my garden beginning to take shape just in time to notice the moon, large but not full against a late-afternoon blue sky. The Atlanta moonlight lily was facing it, as if it had beamed the moon into the sky or maybe it was that the lily was gathering moonlight for the approaching night.

A few days ago I started thinking about silkworms and their strict diet of nothing but mulberry leaves, white mulberry, I believe. I thought of the silk threads that are formed by the creatures, the cocoon that becomes the source of silky cloth and I wondered if mulberry leaves have something of that shimmer before they are transformed by the silkworms. I know the whereabouts of a mulberry tree that had recently been littering the walkway with an abundance of fruit. I don't think it's the type of mulberry that becomes silk in the mouths of the silkworm but I was curious and on my way home, took a leaf from a low branch. The green surface did have that sheen that catches the light as well as ridges and rows and undulations different from other leaves.

And then, just a short while ago that could have been some long past evening of a journey, I saw the moon again, in a gauze-y cocoon and sandwiched between layers of clouds, top and bottom. I arrived home from my travels just in time for the barred owl to fly darkly, mysteriously, and land on the wires of the phone lines at the edge of my yard. I wasn't even certain I'd seen it, thought maybe it was only some impression of movement conjured by my own mind. I scrambled up the driveway to watch it from the darkness and through the darkness, could see it silhouetted against a background of gray sky, surrounded by the shaggy outlines of tree shapes that twinkled with the light of fireflies as the mist rose and the fog settled.