I only have a minute to tell you this.

I am sitting in Argo Tea in the Loop right now doing some homework and at a table nearby is an odd woman. She seems to be in her mid-forties with a chapped face. She is thin and dressed in clean, normal clothes. She has an odd sense of style but her color palate and clothing choices are up-to-date. She is wearing a brown hat. She is eating a variety of foods out of ziplock bags.

Here's the odd bit. She seems to be spending her time here trying to get the attention of other customers by flashing things in their peripheral vision. The first time I looked up, she was waggling a little stuffed ghost bear that was attached to her finger with a rubber band at me. Another time it was a piece of paper with hand-drawn letters and an illustration that said, "Ghost mob hit." The next time I looked up from my computer, she had the torn-off cover of a book about Mozart held out at arm's length in my direction while she studiously looked elsewhere. Finally, the next time I looked up, I saw that she was holding another sign up to another patron. She held it there for awhile, then put it down and got another sign to show someone else.

I love Chicago.

Wait! Now she’s flossing.

Now she is walking around the store with large sheets of music in her hand, largely flipping through them while standing in the middle of the floor.

I really love Chicago.

A poll

What do you keep the thermostat set at when you're home in the late fall and winter?

What's normal?

Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington

So, I'm doing a 5-minute speech on the Entertainment Consumers Association, a special interest lobbying group for video gamers.

If I start the presentation with a title page that says, "Entertainment Consumers Association: Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington," would you get the joke?

What if I include these pictures?

My Bloody Life

I am almost drowning in the four or five major commitments I've made with my time. The irony is that when I started swimming for exercise again, I regained a sense of buoyancy. I'll get almost everything done. But, ugh. Nothing else. So, to entertain you while I'm dong that, I think I'll post some of the writing I've been doing for school. This paper was for my class on the Youth Gang Problem. I think I was supposed to cite some of the other reading we've been doing but I'm not sure how I would have worked it in there in any sort of authentic way so I just left it out. I have a feeling that my scruples will turn around and bite me in the ass when it comes to grades this time.

I will be honest and say that I tried to skim Reymundo Sanchez’s My Bloody Life in order to earn myself a little more time for other class reading. However, to my dismay, I found that every anecdote, every vignette, every story was essential to the psychological progression of this young man’s complicated experience desperately desiring community but simultaneously regretting his choices. There was not a chapter that I could skip without creating a large hole for myself in the fabric of knowledge that he was trying to weave for me. In writing his story, he does an excellent job of looking back with humility, showing neither the self-aggrandizement of a man still caught in the insecurity of adolescence nor the false humility that is just another symptom of that same insecurity. His simple, straightforward commentary on the reasons for his actions communicated the voice of a man who has accepted himself through examination and repentance. For instance, when he says, “The real impact of our actions was a lack of education within the Puerto Rican community,” (166) he demonstrates his new awareness that his story is not just about him, but about a larger system of people and that all of their actions and consequences are tied up with one another. This is the running theme of the book.

This theme that people’s actions and reactions to each other are inextricable is played out in Reymundo’s ultimate initiation into the Latin Kings. Reymundo joins the Latin Kings gradually and spends the first third of the book describing his life up to that point. He vividly describes the abuse from his mother both physical and relational when she allows the men in her life to disregard him once their own children are born as the main reason for his vulnerability to the brotherhood that gang life offered him. He holds his mother responsible for not protecting him, but admits that her actions stemmed from a society that allowed a 74-year-old man to marry a teenager and that did not provide a means for that young widow’s survival other than to seek refuge in another man. In a parallel scenario, he paints a picture of a society that does not provide a means for Reymundo’s survival except to cower under the bed. As his life continues, he describes continued cowering under the bed through drug use, sex and violence. This trio of behaviors is the only thing he knows to do to feel safe. Since these three behaviors were those most rewarded by the girls who he wanted favor with and the boys he wanted esteem from, being formally initiated into the Latin Kings once the Spanish Lords had rejected him seems inevitable.

