This is my photographic response to this week’s photo challenge by The Daily Post. I like taking photos, especially for this type of challenge. I find it leads me to see the world differently. And seeing the world differently is something I always find enriching.
Curves from our weekend in New Hampshire.
This is my photographic response to this week’s photo challenge by The Daily Post. I like taking photos, especially for this type of challenge. I find it leads me to see the world differently. And seeing the world differently is something I always find enriching.
This first photo is of a vernal pool.
Vernal pools are bodies of water whose water levels vary greatly throughout the year; some even dry up entirely during the summer months. Being free of fish, vernal pools are ideal spots for frog, salamander, and caddisfly young to mature before they move on to their adult habitats. Fairy shrimp even complete their entire life cycle in these temporary wetlands. This one at Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary in Worcester, Massachusetts, seems to be going fairly strong for mid-June.
And then here we have a damselfly.
If you’ve ever tried to photograph a damselfly, you know why I thought of them for this challenge. I captured this one in Northborough, Massachusetts, before she flew away. The fleeting moment I didn’t get to photograph on this hike was the dragonfly that captured a bug and then landed on my jacket to consume its prey. My “Holy crap, it’s a dragonfly!” scared it away before I could grab my camera, though.
You might also be interested in seeing my take on a very similar subject in last year’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Fleeting Moment.
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
While I was reading Robinson Crusoe, I was also reading aloud to my children Edward Eager’s Seven-Day Magic. The children in Edward Eager’s books always end up interacting with the characters of classic children’s literature. Where I was in Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe was still alone on his island, trying to eke out an existence when the children in Seven-Day Magic took a short trip to the island, too, where they noted that Crusoe was followed about by his man Friday and thereby spoiled a bit of the plot for me. It wasn’t a huge spoiler, though; it turns out, as with so many classic works of literature, I was already fairly familiar with the story even though I’d not read it before.
I know, however, that many people (like my spouse) aren’t so blasé about having plot points revealed to them ahead of time, so I will warn you that I will be making reference to events towards the end of the book with impunity. If you don’t want read Robinson Crusoe spoilers, you might want to stop here, read the book, then come on back and read the rest of my review. Otherwise, carry on.
I didn’t realize that Robinson Crusoe was considered a children’s book, although I remember having a copy of it in the “children’s classics” set my parents put on my bedroom bookshelf and of which I never cared to read more than the titles on the spines. I can see where children might enjoy reading about his adventures and imagining themselves shipwrecked on a deserted island, but I wonder what else they would take from the book because there really is a lot more here.
Central to the story is what’s essentially a religious conversion experience that Crusoe has, and his musings about faith and Providence take up a fair amount of text. I could see myself just skipping over those sections as a child, but as an adult, I found the evolution of his personal faith very interesting. I particularly liked Crusoe’s shift from a “Why me, God?” perspective to one of gratitude that he was spared when all the rest of his shipmates perished.
“I learn’d to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoy’d, rather than what I wanted; and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them; because they see and covet something that He had not given them. All our discontents about what we want appear’d to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”
With some updates to the language and more prudent use of semi-colons, this could come from a 21st-century self-help book.
I also really enjoyed reading about the roll that isolation played in Crusoe’s personal evolution. For example, when Crusoe finds evidence of the presence of cannibals on the far shore of his island, he spends years waiting for their return, first in fear and then in plotting their murders before deciding it’s better to not get involved unless they involved him. Without distractions—even without the ability to write down his thoughts and feelings in the moment—and with, as it were, all the time in the world, Crusoe was forced to sit with personal conflicts and crises of faith without the power to act. Defoe does a very good job of showing how that mental space and that practice of mindfulness and reflection lets Crusoe’s emotions run their course and gradually leads him to a more rational plan of action.
I frequently wonder if, by blogging about books I read or issues I face in my life, I’m making too concrete my thoughts about different issues and diminishing their potential to evolve over time. With status updates and tweets and blog posts, it seems like we’re getting into the habit of broadcasting our thoughts the moment we have them. For me, at least, I wonder if this squelches the process of reflection and doesn’t allow the thoughts to mature. Is it like picking an apple before it’s ripe? Or can the process of sharing these thoughts actually enhance the “ripening” process?
