I just heard an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition with a singer named Jai Uttal. Raised in Brooklyn (if my memory is correct) with a father in the music business who had a particular affection for R&B;, Jai discovered Indian music at the age of 19. Middle aged now, he’s known for a form of musical devotion known as kirtan–sacred chant–but he also performs in concerts with a kind of fusion of Western and Eastern musical forms, and has released... Read more
February 2007 Last week in Quaker meeting, I was thinking about what I would do if I won $100,000,000 in the lottery. Yeah, I know it sounds like wool gathering, but I came up with one real insight. After all the good causes I’d support, like AFSC and battered women’s shelters and St. Gregory’s Abbey and Linden Hill School, and after all the friends for whom I’d set up trust funds, then I got to what I’d want for myself.... Read more
November 2006 Cat pointed out something the other day: While I am the one who often expresses a wish for more social life, she is the one who usually makes it happen. Now there are a couple of reasons for that. One, as she correctly observed, is that she is sometimes a naysayer. She’s very often too tired, too sick, too stressed-out, too busy with grading to go out on the town and enjoy herself, so I’ve learned to let... Read more
October 2006 I was thinking yesterday about the really nifty confluence of magickal symbols I had available. The moon is full, the land here has always felt very alive and aware, the footpath to the campsites goes across a ford in the river, and I’m wearing my sterling silver athame at my belt. (An athame, for my non-Pagan readers, is a knife used as a magickal tool.) I was thinking about how neat it would be to take the athame... Read more
October 2006 OK, it really is kind of freaky to be sitting out in the woods by our tent typing on a laptop. Cat keeps teasing me: “Some people write with paper and pencil.” Yes, I answer, and some people use clay tablets. It was a bit stressful getting here this year, but that was mostly just because we kept expecting some catastrophe, or expecting each other to get really stressed out. I kept trying to outrun the predictions of... Read more
Cat and I write differently; Cat is more of a journalist while I am more of a novelist. This is part of why I haven’t posted anything to the blog since the school year began. But now that I’m into my spring vacation week, I’m finally finding the time to sit down and rework a few journal entries from the past six months into blog entries. Read more
So it occurred to me the other day to describe what I’m trying to do in Quaker Pagan Reflections as “blogging in a spirit of worship.” (I may get around to adding that line to the banner description–Peter says it fits his focus, too.) I’m feeling a bit inadequate lately for how seldom I post to the blog, but I do think that this is a pretty good explanation for why that is. So often I’ll have the seed of... Read more
As always, when I got done with Quaker meeting this morning, I was surprised at how tired I was. I remember Peter, during our courtship, once writing me one of his patented drop-dead-sincerity letters. The emotional honesty and self-reflection were (as usual for him) uncompromising, and when he got to the end of the letter he wrote, “Ugh. 10:30 AM and I’m ready to go back to bed. Emotional honesty is hard work.” Quaker meeting is hard work, too, though... Read more
This has been a wierd, wierd winter here in New England… a kind of winter in name only, rarely dipping below freezing, with no snow or ice anywhere. But just this past week, we finally got a taste of cold–nights down to the single digits, frost and even a dusting of snow. My hands are chapped for the first time this season. Oddly, the cold has given me the first breath of spring. I walked out onto my front porch... Read more
I’m sitting here next to a baubled, gleaming evergreen tree, with a skirt of environmentally-obliviously wrapped gifts swirling around its feet. Neither as a Quaker nor as a Pagan is this supposed to be my holiday, but here I am. And I’m _not_ wrestling with deep philosophy, so much as I am waiting for my daughter to wake up and come downstairs so we can open all the pretty boxes… Neither my desire for Pagan purity nor my Quaker leadings... Read more
Quaker Pagan Reflections
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