Thoughts on First Day

 The Quaker Meeting that I attend has ventilation problems. That's never a good thing but when viruses gather where people gather, it can be a bit dodgy. So, we crack the windows to make sure the air moves around, even now, in Winter.

We keep our coats on as we sit in silence. This morning, I remembered my childhood Winter Sundays. The pastor of the Catholic Church my family belonged to poured the parish's money into the school. The nave had ceilings that were as high as heaven. The aging, overburdened furnace churned out heat and it sailed immediately to those heights. We never took our coats off unless we were lucky enough to sit right next to the heating vents.

Those memories made my Winter coat feel like a hug as I sat in Meeting. I imagined people long gone putting their arms around my shoulder - Friends who have moved to other states or other parts of the world. I remembered F(f)riends and family whom I will never see again in this lifetime. This morning, they sat with me, as I huddled in my coat.

I remembered teachers and the other students at that parish school. They sat with me in Meeting, too. Worship shared has no boundaries.

If our ventilation problem isn't solved by summer, we may end up meeting under the trees in our shorts. And that will be fine.

Where two or more are gathered in the name of peace, there also will peace be found - even if it comes in a Winter coat.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

The moon over the sunrise. A gift!

 In 2020, I learned that the world is not as safe as I may have thought. The virus, the political arena, the arguments and disagreements, - all added up to make me anxious. I was not alone.

2021 was not a whole lot better, with violence in our capital and the return of mass shootings. (Even shooters stayed home during the pandemic's first year.)

2022 - more of the same. My disillusionment was becoming a world view.

I dropped out of social media. I went to ground. And I told myself that the world was an unsettled, unsettling place.

Over and over again, I warned myself about real and imagined dangers. Over and over again, I congratulated myself on wisely hunkering down, laying low, disengaging.

Now, I am teaching a short "stories-we-tell" workshop to the children of my worship group. What a wake-up call! 

The world is complicated! The world is full of flawed and wonderful people, intriguing living things, beautiful rocks and trees, (awful traffic, annoying noises, too - let's be honest). 

Still, there is light - Light - every morning, even if the skies are gray. If I tell myself that the world is full of danger, I will treat everything and everyone as an enemy. Do I want to live in a world like that? Does that make me happy?  Um, no.

If my conversation is ONLY full of the way people irritate me, or close calls with disaster, or wrongs that I have suffered, YUCK! How can I bear getting up each day?

Somewhere in our suffering, we have to find birdsong, or cloud dances, or funny hats, or smiles.

The Attitude Doctors tell us to find three things to be grateful about each day. Make it easy on yourself. Be grateful for ONE thing! Just one. But be grateful for that one thing several times during the day. Maybe in a day or two, you will notice another thing to be grateful about.

Here are some suggestions:

Hot toast with your favorite spread. Just the smell is a gift.

Birds in puddles - they are seriously silly.

Roofs!

Warm socks.

Air.

The fact that things will change - hopefully for the better.

Can you walk? Be grateful. Can you see? Find interesting things to see.

You can change scary stories to ones of possibilities, tales of comfort, the history of growth.

Time to crawl out of the bunker. You can do it.

(Right now, I am grateful for radiators and tea kettles.)