Cottage Recovery

We have camp counselors arriving today to run our Vacation Bible School.  This year, as in past years, some of them will stay in our cottage.

This year, the getting ready for them has been a bit easier than last year, when we discovered that the AC had stopped working, and mold had overtaken the walls--AGAIN.  This year, my spouse did some heavy lifting, and now we have space for them.  It's still a cottage full of boxes, but the boxes line the walls.  They can get to the bed and there's space for some chairs and tables.  The kitchen and bathroom will be clean.  It's comfortable in a very rustic way.

We did some testing of the hot water.  My spouse was convinced that hot water wasn't getting to the cottage, but it is.  We tested having various faucets running, and while the water pressure dips a bit, it's still usable.

It's usable for camp counselors, at least.  I know the type of lodging they'd have at camp, and our cottage is at that level.  Perhaps a bit better, because it has AC and a kitchen.

I continue thinking about ways to use the cottage if we can ever get it to a better shape.  I'm still most intrigued by having a monastic retreat center or space for a writer/artist to work for a week.  We've thought of having a "Sleep in the Studio" kind of promotion.  Come to a place where you won't be distracted by TV or wi-fi or much in the way of noise.

I've thought of a basic package of $1000 a week.  For additional money, more can be added:  a creativity session for those who like to create together, a spiritual direction session, meals delivered, art supplies,  food bought in advance and put in the cottage.

I realize that price might be high for artists who make a living with their work.  But maybe it's a fair price in the world of retreats.  I'm seeing retreat prices of $300+ for a week-end.  Of course, that includes meals.

I've also thought about my church, which is contemplating future directions.  Could we tie into our church?  People stay and make a tax-deductible contribution to the church, which we then bill for our service.

I'm looking for a way to have it all ways:  preserve my homestead exemption, avoid registering with the City of Hollywood, simplifying taxes, making a bit of money.

Let me keep contemplating.

Student Selfies with Caterpillars and Other Notes from a Week

When I think back on this week, what will I remember?  There are two competing events:

The Butterfly Garden

I'll write about this one first, because I have some photos.  I have wanted to do something to beautify the outside area at school since I first realized how many students use the picnic tables and look out onto the concrete wasteland that is the top part of our parking garage:

On Monday, one week after I put out the initial plants, we first spotted the caterpillars in the butterfly garden:

On Tuesday, I realized we'd need more milkweed, the only plants that these caterpillars will eat.  My pastor butterfly gardener expert gave me 3 smaller plants.  From Tuesday to Wednesday, they ate every leaf on the plant.  I made plans to go get more.

I hurried those plans to completion when a student rushed in saying, "Dr. K!  Dr. K!  The caterpillars are escaping.  They're all over the parking lot."

I walked out to see students working to rescue them and put them back on plants.  I went to get them more food.

On the way back, I thought about how I thought this garden had very little success of attracting butterflies, but it would be good to have some green out back.  So far, if we count caterpillars, we've been successful beyond my wildest dreams. 

I've also been happy that others are interested in this adventure.  I had at least one friend who said she didn't think students would care, but it was good that I cared.  However, on Wednesday, students were taking selfies with the caterpillars.  On Friday, we arrived to plants with very few caterpillars.  I had done some research, and I guessed that many of them had crawled away to create a chrysalis.  Sure enough, we found some.

We've been having interesting conversations all week, about the life cycle of butterflies and about what we can and can't do to help the creatures.  I didn't anticipate having conversations about natural selection and survival of the fittest, but we have.

I hope that we have the opportunity to watch at least one of them move from chrysalis to butterfly.  The process seems perilous, but we've counted at least 5 chrysalises that have a good chance.  Maybe we'll even have a different kind of coming out party!


Crown of Sonnets

I wrote a sonnet on Friday; go here to read it.  As I drove to work on Monday, I thought about that sonnet, especially the last line.  I thought about a crown of sonnets.  On Monday, I wrote sonnet #2.

I have continued to write sonnets in the crown, and I just finished sonnet #7.  I'm not sure they'll be of much use later--they are very much tied to the news cycle.  But it's been good practice.  I have never, ever written as many sonnets in one week as I did this past week.

I won't ever think of them as my best work.  But it's been good to feel my brain engaged.

Other

It's been a good week in other ways too:  time with friends, a phone call about candidacy, time in the pool, good meals, and time to read.  Oh yes, and we celebrated Independence Day as a nation.

Tomorrow the camp counselors arrive for our Vacation Bible School week.  Let me think about what still needs to be done in the cottage before they come to town.