Every time Reymundo is sober, he does not like the choices he has made, including his choice to join the gang. He feels scared and like he in incapable of living up to the legend of Lil Loco that he has created for himself. His solution to these insecurities is abuse of alcohol and drugs and the irony is that this solution is what keeps him from getting to an emotional place where he can leave the gang. He does not fear the physical punishment of being violated out. He fears having to live independently in a society that he views as merely a larger version of his abusive mother. Racist, corrupt police and other gangs form the most obvious threats that his gang protects him from. However, he quietly acknowledges that from the very beginning when watching Slim get violated out rather than helped with his drug problem that his own gang brothers are also a threat. His objectification of women shows that he also sees them as threats. If he becomes emotionally close to them, he risks being hurt and having to repeat the scene when he found himself defending his mother’s honor while still bleeding from the electrical welts on his back that she had given him.

There is no safe haven for the emotional emptiness that attacks Reymundo. But until he acknowledges that the external threats are not the largest threats, he stays in the gang, even when he has pursued the life of a coke dealer and lives largely outside of the gangbanging sphere. His turning point comes when he is in the same position as Slim was at Reymundo’s first meeting. He is brought in front of a gang authority figure for discipline for his drug use and snaps, ranting about how the idea of “Amor to all Kings” had become a joke, that the gang culture had changed, that it was now all about money and not brotherhood. Although he cites specific examples of how gang culture had changed, what seems more likely is that Reymundo had changed. As he had been allowed higher and higher up the chain of command, he saw the inner workings of corrupt officials and the white people who sold his Puerto Rican community the guns and drugs that were used to destroy themselves. He saw that most of the gang leaders lived outside the community that they foot soldiers risked their lives for. He saw that his emotional emptiness could not be filled by a corporate machine. The gang culture might have changed some in the six years that Reymundo was involved, but Reymundo changed much more. So it is fitting that when he is finally violated out, the beating is anti-climactic. The beating was never what he feared and since he had faced his fear that life outside the gang would be worse than life inside the gang, he could walk away and resist his urge to avenge Loca’s child’s death.

I hated reading this book. It was well-written with a humility that did not allow me to dismiss it as grandstanding. I had to engage with Reymundo’s suffering and the suffering of all the people in his community. It was awful. More than any of the clinical research that we’ve read for class that show trends, statistics and brief anecdotes, Reymundo’s story arouses sympathy. What are my impressions of gang life? It is more awful than reading Reymundo’s book. The animal terror of being attacked. The sadness of being rejected. The betrayal caused by family, chosen friends and authority figures. The hopelessness of having no skills to leverage a way out. The emptiness that results from having nothing stable to hang on to. And the overwhelming sense of inevitability is worst of all. Other first-hand accounts and interviews that we have looked at are full of bravado and claims that gang life provides a sense of family and security but Reymundo’s story and my own experience with teenagers makes me interpret that bravado as denial.

I know from my perspective of privilege that individual people can be redirected from the path that leads to gang life. But those folks can’t see it from my perspective. All they can see is the system and the system probably seems deliberately designed to keep them on that path. I hope that the system can be changed, for their sake, as well as my own. I agree with Reymundo, our actions and reactions are inextricable entangled with the actions and reactions of the larger community. From my perspective of privilege, I am partly to blame for every kid that lies bleeding in the arms of another kid. I hope that I do not take that responsibility lightly.

Apples

An apple hitting the floor makes a very distinctive noise. I was reminded of this a couple of days ago when I pushed one off the table while searching for something else. When I heard the hollowish and heavy simultaneous thump and squish I said, "Shit."

I heard the noise again last night when a two-year-old named Zev fulfilled every premonition that everyone in the room with the hardwood floor had just as soon as he gripped an apple in each hand and began walking around looking up into faces and noting, "Apple!"

But the fall was greeted with laughter rather than profanity. Menachem had already assured us, "There are more," and, indeed, there was a feast of apples and honey to celebrate the new year.

Shana tovu. It is the Jewish New Year, which will be closely followed by the Day of Atonement. There is no pretense that we magically start fresh with a new year. Atonement must still be made for the wrongs that we've done by turning away from the needs of others and thus turning away from God, who specifically commands that we look directly in each other's eyes and recognize that just as Zev's dropped apple was inevitable, so are our own mistakes. And since everyone in every station of life is bound to succumb to gravity in some form or another, we should not judge people for the bruises they cause.

