Lastness

Last night, I had this surreal moment near the end of the Women and the Preaching Life class that I have been taking all semester.  This semester will likely the last semester of in-person classes at Wesley.  I am moving back to North Carolina, to our house in the residential section of Lutheridge, and I'll take classes from a distance.

Last night I tried to slow down and let myself experience the "lastness."  I've been expecting to feel some sort of emotional extreme; I have a reason to feel both sadness and happiness.  But for the most part, I've just felt a steadiness.  After all, I still have a lot to do.

Plus, I've felt this lastness before.  Yesterday I thought back to a day in 1991, when I got out of my last class for Spring term in my PhD.  I went down to the historic part of the campus, the Horseshoe at the University of South Carolina.  I watched undergrads enjoying a warm spring day.  I sat on a bench and thought, "I'll never take a class again."  I thought that with a bit of both sadness and joy.

I still had plenty to do:  a dissertation to write, oral and written Comprehensive Exams to take.  I assumed that I had a bright future, a teaching job at a small, liberal arts school.  Little did I know what was coming my way:  the 1992 recession, which was one of the worst in a few decades, and the slow collapse of higher ed.

I did have a bright future, but it wasn't that particular bright future.

And now, I need to keep working towards my next bright future.  My Luke paper is due tomorrow, and I must get it out of my brain, out of my notes, and actually onto the page.

Gloomy Skies: Goodbye to Gordon Lightfoot

I am listening to "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," which I only usually do "when the skies of November turn gloomy" (to borrow a phrase from the song).  But Gordon Lightfoot has died, and it's a gloomy May day, so the song fits my mood.

Of course, Lightfoot was 84 years old, and from what I can tell from the various news stories, he seemed to have lived a good life.  He wrote amazing songs and had a good run as a performer.  Lots of people will be reflecting on his life and appreciating him today, and plenty of us have been doing this for over 50 years.

His music is the background of my childhood, along with Neil Diamond, Simon and Garfunkle, and John Denver.  Yesterday on my drive back to my seminary apartment, I heard John Denver's live version of "Thank God I'm a Country Boy"--what a great song.

He also wrote songs that other people made more famous, like "Early Morning Rain."  I've been listening to some of those songs this morning.  At some point, when I don't have seminary papers to finish, I might do more reflecting on how this folk music formed my perception of what it would be like to be an adult--not because I listened to it as a child, but because I continued to listen to it in adolescence.

Well, we do have an early morning rain, but today is not a travel day for me.  I need to do my last revisions on my Queer Theology paper which is due at 5 p.m.; when I went to bed last night, I thought it was mostly finished.

And then it's on to my paper for my class on the Gospel of Luke:  looking at the Annunciation as a kind of call story, thinking about different kinds of call stories.  If you're like me, you think that a call means that you're leaving your home, going out with very little, and converting the ones you find along the way.  But what if Jesus has a different call?  One that has to do with hospitality?  

Solidarity Forever! Happy May Day

 Here we are in the merry month of May--how can it already be May?  The first day of May has ancient roots as a celebration of Spring and new growth and the return of warm weather.  More recently, the first day of May has become a celebration of workers.

So let's think about some ways we could make the day special:

--The traditional way would be flowers, traditionally flowers that we would leave on dark porches for people to discover when they woke up.  It's probably too late for that approach, but it's not too late to appreciate flowers.  You could buy some flowers or a flowering plant.  Or, for future enjoyment, you could do what we did:  buy some seed packets, plant them, water them, and see what happens.

--It is probably also too late to weave long ribbons around a Maypole.  But we could braid ribbons or strips of cloth and meditate on the types of joy we'd like to invite into our lives.

--Today is a good day to think about workers, workers of all sorts.  We're having more of a national conversation these days about work, about gender, about who takes care of children and elders while people work, about the locations of work.  I look forward to seeing how it all turns out--I'm holding onto hope for positive change, even as I'm afraid we can never make the improvements that need to be made.

--If we're one of the lucky types of workers, the ones who aren't under threat by bosses or by globalization or by robots, we can support those who aren't as lucky.  Send some money to organizations that work for worker's rights. I'm impressed with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, which works to protect the migrant workers in the fields of Florida, but you certainly have plenty to choose from.

--Can't afford to make a donation? Write letters on behalf of the unemployed, the underemployed, everyone who needs a better job or better working conditions. Write to your representatives to advocate for them. What are you advocating? A higher minimum wage? Safer worksites? Job security? Work-life balance?

--Today, Anglicans, Episcopalians, and Lutherans celebrate the feast day of Philip and James; others will celebrate May 3. These are not the most well-known disciples. Today you could reread the Gospels, a kind of literary Easter egg hunt, to try to find them.

--Can you create something that weaves these strands together? Here are some possibilities: a sculpture made out of ribbons that explores the world of migrant workers. A poem that celebrates flowers and contemplates the ways that we love some blooms (flowers) but not others (algae, cancer). A painting that uses weaving in some ways to think about the past century of efforts to enlarge the workplace and make it safer. A short story that updates the story of Philip--who would he be today?

One Year Anniversaries

Yesterday, I realized we were at the one year anniversary of making an offer on the house that we now own.  I was trying to figure out when my wrist surgery took place last year (May 2), and along the way, I figured out another piece of history.

I didn't blog about the process in real time, in part because I had a broken wrist that made it hard to write.  In larger part, I didn't blog about it because I didn't want anything to happen that might jeopardize the process.  I did write some blog posts after the fact, once we purchased the house in June (here and here).