I’ve read reviews in which people complain about the level of detail Defoe goes into about Crusoe’s life on the island, but I actually found those alone-on-the-island parts to be the most interesting. Aside from a riveting account of a wintertime trek through the Pyrenees upon his return to Europe, the “action” parts of the story were somewhat less interesting to me. I guess I prefer the accounts of personal growth to the really plot-driven bits. It seemed almost like, when Crusoe was engaged in action of any kind, his personal growth was on break. For example, there was some rather disturbing treatment of a starving bear near the end of the book, which kind of made me wonder if maybe Crusoe’s personal evolution really was entirely dependent on his being alone. Crusoe himself points out that the bear was going about its own business and would likely have ignored them entirely if Friday hadn’t decided to mess with the creature for their amusement. Of course, this doesn’t seem to stop Crusoe from getting as many laughs from the situation as everyone else. Perhaps spiritual evolution was different back when the Spanish Inquisition was still alive and well.
It wasn’t raining when we left the house.
We turned left up the street, and then I walked over to look at our vegetable garden while my daughter waited on the sidewalk. The Mark Twain tomato plant was upright and its leaves looked perky, so I was hopeful that the central stem had finally mended itself. The plant was smaller than the other three tomato plants, and the stem was bent at a couple of places, but it appeared to be a healthy plant after a lot of worry.
“C’mon, Mom!” called my daughter from the sidewalk. I gave Mark Twain one last smile and walked back through the grass to the sidewalk.
We started up the walk, and I thought about the summer I’d visited Mark Twain’s burial place in Elmira, New York. My college roommate was from Elmira, and the summer after graduation, I’d taken the bus from Ohio to visit her. She’d transferred to a school in Connecticut after our sophomore year, and although our visit was pleasant, our previously close connection had grown threadbare. Our whole visit felt like a goodbye.
As we rounded the curve of our street, I heard rain drops in the leaves overhead.
“It sounds like it’s raining,” I said. “But I don’t see any drops in the puddles. And Daddy said it wasn’t supposed to rain.”
From inside her fleece hood, my daughter looked up at the maple leaves. I kept walking, and she skipped along beside me up the hill. Between two houses there were some vines overhanging the sidewalk.
“Look,” I said, tracing the path of the vine with my finger in the air. “Bittersweet. It’s taken over that whole oak tree.”
“That started from the ground?” she asked, incredulous.
“Yes. See, there are the oak leaves. The bittersweet is just choking the poor tree.” We started on again. “If I could tell where the bittersweet started, I’d just cut that plant and let it die.” I envisioned the green leaves wilting then browning as the oak leaves emerged healthy from among them. Stealth gardening, I thought, and wondered what my neighbors would do if they caught me removing invasive plants from their yards.
“Look, Mom! A squirrel!” She stopped and pointed at the grey squirrel spiraling up the trunk of a tree in the next yard. It leapt from one branch to another. “He’s so agile!” she said. I started back up the sidewalk feeling a chill on my neck. Was that mist? “It looks almost like he’s flying!”
Deft, I thought, thinking of a new word my daughter had encountered in her lessons this week and wondering if it would be correct to use the word “deft” to describe the squirrel and whether it could or not whether I ought to point this out to my daughter, who was still standing watching the squirrel even though I was trying to walk on.
“There’s more bittersweet up here,” I called back to her. As she came alongside me I pointed. “See? There are bushes underneath all that bittersweet, but you can’t even see them anymore.”
“Wow!” she said. It was definitely misting now. My glasses were speckled with water and my neck was feeling uncomfortably chilly, but my daughter didn’t seem to mind.
“That’s a Norway maple,” she said two houses up. “I can tell by the color and shape of the leaves.”
“And if you were to take one of the leaves off, you would see a milky sap at the stem,” I said.