There are more apples.

If we remember this, we can laugh rather than swear because we are not threatened.

Rosh Hashana is a time for letting go and turning back to God and people. My friend Jacob will be casting the lint from his pocket (or his belly-button, depending on his mood) into Lake Michigan this afternoon to represent the spiritual preparation that he will engage in for the next ten days. All of the accumulated shit of a year that keeps us from atoning for the bruises we cause will have to be cast off. All of the defensiveness and fear of what will happen that keeps us from exposing our true selves to God and each other has to be let go of. Because God will just laugh, knowing that your delighted recognition of what is beautiful in this world - Apple! - offsets the mistake of damaging it.

I attended an emergent Jewish congregation's celebration last night led by a rabbi who has attended up-rooted meetings once or twice. He held his son Zev on his lap as he explained and led the prayers his congregants were chanting and reciting. Zev chomped on one of his two apples contentedly in his father's arms and never even noticed the squishy brown spots.

The couch is not an option

My grandma is 87 years old.

She called my cell phone this morning but the signal was bad, so I had to hang up without speaking to her, find a new location and call her back.

In surprise, she answered the phone, "Rebecca! I was just talking to your dad about you!"

I had asked my father to determine whether it would be better for me to go down on Wednesday or on Thursday next week to see her.

She said, "Well, I told your father that either day was fine but I just remembered that on Wednesday I have Bible study from 10 to 11." She said this like that might be a deal-breaker for me and she just wanted to be respectful of my time.

I laughed and said, "Well, I'd love to go to Bible study with you, Grandma."

"That's what your father said. Otherwise, I have to work at the front desk at church from 9-12 on Thursday. I could cancel because I'm only a volunteer but I think it's a good idea for me to stay as active as possible."

Grandma said that last bit because she was reminding me that although she's getting old, she's doing everything she can to live the life God wants her to live, rather than giving up and letting age overtake her mind. She read in Guideposts magazine that people's brains stay healthy longer if you limit your TV intake (only Gilmore Girls and Matlock)and keep as active as possible. So, even though she misses my Grandpa fiercely and with great sadness and all of her friends and contemporaries are dead or out-of-reach, she gets out of bed every morning and does stuff so that her mind stays healthy.

I love it when my grandma says and does things like this because it shows her total inability to deny that we all get old, lose functioning and die. This straight-forward approach might be the only real characteristic that she and I share. I'm proud to receive that legacy.

Vegetable pizza

When I get my garden (and I'm thinking about big pots on the back porch for next summer), I'm going to grow eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, garlic and onions. Because with eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, garlic and onions I can make my very own vegetable pizza.

What is vegetable pizza? One of the legacies of my childhood meals. We never balked at the vegetables because it was smothered in mozzarella cheese and seasoned with basil and oregano and so actually tasted like pizza.

Last week I made it for the first time in more than 5 years for a date. I bought the veggies at the Farmer's Market and arranged them all pretty for his arrival. I also bought a big bunch of basil and a bunch of oregano and put them in earthenware mugs. I'm surprised I didn't take a picture of the entire tableau I set up.

It's a perfect date meal. Easy to slice the vegetables together, bumping into each other as we move from counter to sink to drawer to retrieve things. Then, pile them into the Romertopf and sit on the back porch in the twilight with a glass of wine and wait.

Tonight is the only night I'll be home for the next two weeks. No exaggeration. So, I thought I'd take advantage of the season and make it again for the leftover lunches.



I had frozen the basil by coating it in olive oil and popping it in the freezer. I dried out the oregano by the heat generated by the pilot light in my oven. (I did briefly forget when pre-heating the oven for brownies bit caught it before it burned.) Since each bunch had been $2, (those little plastic boxes of herbs at the grocery store are $2 each, also) I feel good that I could make it last over the weeks.

And voila! I present you with vegetable pizza amidst a swarm of childhood memories and future plans.

A new song

As has happened before on the rare occasions when two romantic-y men have come into my life at the same time, one has fallen by the wayside and one has hopped into the car with me.