At the time, a year ago when my spouse was talking to the owner of the house on the phone, I remember being a bit worried about making big decisions in a place of emotional vulnerability.  I remember saying words to the effect of, "I'm happy to have a house at Lutheridge, but right now, I'm focused on my wrist surgery, so I might not be thinking clearly."  My wrist was not the only thing shattered a year ago; my faith in my ability to know my body took a hit too, and I was feeling vulnerable, because if a little tumble could do so much damage, what other catastrophes might be waiting?

Yesterday my spouse and I talked about some of the decisions we've made in the past year.  We felt lucky to get this house at a really good price because it needed work.  We may end up spending almost as much (or more even) on it than we would have spent if we had bought a house that was more move-in-ready.  But oddly, I feel O.K. about that.  We're making good decisions (like putting in a high quality/efficiency HVAC system) that people who wanted to sell a house quickly at top dollar might not have made.  We're making design decisions that work for us.

A year later, I am glad to have this house in more ways than I would have anticipated, and I anticipated being glad to have this house.  I didn't anticipate that seminary housing might become more precarious.  Now I know that there are plans to bulldoze the building that has apartments, including mine.  I don't know exactly when that will happen, but I've felt lucky to have a place to go.  I knew the housing market had been weird, but I didn't realize it would continue to be weird; yesterday I read an article in The New York Times that noted that lots of people want to buy houses, but increasingly, as interest rates rise, many people don't want to sell and lose a lower interest mortgage.  If we had waited to invest the money from the sale of our prior house into another place to live, we might not have been able to find anything.  

I am glad to have a house in an area that's a bit safer from all the destruction that climate change is unleashing; several weeks ago, I looked at pictures of flooding in our old neighborhood and felt a bit of survivor's guilt.  But more, I felt relief.

A year ago, the people who owned this house accepted our offer to buy it.  And I continue to be grateful.

The Ballast of Books

I have turned in the Timeline project for my Church History II class.  It asks us to choose 30of the most important events that happened during the time of our class (1500 to present) and put them on a timeline.  Each of the 30 events gets a 1-3 sentence annotation.  Then we choose the five most important and write a longer piece that explains the importance. 

When I did this assignment for Church History I, I was writing about time periods that I didn’t know much about until I took Church History I. I thought that the timeline would be easier for Church History II because I know a lot more about the time periods covered by this class. It’s been hard in a different way—so much to choose from.

But it's done and turned in.  It feels like the term should be over.  But I still have a final for the class (open book objective along with a separate essay section).  And I have to finish my final project for Queer Theology and a paper for my Luke class.  Once those are done, I've got the final grading for the classes that I'm teaching online.  

And of course, there's the vacating of the seminary apartment.  Like all the rest, it's underway--I'm living in the now and the not yet.  

Yesterday I made the trip from seminary to my North Carolina house. I knew there would be rain, so I left very early.  But there was no way to escape the rain.  For the first several hours of daylight, I drove more slowly than usual, with rain flying up off the road in addition to falling from the sky.  It was grueling.

I had decided that this would be the move that included most of the books, and I was happy to have them in the back of the car as ballast.  I could feel the car wanting to slide off the wet roads; I could feel the books saying, "No, not today.  We're holding steady."

Books as ballast, books as counterweight to the distractions and destructions the world offers, books as stabilizing force--the metaphors abound!

Patterns Made with Detritus

Before moving on to other topics, one last post about silk scarves.  

The main way that we got this variety of patterns was with rubber bands--tie dye, basically:

I had done tie dye many times before.  Long ago, I was part of a department that had a quarterly festival, complete with tie dye.  So I decided to try something else.  I looked down and saw lots of tulip petals, both purple and yellow.  So I put them onto the silk, in a circle, and I ended up with this gorgeous pattern.

I also tried dying another scarf with a leaf, and some detritus from a tree.

But that approach yielded a more subtle pattern.

To be honest, I'm not real sure which scarf goes with which approach.  I also experiment with mixing dyes, so the green in each scarf may come from the vegetative matter or it may come from some dye mixing.  It doesn't really matter, since I was just having fun with the experiment.  I don't need to replicate it.

Silk Scarves and April Breezes

On Thursday of last week, as part of our Chapel Visuals class, we dyed silk scarves in vats of liquids made out of natural materials:  black beans, turmeric, and turmeric with iron water (created by soaking rusty nails in water and vinegar).  I wrote this blog post about it.

We left the silk scarves soaking in the liquid.  My teacher took the vats home, left them soaking until Monday, and then hung them up to dry in her basement studio.  She brought them all to campus yesterday morning, and she strung twine between some of the trees in the courtyard of our seminary campus.

Then we pinned the scarves on the lines.  Our goal was to complete this task before chapel, and we were successful.  

It was the perfect day for this installation:  there was a breeze which kept the scarves fluttering, but it wasn't the kind of breeze that would rip them from the lines or flip them around.

I was intrigued by the ways that the scarves were both so similar and yet so different, even though we had all used similar techniques:  the same choice of dyes, the rubber bands to hold it all together in the vats of dye.

I loved the way they resembled prayer flags as they fluttered in the breeze.  Someone else took this picture of the courtyard from above, from a second floor window:

I am intrigued by how something relatively simple transformed the outdoor space, and the potential to impact the indoor space.  For example, people have this kind of encounter as they approach the chapel--our chapel has only the one way through the courtyard to it (for most of us who don't have keys to the other doors of the building that are kept locked), so people had to walk by the scarves--what would happen if the worship service built on what they encountered on their way to the chapel?

That's not what happened yesterday; we just had a regular chapel service.  But the potential is there, and I want to remember it.

I did something slightly different with the scarves that I dyed, but this blog post is getting a bit long.  Tomorrow I'll write about how I used other botanicals with my scarves to get a different effect.  Today I'll remember the beauty of them as they fluttered in the chilly April breeze.