“What? Leaf soft?” Her voice had that edge of frustration it gets whenever she doesn’t immediately understand something.
“No, if you take one of the leaves…off,” I repeated, enunciating more clearly, “you’ll see a milky sap.”
“Oh. Milky sap. Got it.” When we got back to our house, I would have to remember to pull a leaf from one of our Norway maples and show her the sap.
At the top of the cul-de-sac, she stopped again. “Look at the worms, Mommy!” She bent down to try to pick up the pink worm from the wet sidewalk. “It’s really squirming,” she said, but in a moment she cradled it in her palm as she dropped it gently into the grass.
“Oh, look! There’s another one!” As she bent to pick that one up, I surveyed the sidewalk and the adjacent few feet of street. Worms and worms and worms.
“There’s more over here,” I said.
“Where?” she asked, looking up with the worm squirming between her fingers.
“Everywhere,” I said, indicating with my hand a worm-filled three-foot radius around us.
“I don’t want any of these worms to dry out in the sun,” she said.
I looked at the grey sky and felt again the chill of the mist on the back of my neck. I pulled the hood of my fleece up over my ball cap, the one emblazoned with the name of my alma mater.
“I don’t think there’s much risk of that today,” I said.
My daughter, unmoved, continued saving worms.
“They’ve got that band on them,” I said. “What’s the band for again?” My daughter looked up from the worm she was trying to save at the worms I was pointing at.
“It’s called the saddle. It’s for reproduction.” Then, just to make sure I understood she added, “for mating with other worms.”
“Oh, yeah. I thought it was something like that.” Standing over my daughter as she squatted over a worm, I felt my feet in my sneakers and tucked my chilly fingers into my sleeves.
“Come on, little guy,” she said to the worm that was squirming into curls every time she tried to touch it. “This one doesn’t want me to catch it,” she said to me.
“It’s afraid you’re a robin,” I said. She stood up and held out her hand.
“I got more slime than worm,” she said, and as she drew her fingers apart I saw the threads of worm slime trailing from them. Gossamer, I thought, and surprised myself by needing to swallow back a gag. “They make the slime to protect themselves from predators. I need to get a stick or something.” Seeing no sticks immediately she added, “or a thick piece of grass.”
I looked around us. We were up at the newer, McMansion end of our cul-de-sac where the power lines were all underground and the yards were each an expanse of manicured lawn. No trees, so no sticks. I looked at the grass at my feet. There was a yellowed piece of something. I picked it up. It wasn’t as thick as straw, but it was a little stiffer than green grass.
“Here, try this.” I handed the not-straw to my daughter. “I don’t know if it will work…” I began, but she slid it under the worm with no trouble.
At least the worm rescue will go faster now, I thought. Maybe we could still do the rest of our walk. I thought of the brisk walk I’d envisioned this morning when I invited her out with me. I thought of the tightening of my muscles as I climbed the hills and the cool of the air as I breathed it into my lungs. Then I looked again at the expanse of worms around us.
She would save them all. And I would take a walk another day.
This is my photographic response to this week’s photo challenge by The Daily Post. I like taking photos, especially for this type of challenge. I find it leads me to see the world differently. And seeing the world differently is something I always find enriching.
This is a sign left under a basement light switch by the previous owners of our home. I find the whole thing delightful, from the fact that it’s a notecard stuck crookedly onto the faux-wood panelling with a push-pin, to the misspelling, to the underlining of the word “switch.” I’d thought of penning my own replacement sign, but I would miss this one too much.
At my church, we’re in the process of developing a congregational covenant. It’s taken me a long time to figure out what exactly a congregational covenant is, but after reading Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language by Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar, the meaning of “covenant” in this context became clear.
The book (and, I think, the concept) is geared specifically towards Unitarian Universalists, but I think a lot of the themes apply to other liberal religious traditions, too.
Today at church I gave a short (five-minute) talk about covenant based in large part on the new understanding I got from Nieuwejaar’s book. (Today’s service was also our annual Flower Communion, which is one of my favorite services. One day I’ll have to write about that tradition.)