Independence Day Report: Culinary Treats and a Chance to Read

I'm not taking today off because it's going to be a fairly quiet day at work, with lots of administrative staff taking vacation time, and I want to be there to support the faculty and students.  So my 4th of July was constrained by the fact that I'm working today--there would be no road trips and no staying up all night to set off fireworks.  Of course, even if I took today off, I wouldn't have been up late to set off fireworks.

Early yesterday, I thought about the variety of ways I could spend the 4th, a day off in the middle of the week.  I went for an early morning walk to the beach.  The sunrises have been amazing these past few days, but I've observed them in the car.  Yesterday's sunrise did not disappoint.

I came home and did some writing and had breakfast:

It looks so healthy, doesn't it?  And it is, in a way, with the berries.  But they're on top of pound cake and drizzled with whipped cream, the real stuff, with full butterfat.  Yummmmm.

I made a quick run to the grocery store and then decided that I wanted to spend some time by the pool reading.  I read a bit of Jill Lapore's amazing book These Truths.  I've been making my way through it slowly.  It's that rare book:  huge, but every page has so much to savor.  It's a great book for Independence Day.  I've made my way to 1939 in this book that I started in October.

In the afternoon we went to see some friends.  We played cards and cooked together.  I thought I might be posting pictures and details of our experiment infusing smoke into our beverages.  We had a plan that involved a handheld smoker and rosemary:

But the handheld smoker has something wrong with it, so eventually, we just burned the sprigs of dried rosemary.

I was much more pleased with the dessert we created.  One of our friends had requested a dessert that said 4th of July.  I immediately thought of the cakes of my youth, decorated to look like a flag.  I was inordinately pleased with our result.  This picture is a bit blurry, but you get the idea:

And so my culinary day ended as it began:  with berries and whipped cream and cake.  But this time, to be different I sprinkled coconut on the cake.

We got home in time to sit in the backyard and watch the fireworks at the beach.  We couldn't see all of them, but Hurricane Irma's destruction of some of the tree canopy means that we can see some of the show from our house.

I finished the day by reading, but this time, I read Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.  Sadly, it seems more relevant now than when I first read it just after it was published.

Now it's time to have a repeat of yesterday's breakfast (only today I'll make it slightly healthier by having yogurt instead of whipped cream) and then off to work:  there are caterpillars to care for and students to feed and instructors to support.

Knitting the Constitution Back Together Again

I am listening to the annual reading of the Declaration of Independence on NPR's Morning Edition. You can listen or read here. It always makes me a bit weepy, but this year, there's a bit more sorrow mixed in with the gratitude weepiness.

I have not always agreed with the government or the president of the U.S., but I've never felt fearful in this way about the future of the country.  What I'm feeling these days is a different fear than I felt in the waning days of the Cold War.  We didn't know it was the waning days, and I spent my young adulthood expecting a nuclear war.

These days, I'm more fearful that it's 1939, and I'm living in Poland or Austria, and I don't want to believe the dark days that are on the way.

It's good to remember that we've been in dark times before.  The period leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 was a dark one, as Thomas Jefferson lists in the document.

The war for independence was another dark period.  I'm guessing that many people got the same sort of sanitized history lessons that I did in school:  scrappy colonies fight against the British Empire, right is on their side, and might doesn't matter.  Most of my history teachers in grades K-12 rarely mentioned the human cost.

Consider the Civil War, another dark time.  People who declare that the nation has never been more divided should go back and read about this time period and the amount of lives lost and shattered in the U.S. Civil War.

Today, we are likely to hear lots of people blustering about the 4th of July celebration in the nation's capitol.  I'm a bit aghast at the cost of the plans, but I used to live in the D.C. area, and there was always something to be upset about.  I remember one year when there was much discussion of the musical groups allowed to play.  I prefer the Beach Boys to Wayne Newton, but there were plenty of crowds that year who turned out to hear Wayne Newton.

A few years later, my dad and I decided to make the trek to the Mall, when my sister and mother were out of town at a Lutheran youth gathering.  I remember hearing Katrina and the Waves; the Beach Boys did play that year, but they were mostly drowned out by fireworks.

I don't have those pictures digitized, but I'll post this much more recent picture of my dad and me:

When I visited my mom and dad in January, we went to the new education center at Yorktown, Virginia--what a great facility.  Most of the displays taught the history of the colonial time period and the Revolutionary War.  They even had some live educators. 