The psychic ghost hunter sparked for a minute but lost interest like so many of them have but tried to keep me in his stable of women that he calls on when necessary. No thank you. I was too clear about what I was looking for in a relationship and after he responded as if he was actually considering a partnership like I offered, I will not tolerate that kind of insult.

However, after over a month of exploratory conversations over dinners and lunch, Mr. Steampunk has shown himself to be funny, intelligent, quirky, handsome, considerate, spiritual and consistently eager for my company. In fact, we've had a slightly giddy conversation about formalizing our intent to see if we could possibly be partners with one another for awhile. I am cautious and a little fearful but have decided to trust the joy and accept the pain if it comes.

The immensity of this step hit me this morning when writing an email. Mr. Steampunk had gone to church with me on Sunday night. It seemed such a natural part of our weekend together but once I reflected on it, I felt a little overwhelmed. I wrote,

Since I have never dated a practicing Christian man, I have just gotten used to the idea that church is something I do by myself. No one has ever been interested. Pagans, secular Christians, Jews, and atheists all simply co-existed with my faith once it became clear that I didn't need to convert them. Even when I was married, my husband went to my church only once on a random afternoon for a concert I was singing in. But then you included me in your Shabbat ceremony and didn't blink before you said yes to church. It is making me re-think this idea that church (or spirituality) is something I do by myself. That's overwhelming. I haven't had to change my base perceptions of life for awhile and although I've been longing for someone to help me do that, I'm less ready for it than I expected to be.

Of course, church hasn't been exactly something that I do myself. I have the other people who go to church with me forming a community of people searching for God with me. But it's not something that I do with a boyfriend.

Still, the last sentence of my email has been repeating itself back to me all day. I'm reading This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation by Alan Lew. My friend Mark loaned it to me as something I "should read" almost a year ago and since the season it describes started lst month, I figured I should actually buckle down and read it. Lew describes the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, in which all of our names are written either in the Book of Life, the Book of Death or the Book of In-between (my vocabulary) and he descrcibes this spiritual event as terrifying since judgement cannot be known.

When I was in junior high, I wanted to be an Egyptologist and read every book in the library on the subject. I learned that judgement of the afterlife required that when one's heart was weighed on a scale, it had to be lighter than a feather or it would be fed immediately to Ammut, who had the head of a crocodile, fore legs of a lion and hind legs of a hippopotamus. How terrifying? How could you know for sure if your physical heart would be transformed by your good life into what had to be just a cloud of mist that would provide no sustenance for the monster?

This anxiety is something that Lew would have us recreate on a yearly basis since he reminds us that we are imperfect and need spiritual motivation to get us off our butts to seek out transformation.

I think he's right.

My sister-in-law's mother died two weeks ago. There was nothing beautiful or exotic about her funeral. She was not yet 60-years-old and her passing came swiftly on the heels of the cancer diagnosis. People grieved. It was over 90 degrees. Not everyone had a seat. The officiants spoke vaguely and in platitudes. It made me wish fervently that the homily was already an aspect of Hindu funereal tradition and is not an influence of Western Christian culture that seemed - for whatever reason - like a good idea to adopt.

The pundit-ji spoke for 20 minutes on how death reminds us that we are alive and should not be feared.

Ugh.

In trying to pull all of this together, I have thought most about getting dressed. Meena told me that it was fun to dress her mother in a sari on the morning of the funeral. I bought a white dress for the occasion and paired it with pearls and heels to respect with my formality the life that her mother had led. Susan's sister-in-law was dressed by her mother and her closest friends in a white dress of her own to celebrate the beginning of her marriage that same weekend. In the beginning of this relationship with Mr. Steampunk, I choose each outfit deliberately to delight him and to communicate a favorable personality.

All of this attiring is preparation and it is good preparation. But it in not enough to keep us from being surprised by death and grief and joy and the ray of sunlight that breaks through into loneliness.

And the surprise is what allows us to skip out of the groove that we're stuck in and play a new song.

Update

I've definitely got thoughts to share with you but life is full to bursting right now.