In writing this short sharing, it occurred to me that the mutual promises that are covenants don’t just exist in religious traditions. We make mutual promises all the time in our daily life. In a marriage or a parent-child relationship, in our workplaces, even driving down the highway, we make promises to one another to establish trust. We promise to respect one another, to treat one another fairly, to act in at least a somewhat considerate manner. These are voluntary promises; they’re not enforced (except for traffic laws), and we don’t have to follow them. Often, despite our best intentions, we don’t follow these promises. But the relationships we’re in depend not on keeping the promises but on the sincere intention to keep those promises.
That’s how I see a covenant since I read Nieuwejaar’s book. It’s a set of voluntary mutual promises meant to establish trust and foster connection.
Below is my five-minute talk, modified to remove identifying details about our congregation. I also left out the announcement about the minister’s discussion group about Fluent in Faith. Otherwise it’s what I presented in our un-air-conditioned meeting house, hands shaking and sweat stains spreading alarmingly beneath my arms. Whether you’re a UU or not, I hope it speaks to you.
Two notes for non-UUs:
1) “Signing the book” is how one becomes a member of a Unitarian Universalist congregation, and
2) “GA” is short for General Assembly, the Unitarian Universalist Association’s annual meeting (not to be confused with what I refer to as “Annual Meeting,” which is our congregation’s annual meeting).
***************************
When I arrived at the covenant discussion after service in late April, I didn’t really know what a covenant was, much less why our congregation needed one. By the time the meeting was over, I wasn’t much less in the dark about the whole thing than I had been coming in, even though I’d helped write one of the three covenants the meeting produced. I left the meeting with the impression that covenant was something very important to other people, but I didn’t really see why it would be important to me, and I didn’t see how it was different from our mission or our vision statements. With both of those, why did we need a covenant?
Then I read Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar’s Fluent in Faith for the Finding Your Spiritual Path class. In her book, Nieuwejaar addresses many terms that are a little sticky—or sometimes a lot sticky—for Unitarian Universalists—god, faith, sin, atonement…and covenant.
The section on covenant is less than two full pages long, but when I finished reading it, I was blown away by the simplicity of her definition.
“The genius of our faith,” Nieuwejaar writes, “the lifeblood of our faith, is that we honor the bonds of community more than the bonds of intellectual assent. We hold our relationships as more sacred than any system of belief. We make promises to one another about the ways we will be in relationship and the ways in which we will pursue our religious journey together. This is covenant.”
I felt energized by this definition of covenant. I suddenly got it. I thought about the intense amount of joy that I’ve felt as an active part of this congregation in the year since my spouse and I signed the book, and I started thinking about what it is that makes that joy possible for me.
What I came up with is that we already have a covenant—each of us already has a covenant; it’s just an unspoken covenant. Every time we attend service, every time we bring a dish to the Penultimate Potluck, every Covenant Circle or committee meeting or coffee hour we attend, we’re making a promise to the congregation, and the congregation is making a promise back to us. We’re promising to show up, and the congregation is promising to receive us.
The easiest way for me to name these promises is through my experience with the choir. I joined the choir just before Christmas after more than two decades of vacillating about joining a choir. I procrastinated because I was afraid I would sound bad. I was afraid people would say rude things to me, or, perhaps worse than that, that they would say nothing and just silently feel grateful for the weeks I couldn’t sing with them.
Showing up in choir that first week—and really every week—involved a feeling of vulnerability for me…a lot of vulnerability. But I made a promise in my heart to the choir. I would show up. I would make my voice heard. I would listen to the rest of the choir and appreciate the blending of our voices.
And in turn, they made an unspoken promise to me. They promised to listen to my voice, to make their voices heard, and to appreciate what we all create bringing our individual voices together.
When I let myself feel vulnerable, when I let myself trust in those unspoken promises, when I stand side-by-side with my fellow choir members and feel that connection, feel that vibration in my chest when our voices come together—oh, man. It’s worth every ounce of fear.