The above picture was part of an educational table that taught us about the different uniforms of soldiers.  I'm dressed the way a colonist soldier would be dressed, in a shirt made out of hemp fibers.  My dad is wearing the coat of a British officer.

I have always been amazed that the rowdy colonists could pull off this defeat of the greatest empire in the world at the time.  I don't think it's only that they were fighting on their home territory that helped them win.  Plenty of people fight to defend their homes and don't win.

My reading of history has always taught me that the unexpected might happen--and yet, it often doesn't.

So this year, as we celebrate the 4th of July with tanks rumbling through the nation's capitol, I'll find comfort in the fact that when there's been fighting needed to protect the ideals that Thomas Jefferson articulated with the Declaration of Independence, citizens and institutions have risen to the task.  Not all of them and not always--but so far, the rights enshrined in the Constitution are standing, at least for U.S. citizens.  While I do think those rights should be extended to all, I understand how others have come to different conclusions.

For all attempts to shred the Constitution, we've been knitting it back together again.  May we continue to do so.

Of Sonnet Crowns, Butterfly Gardens, and Discernment

This has been a tiring week--and it's only Wednesday.  We've had a church house meeting at our house, the last part of week 1 of our Summer quarter at work, and I've got caught up on my grading: no wonder I'm tired.

Let me collect some observations before I lose them:

--On Monday, as I drove to work, I thought about the sonnet I had written on Friday, and this thought flitted through my brain:  I wonder if I could write a crown of sonnets.  I wrote a second sonnet, and then went on to write a third and a fourth.  Yesterday I got a head start on the fifth.

--I've realized that I can rhyme Holocaust with Pentecost. My crown of sonnets may be headed in an unusual direction.  I have yet to use that rhyme, but seeds have been planted.

--Speaking of seeds, the butterfly garden continues to enchant.  On Monday, I realized that one of the bushes had caterpillars.  And then I realized how much of the milkweed bush they had eaten:

--More than once this week, I've thought of the book The Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar.  And more than once, I've wondered if I'm remembering it correctly.

--Yesterday, I got three more plants that my pastor picked up for me.  He said that it can take 2 or more weeks for the milkweed to spring back from the relentless munching.

--The fact that  the bush can survive and come back seems like a good metaphor if I could avoid the potential pitfall of triteness and cliche.

--I put the new plants close to the munched plant and wondered if the caterpillars would find it.  I didn't need to worry.

--Update:  I got to campus, and the caterpillars had stripped the 3 new plants completely overnight.  I went to the nursery to get some more milkweed plants.  I always said I didn't want pets because I couldn't keep house plants alive.  Now I have caterpillar pets AND houseplants.  Wish me luck!

--I've been happily surprised with how interested some of the students are in this butterfly garden project.  They've asked me about the names of plants and about the life cycles of butterflies.  Like me, they've been amazed at the quantity of the caterpillars and their coloring.

--Tuesday night, I had a phone appointment the woman in the Florida-Bahamas Synod of the ELCA who is in charge of candidacy committees.  For those of you in different religious groups who wonder what a candidacy committee is, in the ELCA, a candidacy committee is the way the larger church both vets candidates for ministry and supports them.  It's also a way that the Synod helps those in a period of discernment.

-- I like the phrase, "I'm in a time of discernment." It sounds much better than, "The future confounds me" or "I'm flailing in no particular direction."

--It was a good conversation, although I didn't have an earthshattering epiphany.  I didn't really expect to have an earthshattering epiphany.  While I know many people who have the Saul on the road to Tarsus type of epiphany, I know many more who spend much of their lives wondering if they've heard God at all.

Resistance and Self-Care

Like many people, I am quite concerned about the fact that my nation is holding immigrants in substandard facilities.  As I typed that sentence, I thought about how I had sanitized my language.  We can argue about what to call them, but the facts seem clear:  these facilities weren't designed to hold as many people as they're holding, and they were designed for the single men who used to be the primary people who crossed the border illegally.

I have been most concerned about how we're treating children, but it doesn't sound like anyone is being treated humanely in these facilities. 

I could list lots of suggestions for how I would do it if I was in charge, and you've probably seen them floating around, everything from sending children to stay at a Disney resort or sending them to church camps to having more lawyers so that asylum claims can be processed more efficiently to just sending people back to building an impenetrable wall--and you've probably seen other suggestions that are much more cruel.

I am not in charge, and I've not seen much evidence that the people in charge are interested in any ideas that we may have.  I know that the people on the ground are overwhelmed.  As with many of the policies coming from this administration, I'm not convinced we have an overarching policy so much as reactions to situations.

