Out on the Dance Floor
The Pope has come and gone, with countless people either seeing him for real –including two of my very best friends –or wondering what’s he’s about; we’ve watched the moon get enveloped in a red shadow and then learned that there’s likely water on Mars. Meanwhile, I just keep trying to make sense out of, on the one hand, organized religion and the way different people depict God; and on the other hand, the vast universe and what we actually … Read More
Family, Food, and Flexibility: The New Age
Today we’re going to look closely at two terms with an almost automatic heartwarming quality: FAMILY and FOOD. Ah yes, I know, your whole inner being is already feeling the glow…there’s a big table, smiles and laughter, glasses clinking, sharing of tales, a high chair with a baby banging a spoon or, why not, perhaps a slightly hunched over grandparent sitting near a sullen, for the moment anyway, teenager. Disorganized, perhaps; raucous, sometimes; but generally good, right? Except, remember, this … Read More
Alabama in August? Yup, That’s Right.
“What brought y’all down to Alabama?” the coffee seller on a Montgomery street corner asked, as friendly as she could be. We paused. It wasn’t so easy to explain to a welcoming Southerner that we were a group from New Hampshire travelling through their state to commemorate the murder 50 years ago of a civil rights activist from our state– Jonathan Daniels. But she didn’t flinch and, in fact, said something like, “Oh, that’s SO interesting!” Then she went on … Read More
Swinging Equals Not Gettings Things Done… Ah!
Life can, it seems to me, be divided up roughly into “Getting Things Done in a Linear Fashion,” “Getting Things Done in a Circular Fashion,” “Not Getting Things Done,” “Just Going Back and Forth,” and finally “The Hell With It.” Once in a while, I’m in the first couple of camps. Much of the time, however— sometimes by choice, often not—I’m in the last three. To be more precise, it looks like I’ll be in the “Just Going Back and … Read More
Take Me to the River…or the Stream, or the Pond
Driving back from early evening tennis a few towns over, I saw the sun hanging low over the rolling New Hampshire fields—still glorious, as if darkness weren’t right on its heels. Going to the pond would mean taking a significant detour from my route and then, after parking, hoofing it under the highway and over to the water. I briefly considered doing the sensible thing: heading home for a shower before joining my family for dinner. But that was really … Read More
What the Rockies Have Done For Me Lately
“Look at that…just miles and miles of emptiness!” “But Mom, what we’re seeing is not empty at all…it’s full-up with Nature.” This is, more or less, how a bit of conversation between my older son and me went as we were driving through the vastness of Wyoming last week. Conversations were few in that car, actually, as we all just tried to drink in the dry spaciousness of what we were seeing, mile after mile. Small talk seemed, well, particularly … Read More
Boyz to Men, All Around Us
Each time I dive in again here, I remind myself that my theme is contrasts…things that are next to each other but strikingly different. Life is a lot about merging, but those lines of demarcation are everywhere, too. Take, for example, the fact that we try to appreciate the little treasures that glimmer through our daily lives while not shrinking from the full force of tragedies outside of our own households. Sometimes, of course, it’s the opposite: our own lives … Read More
Landscape Studies: Religious and Homegrown
Did you hear about the recent U.S. Religious Landscape Study? The people at the Pew Research Center have been busy bees, publishing the results of their new survey just as—around our homes— the flowers are blooming, the vegetable plants are taking hold, and of course all the beds need tending. I suppose there are literal little domestic landscapes, and then there are Large Landscapes in the Abstract. In this space, I try not to succumb to the power of metaphors … Read More
A Woodpile is a Thing of Beauty
It’s funny sometimes, isn’t it, how a task that might at first seem like just another chore to complete on a long list of others becomes more than that, takes on a certain depth and fullness, even gives new life? Take wood-stacking, for instance. Our neighbors down the road had what looked to be a wood-stacking party yesterday. A bunch of cars pulled in, and lots of people wearing gloves were moving about purposefully as I drove by in the … Read More
Ah, Marriage: In Any Form, It’s A Mystery
Just when you think, after about 25 years in the marriage pond, you might be getting the hang of it, you realize there might be a whole other way of swimming than the one you learned—the one you’re still learning, actually. That’s kind of how it feels when you have a burgeoning anthropologist in the family who is studying how polygamy has worked, over generations, in peaceful communities on a distant continent. In this country, we’ve been widening our definitions … Read More