The choir turned out to be a sanctuary (another term addressed in Fluent in Faith) for me: a safe place to feel vulnerable, a safe place to let my voice be heard.
This is pretty much how I feel with everything I do at this church. I make a promise to give voice to the truth in my heart, and to listen to the truths in others’ hearts, and I feel the promise that this congregation—that you all—make to me: to hear that voice in my heart, to walk side-by-side with me as we search for truth and meaning.
Through these promises we make as individuals and as a congregation, we’re able to bring out the beauty in each of us. We’re able to blend the voices of our hearts into something even bigger and more beautiful, stronger and more powerful, and offer that to the world.
Each of us makes promises to this congregation and each of us receives promises from the congregation in return. Adopting a covenant for this congregation is simply putting these mutual promises into words.
As we consider the covenants that have been put forth, as we go into the Annual Meeting, as we head to GA, I invite each of you to think about those unspoken promises, and what words reflect those promises. Those mutual promises are our covenant.
I’ll close my comments with a few words from Rev. Victoria Safford, who has an article about congregational covenant in the issue of UU World that fortuitously showed up in my mailbox this week:
“We will walk together with you, child; we will walk together with you, friend; we will walk together with each other towards the lives we mean to lead, toward the world we mean to have a hand in shaping, the world of compassion, equity, freedom, joy, and gratitude. Covenant is the work of intimate justice.”
The first day of each month, I’m posting a summary of what I read the previous month and what I plan to read in the coming month. I would love if this could become a conversation in the comments about what’s on your reading list, too!
May was another light reading month (light in quantity, not in quality). And I did something I rarely do: I took a book off of my currently-reading list. I decided to stop torturing myself by keeping Fanny Stevenson: A Romance of Destiny hanging over my head and move it to my “stopped-reading” list.
Because the person who loaned it to me said I could keep it and because I’d planned on donating it to the church book sale but missed the deadline, I still have it. I’ve not decided yet whether to keep it and try again or to pass it along. After I Write Like said I write like (among others) Robert Louis Stevenson, I thought maybe I should give the biography of his wife a better try, but now I’m not so sure that’s a compelling enough reason to keep me reading.
At any rate, enough about what I didn’t finish reading this month and on to what I did…
Grown-ups’ Books:
The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown (self-help/memoir based on Brown’s research into vulnerability, shame, and “whole-hearted living”)
Fluent in Faith by Jeanne Harrison Nieuwejaar (directed towards Unitarian Universalists in particular, this book is about reclaiming the terms that make members of liberal religious traditions squirm in their sustainably-harvested pews—words like sin, atonement, grace, god/God, covenant. I’ve long been interested in making these very powerful and descriptive terms my own, and Nieuwejaar offers a succinct start towards doing so.)
These books were both fine, but I like Fluent in Faith much better than The Gifts of Imperfection. Fluent in Faith, which I read for my Finding Your Spiritual Path class, was actually somewhat epiphanic for me. I’ll be speaking about it in our church service this Sunday (mouth parched and hands shaking, I’m sure), and I’m debating whether to just post those remarks as a blog post about the book. If I do, I’ll link to it here.
Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager (last of the Tales of Magic series, this one follows a new group of children as they make wishes upon an enchanted library book. My library-loving kids were totally into this concept.)
My kids and I are sad this series is over. Now we need to find something else to fill the void. It was going to be Harry Potter, but my husband took over reading that series to the kids. I’m sure I could read it to them, too, but I don’t want to be a copycat. We’ll find something else.
Currently Reading/To-Read for June
I’ve signed up to participate in Délaissé’s 18th-Century English Literature Event for June. For that, I’m working on Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, which I hope to finish during the first week of June so I can move onto David Hume’s The History of England, Volume V. If by some miracle I finish both of these before June 30, I’ll go for Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which I was supposed to have read in college, but which I can’t really remember. If you’d like to participate in the reading challenge, you can do so on Goodreads or at the link to Délaissé above.