I was sick. I was out of town at the fantastic wedding. My brother's mother-in-law passed away. I had a very good date while still remaining in the interminable liminal stage.

Lots of emotions.

Lots of thoughts.

And it keeps on coming.

Soon I'll be able to stop and share my progress.

Soon.

Tired and full of trepidation

I'm tired of dating.

I'm tired of holding back my enthusiasm and my needs until I'm sure that he wants both.

I'm tired of being unable to date casually (like this great blog I found) because my heart and my spirit want a partner rather than a companion.

I'm tired of the constant ticker tape of analysis that runs through my head puzzling out if a man is still interested now that he's gotten to know me and whether he's still interesting now that I've gotten to know him. (It's no use asking him: they're always either polite, manipulative or cowards but I don't have enough information about their actions to deduce the answer at this point.)

But I fear that if I stop dating, if I declare a moratorium, I'll be like a grasshopper and wallow too long in the temporary comfort of my single life when I should be an ant, storing up for winter. I fear that when I get back into it, I'll have hit an age where my only options are damaged goods, like the last pumpkins in November.

I'm fear that I'm already that old.

And I fear that by saying these things out loud I am betraying feminism, that I'll get lumped in with those women, with their romance novels and too many pictures of their nieces and nephews in their cubicle.

I'm tired of living up to my own high expectations.

I wish I could want a career instead of a family but I don't. But I can take steps toward a successful, fulfilling career where I can't take any steps toward a husband. I just don't know where he is in order to set off in that direction. So I reluctantly turn north whenever I can toward a career and take the interesting-looking side roads of dating whenever possible.

But there are long stretches of corn fields on these side roads with only a few attractions to break the monotony and I keep telling myself it will get better but I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't be heeding the adage about fool me once, fool me twice.

But it's not all bad. This weekend, I'll be heading up to Wisconsin to a wedding as my friend Susan's date to be the comic relief and to hold a drink that she can take big slugs off of between bridesmaid duties to a bride who will have gigantic hair and a dress like a cupcake. I have chosen the walleye option for my meal at the restaurant with the giant cow statue out front. I've also been asked to watch over the two boston terriers that will act as the flower girl and ring bearer.

Don't worry, I'll take pictures.

Woozy

I think that maybe next week I should wash the blueberries that I buy at the downtown Farmer's Market on Tuesdays before I eat them.

I'm feeling a little light-headed.

I have the best intentions of taking them home.

But the bag is just sitting there!

Remember, Rebecca. Local doesn't equal organic. Who knows what's on those things?

Beholders for Obama

Probably only one or two of you know about the crack that McCain staffer Michael Goldfarb made to rebut some people who speculated about the validity of McCain's war story.

He wrote:

It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.

Now, I'm inclined to doubt that McCain is making up his story. However, I'm less inclined to vote for a man who chooses to surround himself with staffers who lash out on his official blog with weird, almost Freudian, non-sequiturs that just happen to hit me right in the nose. Really, did some nerd pick on you in high school?

So, in response I have spent my Saturday afternoon making my first-ever campaign t-shirt.Pretty cool, right?

I did steal a couple of images, so I'm making my first-ever campaign contribution for amends.

However, I'm so giddy that I'm giving away the extra iron-on that I printed. Just comment below by next Friday, August 29 and you'll be eligible for the prize. Look around the blog and write a short response or tell me a story about your own experiences with D&D and I'll give you a +1 on your dice roll.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral

When I was in the 7th grade, some liberal rag of a magazine showed up in the mail and I read it, which is unsurprising since my eyes can't seem to keep from reading whatever wafer of text are put in from of them. It lauded the society in Amsterdam, where drugs were legal and health care was free and probably discussed baby seals and whales. The latter is probably what drew me in. I remember showing my Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Herrity, this mind-blowing new truth I had found and she said as politely as she could that possibly there were other sides to that story. You've got to respect her sense of restraint.

But another article in that 1988 periodical was about organic farming and how some folks in San Francisco were starting to be able to make a living on smaller plots of land, tending their crops by hand and selling the more expensive produce to restaurants.

And thus was born my ultimate fantasy.

