Illustration credit: Mikael Häggström Have you ever noticed how much the shape of a human spine resembles a dragon, with the head at the base of the spine, and the tail at the neck? I have. I have had reason to. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may be wondering: what happened to it? The Dragon happened to it, in the form of a post-influenza inflammation of either the sacroiliac joint or the L5 S1 disc,... Read more

Note: This guest post was written by David R. Forman, a longtime friend of Peter’s and mine, whose wife Leslie died earlier this year. Like David, as someone who has felt the blessings of a good marriage, I am outraged at the notion of denying the love of any class of people as a “defense” of my own marriage. Like David, I am dismayed that the voters of Maine were unable to see in equality, not an affront to marriage,... Read more

Photo Credit: David Hawgood I was talking to my grown daughter on the phone the other day. I told her that one of the unhappy things about getting older is that loss becomes just part of the scenery of life. I told her that I’d spent years of my life learning not to sweat the small stuff, the losses and frustrations that don’t really matter, only to arrive at a time in my life that’s filled with losses that do... Read more

When Nora, Peter’s grandmother, lived with us, our household was the nucleus of an active local Pagan community. Over time, dementia eroded more and more of Nora’s ability to retain anything she learned about in the present, so she wound up discovering again and again that she was living in a family of Pagans. Over and over, we would have made some reference to our Paganism, and Nora, having forgotten about it for the time being, would ask us to... Read more

To A. This isn’t written for you. You don’t need to take care of me over this one; this is written for myself, and it is how I cope. I love you forever. I remember when I was small, not understanding why the adults around me were so serious. Everyone talked about how hard life was, and I thought that was a sign of how ridiculous adults could be. That says a lot for how good a job the adults... Read more

I have a vivid memory, from a Quaker retreat I attended not so long ago. I remember coming across a friend, sitting quietly in a patch of sunlight, paging through his Bible. The sense of depth and worship that surrounded him was as rich as the silence in a forest, and I envied him his ability to sink so deeply into communion with his God, and to stay there so comfortably and restfully. (I often find that, after any extended... Read more

I stayed home for meeting for worship today. The two acres of woods immediately behind our house have not been woods for very long. They are still in that stage of growth where the trees are mostly of the same age, young trees that are stretching their heads up as high as they can, seeking some light and air, jockeying for position among their fellows in a very close race. Only at the edges of the old field are there... Read more

This is it… the last weekend before I return to full time teaching in a high school English classroom. And, if past years are anything to go by, teaching English will live me feeling wrung out and used up at the end of each day, somewhat resentful at the end of each week that I have such a narrow little window in which to fit the rest of my life. I don’t want it to be like that. That’s not... Read more

So. As previously hinted, I do have more to say about New England Yearly Meeting. However, my ability to say it has been temporarily compromised by two issues: technical difficulties, and finally moving into that new/old house I’ve mentioned here before. Unless my personal life and Peter’s holds interest for you, you might want to skip this one. The technical difficulties I mentioned are entirely the normal thing in this technological age; when we arranged to transfer our current telephone... Read more

This was a sort of a breakthrough year for me at New England Yearly Meeting of Friends (Quakers). I want to write about that, but I feel that, this year, I need to allow NEYM to scoop me. Because it was a breakthrough year for Friends in New England, too; we minuted our clear sense of the right order of same-sex marriages performed among us. It is probably worth mentioning that same-sex marriages have been performed by monthly meetings for... Read more