Some part of me thinks it's now mid-July; Thursday's Juneteenth holiday has fast forwarded that part of my brain. Let me capture a few moments from the past week that I haven't already captured.
--I've made it through two weeks of chaplain training. I am still exhausted by the end of the work day, but happily, my spouse foresaw this development, and he's patient. I am glad that I don't have little children.
--Last night was one of those nights where I couldn't even focus enough to sew or sketch. Happily, I was still able to read. Usually I choose something light, but last night, I turned back to Mark Lynas' Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It. I bought it a month ago, read the part that I read as the LitHub excerpt, and then put it aside, where it got buried under a stack of papers. It is one of the grimmest description of nuclear aftermath as I have ever read, even grimmer than the movie Threads. It was so grim that it was almost not scary. It's not exactly new information--after all, we've known about the possibility of nuclear winter for decades now. But the book spells out in detail what that would mean in a way that I haven't seen before.
--I was happy to turn my attention to Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, nominated for the Booker Prize in the same year as Paul Lynch's "Prophet Song." Maybe I'll spend the summer reading 2023 Booker Prize nominees.
--I spent part of Thursday stocking up on groceries: nuts, flours, beans, some canned goods like tomatoes. I have plenty on hand for lunches and dinners. My breakfast remains the same: oatmeal with nuts and dried cranberries, and I'm well stocked for breakfast too.
--I have bought a few more clothes and an extra pair of Saucony running shoes. Most of my shoes are several years old, and I need more cushioning.
--I am trying to get two sermons ready for tomorrow, since I will be at the hospital on the last Sunday in June. Yesterday I wrote a draft of next week's sermon by hand as I ate my lunch. I'll be interested to see how it stands up as I type and revise today.
--On Wednesday, I wrote most of my Noah's wife (as in Noah and the Flood in Genesis) as hospital chaplain poem, again by hand during lunch. I am pleased with the draft, and here, too, I look forward to seeing how it holds together when I type and revise.
--Here's one stanza of that poem:
She has already witnessed
the end of the world,
the disaster that destroys everything.
She can be a non-anxious
presence to everyone in the hospital.
She has seen worse.
--It is time to get ready to go to the Mills River Farmer's Market. The Saturday before Hurricane Helene, I bought a basket of tomatoes from my favorite farmer, and he said, "Just bring the basket back when you can." After Helene, I couldn't get back to that market, and it might not have even been open. But I'd like to return the basket if I can, and I'm not sure what my Saturdays will look like for the rest of the summer.
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