At age 11, I pictured raising my children in a rustic farmhouse with no TV, getting up early in the morning before school to harvest the eggs. With my shiny Prodigy account, I knew that we wouldn't be too remote as long as we had a computer and a phone line. I could live life the way it was meant to be lived: with the middle-man cut out and possessing the ability to feed myself directly, rather than working for money that would then be used to purchase my sustenance.

I had taken a summer school class for gifted kids that taught us the basics of economics by creating a marketplace where we all had something to sell and were given monopoly money to purchase the commodities produced by others. I baked a coffee cake before class every Wednesday so that I could serve it still warm and cinnamon-y. So, this is not revisionist history. I really did understand capitalism enough to fantasize about circumventing it.

And the fantasy has continued to exist fairly consistently for the last 20 years or so.

When I lived on the island, I even volunteered once a week or so with on my friend Rhonda's start up organic farm, plunging my hands into goat poop, feeding the trimmings to the chickens and getting my hands stuck my nettles as I weeded the strawberries. I also learned that the island also has an organic farm camp, where kids come to spend a week doing that exact same stuff. I still have two giant balls of yarn that some kids spun and sold at the farmer's market. Then, I altered the fantasy to having a farm camp where urban kids could come to let down their emotional defenses for a moment while school is out. That combined my two passions, you see.

I'm not sure when I will make this fantasy a reality, but when it doesn't seem exhausting to think about, I'll know it's time. That's how I've known when every other decision was right in my life. When an idea shifts from seeming like an uphill battle to bringing images to my mind's eye of flying down that hill on a bike, I know I'm ready. If I start before then, I only fuck everything up.

Still, I can be brought nearly to tears at the sight of a stray kohlrabi at a farmer's market because I remember Rhonda giving one away as a gift to a customer. She covered the woman's protest by saying, "It's just a kohlrabi; please take it," but I knew it wasn't just a kohlrabi. I knew exactly how much effort had gone into sprouting and cultivating and fertilizing and weeding and harvesting and cleaning that kohlrabi. It was an enormous gift Rhonda was giving this woman.

So, yesterday, when I rounded the corner on my lunch hour and saw a farmer's market in Federal Plaza, I considered carefully before entering.
But August is food month at my church.

It only makes sense. August is when the harvest starts rolling in. Why not spend that time meditating on and talking about the life-giving routine that we practice every day? I mean, if religion can't address the daily routines of life, really, what can?

As a church, we're reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and I have to say that it's blowing my mind in the same way that Irresistible Revolution did. One of my favorite authors writes about her family's attempt to eat only local food for an entire year, growing and preserving much of it herself.

So, I had to go and at least smell the farmer's market. Earlier this summer, I was admiring my friend Emily's tomato plants and had a visceral sense of being three feet tall in my mom's garden again. It made me think of my friend Carrie's daughter Caitlyn coming in from the backyard through the dog door when she was two years old, clutching tomatoes in her chubby fists that she had picked herself. It's moments like those that I want for my someday family.

I actually ended up coming home with a little of the farmer's market.

The problem right now with following in Barbara Kingsolver's footsteps right now is that I rarely cook. Almost every night I am meeting friends for dinner at a restaurant or at their homes. They don't come here because a) I actually don't enjoy cooking very much b) my house is a mess and c) many of them now have children.

But, contrary to popular belief, I can cook. But if I only have a couple of hours of rest in an evening, I'd rather spend it reading a book than shopping and cooking my meal.

But Kingsolver really reinforces the idea that how we spend our money will ultimately determine what the market offers. If traditional farmers can't make a living, the option of better-tasting, more nutritious and carbon footprint-reducing produce won't exist very much longer. Both my 6th grade economics summer school and my University of Chicago graduate degree tell me that.

Plus, I believe that how we spend our money is a spiritual practice and I'm working to transform myself into the kind of person who spends money in proportion to my priorities rather than society's priorities. For instance, I'm trying to get to the point where I spend as much money every month on maintaining the institution of my spiritual community (church) as I do on Netflix.