So I've been doing what I always do in these situations where I can't really do much to change the policy.  I've prayed.  It may not do much good.  But I do believe that God has a much larger vision than our human vision, and I also believe that in a universe set up on principals of free will that God can't act unless we ask.

I have also given money to a Lutheran group that walks with unaccompanied minors through their journey in the U.S.  I like this group, but there are many worthy groups. 

I am also working on not shutting down.  I know that the danger of the times we live in, and the fact that I have some protection from the times we live in, is that I might stop seeing what's happening.  I might stop protesting.  I might shut down my heart.  I might turn a blind eye to what's happening because it's not happening to me.

That process of not shutting down takes many forms.  My creative practices help me stay open to the distress but not immersed in the chaos of the emotions.  Last week, I wrote a poem that led to a sonnet.  And yesterday, I decided to try a crown of sonnets.  I wrote a second poem with this first line, which is the last line of sonnet #1:  Or maybe this time we will hold the evil ones at bay.  Sonnet #2 ends with this couplet:  I leave the modern news cycle for reading a bit more slow / The U.S. Constitution, Bonhoeffer, and Thoreau.

I have written most of sonnet #3 in this cycle.  I haven't figured out the last couplet, but once I do that, I plan to write sonnet #4.  Let's see how long I can do this. 

I am also working on creating beauty that has little to do with acts of resistance.  That seems important too.  Yesterday I realized that one of the butterfly plants has caterpillars on it:

I did some research and realized that we should have monarch butterflies if all goes well.  I have such joy--the joy that comes from observing nature in action, which I don't do that often.  It's also the joy of doing simple research to find out information--I couldn't remember the life cycle of the butterfly, and instead of berating myself, I simply looked it up.  I have that joy since childhood, the joy of figuring something out.

It's become clear to me, as I look at not only the state of politics in the U.S. but also at the larger state of the world, that we're going to need to practice resistance for awhile.  It's important to stay observant and engaged, but it's also important to take care of ourselves for the long haul.  Future generations need us to not burn out or tune out or become too disabled to do the work that must be done.

Candles and Other Creative Endeavors on a Cloudy Week-end

What made us decide to make candles on a Sunday afternoon?  Long term readers of this blog may remember that we have made candles before.  One summer in 2014, we made candles and invited friends over to be part of it.  We've made candles for a Sunday where I lead the creative church service, back when we still had that service.  One time when my sister and nephew came, we made candles together.

We've had our candlemaking supplies packed away a long time, and one year, I thought about taking them to the Create in Me retreat to give to others who might be ready to try making candles.  This year as we tried to carve out room in the cottage for camp counselors to sleep, we came across them.  Yesterday, I dribbled some wax from a candle into the foil from a tealight candle, and my spouse said, "We could just make candles."  It was an overcast but not rainy afternoon, and we decided to do it.  The thought of getting rid of some of the stuff we'd been storing for years was just irresistible.

For awhile, we'd been collecting every jar that came our way, so we had a huge bucket of jars.  I had a vision of using all of our wax and wicks, but my spouse predicted we'd run out of containers.  He was right.  But we had fun trying.

When we first made candles, I had a huge bag of crayons that had gotten melted and distorted enough that we weren't able to use as crayons; in fact, I think we made candles to use up those crayons.  As with many art projects, we ended up with more supplies than we could use.  And then it's hard to get rid of them because we've spent the money and it seems wasteful to just toss them out in the trash.

I love choosing crayons and anticipating the colors.  We have realized that the color won't be as dark as it first appears.  We now have some lovely peach colored candles from almost fluorescent orange crayons.

We also use essential oils.  Years ago when we couldn't find any citronella candles, we decided to make our own.  So most of these candles contain citronella.  I'm not sure it really keeps the mosquitoes away. Through the years we branched out into rosemary and lemongrass. 

We ended up with a table full of candles that we then rushed inside the house to finish cooling when it looked like the rain clouds were finally catching up with us.  I love the way they look:

Now we have to figure out where to store these candles.  Maybe we'll give some away.

It's been a delightful week-end.  There's been time for creativity in addition to the candles.  We had a rainy Saturday, so we watched some cooking shows while making pizza.  We experimented with dehydrated mushrooms from Mepkin Abbey and made a pasta dish.  We transplanted a salvia plant for the butterfly garden that I'm creating at school. 

We did all of this along with getting some difficult work done--a start at reclaiming the cottage.  That process can be so overwhelming.  But we'll get it done, one day at a time, one week-end project at a time.