Since I’ve been missing “fun” fiction, I’m also working some of that in for June. A Game of Thrones arrived for me at the library this week, and I’m going to jump into that soon. I’m going to try to finish good old Robinson Crusoe before cracking A Game of Thrones, but I’m not sure I have that much willpower. After watching episode 1 of the HBO series and being irritated and disgusted by the misogyny and graphic (and gratuitous) violence, I vowed not to read the books. But then I made the mistake of giving the HBO series another chance, and now I find myself wanting to read the books before watching Season Two. This makes my Cavalcade of Classics goal more difficult to attain, but hey…it’s my goal, right? And really, if writers of classics wanted me to read their books more quickly, they ought to have made them better page-turners.
And while I’m complaining about classics, why is it that it never seemed to occur to Robinson Crusoe that he might have gotten food poisoning from that tortoise he ate. I mean, every time he ate more of it, he had another attack of “ague.” Sure, maybe he had malaria, but it seems odd that the thought that it was something he ate never crossed his mind. I’m always positive any ailment I have is caused by my diet. I suppose that would be a different survival story, though. Instead of innovating a new way to sharpen his tools, he would have developed tighter food safety guidelines.
On the kid-books front, my kids and I read one story from Tales of Ancient Egypt by Roger Lancelyn Green today, and I think we’ll work our way through those myths and legends next. My daughter says she wants to read The Histories by Herodotus after this. That one’s on my Cavalcade of Classics list, but I’d not thought of making it a read-aloud. I’ll have to mull that over.
What have you enjoyed reading in the past month? What’s on your to-read list for June? If you blog your answer, please post a link in the comments (and/or link back to this post, if you’re so inclined).
Seven-Day Magic by Edward Eager
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I just finished reading the last chapter of this book to my kids at lunch today, and I feel a little bit sad that we’re done with the series.
I enjoyed the series so much, I keep looking for more biographical information about Edward Eager (the fact that he was an Ohioan is especially intriguing to me; I kind of collect Ohioans), but there’s just not much information out there about him.
At any rate, my children and I loved this book. I think I liked The Time Garden a little better, but the chapter in this one where Grannie got her wish almost edged out all of the other books in the series. The kids and I read that while curled up together on my bed, and the story of Grannie’s courtship (and the fact that that’s the moment she chose to revisit) brought tears to my eyes. The other chapters were somewhat less poignant, but they all dealt a great deal with cooperation, personal sacrifice, and the challenges of friendship (and family relationships), which are subjects I like to discuss with my kids.
Before we read this series, my daughter only wanted non-magical stories. She liked talking animals (Wilbur and Charlotte, Babe and Fly) and gave special dispensation to the Magic Tree House books because they dealt with history, but she mostly claimed magic was too unrealistic. Eager’s books helped her start to enjoy the process of suspending her disbelief and just immersing herself in the story. We’ve since read Edith Nesbit’s The Complete Book of Dragons, and she’s now working her way through the Harry Potter series. It’s quite a big change for a girl who six months ago turned her nose up at any book that remotely smelled of magic.
This is my photographic response to this week’s photo challenge by The Daily Post. I like taking photos, especially for this type of challenge. I find it leads me to see the world differently. And seeing the world differently is something I always find enriching.
Now that I think about it, my new blog header—and the original one, too, for that matter—is kind of an “in the background” photo. Must be something I like to do with my photos.
My three-year-old was busy at his play kitchen with a skillet and some wooden fruit.
“Mommy, would you like some tasty chicks?” he called.
“Chicks or chips?” I asked.
“Chicks,” he replied.
“Chicks like…baby birds?” I asked, incredulous.
“Yes,” he answered. “Mourning dove chicks. You should taste them. They’re very tasty.”
“Thank you, but I’m not big into eating mourning dove chicks,” I said.
“But I cooked them very well,” he insisted. And then, to sweeten the deal: “They’re on gluten-free buns.”
Well, since he put it that way…
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