Repurposing

There are many things I should be doing, or could be doing, today – many items on my TO DO list. And yet I am drawn to things that need repaired, or fixed, or tidied. I wondered aloud if I am distracted by these things to avoid my lists, or if something about these distractions could be a call to metaphor, a call to spiritual work. With that question, my Inner Critic stopped pestering about the List. Indeed there was a metaphor coming, and so I began.

Months ago, Hubby reported that the zipper on the sleeping bag had broken. I’m not one to toss a perfectly good sleeping bag because the zipper is broken and the fabric torn. The other day, I carefully removed that zipper, and put the sleeping bag back on the table where it had perched for months. Now what?

Well, I could make a Crazy Quilt…. I have loads of fabric, because, after all, I’m not one to toss perfectly good scraps of fabric, or shirts with ink stains. Do I need a Crazy Quilt? No, not really, not any more than I need a broken sleeping bag. But a Crazy Quilt would be a good repurpose. How long would I let this sit, in plain sight, waiting? Should I tackle it and get it out of the way? Or should I tuck it into storage for that elusive Someday.

The thought of a possible metaphor was enticing. Curiosity won. List set aside, I mined my fabric collection, searching my heart for Spirit’s leading. What might this task be telling me? How many things in our lives are kept, tucked away unused, just in case? How many items are forgotten in store rooms and attics, for our children to eventually sort through, toss, and roll their eyes at? Case in point, some of the fabric I have tucked away had been in my mother’s collection, upholstery samples too good to toss.

I think of our churches: old hymnbooks and choir music, old banners never used, leftovers from congregations long gone, rooms unused except to store things, pews that sit empty, treasures kept and forgotten. Is it time to repurpose these things, now before we are old and feeble? Now before no one remembers why certain things were kept at all, like the ancient photos in my father’s photo chest? Can we make a “Crazy Quilt” out of our gathered materials and structures that could be useful to someone, somewhere?

I expect I will soon have a repurposed sleeping bag to give away. Someone out there is cold. Someone out there needs this, and I do not. I doubt it will be a piece of art, but it will be useable. Is it time to rethink and repurpose much about how we do church, in order to make something useful for our community or the world? Or will we just keep storing things.

Jesus told the story about a farmer who said, “I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones, where I can store all my grain and other goods. Then I’ll say to myself, ‘You have stored up enough good things to last for years to come. Live it up! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.’”  But God said to him, “You fool! Tonight you will die. Then who will get what you have stored up?” (Luke 12:18-20, CEV).

The Bible, the Bee, and the Spider

I have been dreaming, after a long dream drought. I reopened the faucet of dreaming first by participating in an online dream workshop series with Robert Moss, and later with a new teacher, Ariella Daly. I’d worked with Robert many times, and am grateful for his new online offerings. In one of our guided dreaming sessions, he invited us to ask for a messenger to tell us about our mission in life. We may, he told us, find a reminder of a messenger who had already visited in the past. In that short drumming journey, I saw a bee emerge from the garden outside my window, as bees do in spring, rising from earthy solitude. It was indeed a reminder of a dream I’d had many years earlier.

Weavers and Weaving

In that dream, of January 12, 2000, I woke inside the dream to put the dog out. The rocking chair was moved, and I bumped into it when I went to turn on the light. The light would not come on. I realized it was dimmed, and moved up the dimmer switch. The light was one globe hanging, and covered by a swarm of bees, and bees flying nearby. A huge spider hung on a web. I didn’t know how I could get past all that to let the dog out. Then I said to myself, “I’m still asleep!” and went back to bed to ask my husband, still inside the dream, to wake me up. Then I woke up “for real”.

Later, when I found Ariella’s workshop series on Dreaming with the Bees, I knew I needed this. My intention was to work with the Bees Around the Light dream, but my first dream during our month as a dreaming hive was about the Spider. I WAS the Spider.

I live within a wealth of symbols. My work, my chosen public path, is ministry. My private spirituality, on the other hand, ranges far and wide, finding the God Essence in everything. And so, I was pondering how to carry all this, the Bible, the Bee and the Spider, in one perfect whole, when I realized that there are seasons and patterns to spirituality. The Bible will always be a thread through the Weave of magic and dream. And the Dream will always weave through my experience of the Christ.

The Weave, the beauty in the Weave, is the pattern. As an artist, my weaving is not the same pattern over and over as might happen in a factory. The Weave is intricate and beautiful, shaped by time and life. I have so many threads, so many colours, so many fiber types. No weaver can use all their threads at once. Sometimes a single colour cotton broadcloth is perfect, but that leaves out the other fibers, the other colours, and other textures. A fabric store with only one colour of cotton broadcloth is not inviting. Threads of Bee and Spider will always weave through my work, as will threads of the Bible. All of this is one. I am rich. I am full. I am safe.

“Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart; for God now accepteth thy works.” Ecclesiastes 9:7, KJV.

[NOTE: I weave words, metaphor, and symbol. My daughter, in the photo above, with her girls, wove the reproduction overshot coverlet you see there. It is on display at Kings Landing. For more information on overshot coverlets, please see Upper Canada Weaving.

When I am 64…

It is MY birthday and I am 64. I take after Daddy, so I am not yet grey. I walked almost 8 km yesterday. (We are celebrating in Alma and Fundy National Park.) I climbed back up the Laverty Falls trail without getting out of breath, while my hubby at 53 had to keep stopping for a rest. Short ones, mind you, because of the black flies. (Three years ago it was me needing the breathers.) So much for marrying a younger man. Even his mother admits I’m the younger one. 😂

Laverty Falls, Fundy National Park

I think of my Mom who only managed 62, living her last years with cancer, and last decades with arthritis. I am so fortunate. 

My goal is to be as healthy and fit as now, when I’m 85, with a few extras like chin-ups on the monkey bars (never ever did these) and splits on the living room floor again. Good to have goals. I go at it slow and steady and surprise myself.

After that, the goal is to continue being happy and well for a long long time. I want to keep dreaming God’s dream of joy for many many years.

Hidden Things

Easter Sunday when I was eight years old, must have been cold and snowy, because I remember I had to wear my boots to church. I remember that very clearly, as well as the mess of feelings Little Me was having that morning.

I am the oldest of six, but that Easter we were only four – three girls – age eight, six, and five – plus our four year old brother. We were excited about Easter eggs, or maybe a chocolate bunny, or a hollow chocolate hen, sitting on a hollow chocolate nest. We woke up early for the hunt.

Daddy came in from the barn, running late, like most Sundays. He smelled of hay, manure and milk. He rushed to wash, don a suit, and comb his fine unruly hair. It was almost church time, but I still had not found my Easter eggs! My little sisters and brother had theirs, but mine were nowhere to be found. Looking back, I don’t know how we knew whose eggs were whose, but I certainly did not have mine.

It was time to go. Daddy was ready. “Put on your boots,” he said.

“No! I want my candy! I can’t find my candy!”

“Put on your boots!”

“NO! I want my candy!”

“ALICE, put – on – your – boots!!!!”

He was getting angry. I was furious! No candy and I had to go to church! I stomped my little feet all the way to the corner where my boots waited, under the hooks piled high with coats. One foot in, and then…. What? Something was in there! Candy!

You would think that I would be overjoyed. Instead, I felt horrid. So sorry for disobeying my Daddy. So sorry for being angry when he was telling me where my candy was, all along. But at the same time, really mad at him for not just saying so. Mad at him for embarrassing me this way. Embarrassed, that I, the oldest, was acting like a baby, on top of the fact that all the little ones had found their candy first.

I was reminded of all this earlier this week. Usually I fall asleep easily, but that night, I was up late, sipping camomile tea, fussing into my journal about uncertainty. It’s a strange world right now. It has been over a year since we had church services. Two Easter mornings have come and gone without choruses of Alleluja. Finally, this Sunday, we are going to open our doors, AND our windows, wear our masks, and sit socially distanced, so we can at last worship together in person, instead of just online. We will NOT be singing.

The decision to open this Sunday was made weeks ago, and here we are, with increased cases of variants, a public exposure at the Post Office, which is just down the street from the church, and a mobile testing unit set up in the mall parking lot. Some of my people will be isolating as they wait for their test results. Others will be more nervous than before, about being at church. And so I was fussing. How many people would come to church now? Would we be safe, with all our safety measures? No one would know until too late.

That night, it wasn’t just Covid on my mind, but climate change, economic change, work change, school change. I don’t know – none of us know – whether tomorrow will be the same as today. I could feel everyone’s anxieties swirling around me, mixed with my own. How do we make a plan for anything, with Covid rules subject to change daily? If any of us have to go into isolation, is there enough food in the house? What about work? Will there be money? What if something breaks? How do we get it fixed? How do we replace things that break or wear out, with shortages in the stores, and the list of shortages growing? Can we learn to make do, to value old chipped dishes, for example, instead of tossing them at the first signs of wear, or the first dash of boredom? What are we losing in all this change? But what, also, are we gaining?

So many questions, so much fussing. No wonder I couldn’t sleep. I had my Bible open beside me to the Book of Sirach. Sirach is not part of the Protestant Bible, so I had never read it. At some point recently, I had heard a beautiful quote from Sirach, and got out my Catholic New Revised Standard Version Bible. That night, I began to read. Sirach 3:22 popped right off the page at me, and landed deep in my heart:
Reflect upon what you have been commanded, for what is hidden is not your concern (NRSV).

I had been fussing about what was hidden, all the things in our imagined future that we know nothing about. We guess and guess. We worry. We fuss. Well, at least I do. Yet here, Sirach is saying that those hidden things are not my concern. What I do need to think about, what I do need to reflect on, is what I have been commanded, what I already know that I am supposed to be doing. We are commanded to love God and to love our neighbour as ourselves, for instance (Mark 12:30-31). Those two commands take in all the rest, Jesus said.

And don’t worry. Don’t worry, Jesus said, about your food or your clothes. Don’t worry, just seek the Sacred, the Holy, the Spirit (Matthew 6:25-32). That, just that, is enough to keep me occupied, Love and Seeking the Sacred. Can I keep my mind on those things? Can I reflect on what I have been commanded? Can I focus on that instead of those things that are hidden, which, Sirach says, are no concern of mine?

Sirach was written about 200 BC, yet here it was, a timely message. I fell asleep meditating on those words, and listening to the sound of the frogs. Frogs don’t have a worry in the world, even though they too are facing climate change and environmental troubles, even extinction. They are smarter than me. They do not fuss about the hidden things. They only lift their voices as they are meant to do, reflecting the commandment of their very Being, night after night, in joyful song.

One of our Frog friends

Tending the Flame 2

This morning, this poem by Allison Rennie, ©Feb 2021, arrived in my inbox. I loved the poem enough to ask her permission to share, which she graciously gave. Thank you, Allison.

Candles that won’t light are the bane of any worship leader, even when the worship is solitary, at home, for online services or private prayer. I’ve written about my necessary careful tending of the Peace candle. Then this morning, my fire would not start. I kept adding paper, kindling, but only achieved smouldering and smoke. Finally, sitting with the stove door open, I managed for it to catch. Only later did I realize the damper had been closed for the night. I’d forgotten to check.

Not enough air. Not enough breath. Not enough Spirit sometimes in our lives, to light the flame of hope or peace or love. Persistence, writes Allison. Staying with it. Let’s not give up on our world. Thanks, Allison!