I want to use the world's currency to express my spiritual beliefs. Those currencies can be my money, my time or even my relationships. I mean, if I don't care about something enough to talk about it with my friends because I'm afraid of their reaction, it must not really be that important to me. I think that I can shape my spiritual identity by committing to act out my beliefs because those commitments create a mold that I can grow into. So, I signed up to have money deducted every month automatically for my church.

And I cooked local green beens for my dinner instead of eating an organic frozen pizza that had been trucked across the country to my local Trader Joe's. I planted the cilantro plant in my window box with my morning glories.I'm saving the eggplant to make a tiny experimental batch of baba ghanoush.

It's a start.

Barbara Kingsolver describes part of the store her family put up for winter:

. . . I took inventory of our pantry. During our industrious summer we'd canned over forty jars of tomatoes, tomato-based sauces, and salsa. We'd also put up many jars of pickles, jams and fruit juice, and another fifty or so quarts of dried vegetables, mostly tomatoes but also soup beans, peppers, okra, squash, root vegetables, and herbs. In pint-sized freezer boxes we'd frozen broccoli, beans, squash, corn, pesto, peas, roasted tomatoes, smoked eggplants, fire-roasted peppers, cherries, peaches, strawberries, and blueberries . . .

Our formerly feisty chickens and turkeys now lay in quiet meditation (legs-up pose) in the chest freezer. Our onions and garlic hung like Rapunzel's braids from the mantel behind the kitchen woodstove. In the mudroom and root cellar we had three bushels of potatoes, another two of winter squash, plus beets, carrots melons and cabbages. A pyramid of blue-green and orange pumpkins was stacked near the back door. One shelf in the pantry held small, alphabetized jars of seeds, saved for starting over - assuming spring found us able-bodied and inclined to do this again.

. . . Right now, looking at all of these jars in the pantry gave me a happy, connected feeling, as if I had roots growing right through the soles of my shoes into the dirt of our farm.

My parents live in the original farmhouse of their neighborhood. At some point, previous owners sold off the land in suburban-sized lots but they left an acre for the house to live on.

A common theme in this blog is my search for community, for a connected feeling. After three years in Illinois, I'm just now starting to feel comfortable with the group of people that is sprouting out around me. They are like the leaves that photosynthesize food for my soul. But I left the community I had on the island partly because I didn't want a community without my family in it. Lately, I've been starting to wonder if I'm not supposed to incorporate my parents' backyard into this fantasy of mine. My personal roots are already planted there. Why not pull in my branches just a little closer so I can really focus on opening blossoms that will ultimately become fruit?

I have a long way to go until I can realize this dream. The longest distance will be actually learning how to garden. I'll rely upon my mom to teach me how to can and preserve things. I have such pleasant memories of standing at her hip, being told not to touch the sterilized jars and being warned not to get under foot lest I get burned or one of the newly sharpened knives "cut my heart out." And Jeffrey's mom has spoken of my mom's canning kettle in rapturous tones that came quite close to breaking the 10th commandment.

The fact that I'm starting to dream like this makes me think I'm getting a little closer to the top of the hill of possibility.

Two summers ago, I bought this painting at the Renegade Craft Faire from Johanna Wright. It's the most expensive piece of art I own (at $125) but the lifestyle it portrays is so exactly the life I want.

I believe that I get to be a citizen in the Kingdom of God whenever I follow her commandment to be connected to the earth and to other people.

Slowly but surely I'm spending more and more time there and I couldn't be happier.

Rock, Paper, Strippers

As you know, my church is trying to find different ways to financially sustain itself as part of our mission to be welcoming to people who were hurt by churches in their past. We're trying to make it easy for them to get back on the path of moving toward God through Jesus by not parroting the fundraising tactics of traditional churches since that so easily makes people defensive.

Also, as part of our mission to engage the artistic community in Chicago, we've let a Second City student troupe use our space to practice and they're donating a show in return.

These two activites of my church are coming together in a fundraising event on Tuesday night. I'd love it if any of you wanted to come. For $25 you get a Second City improv show, alcoholic beverages and fancy restaurant-grade hors devours. (Fair warning, though, because this isn't your grandma's church, we're comfortable with some degree of adult humor.)

If you can't make it but want to support us anyway, we're also taking donations. Either way, it will really help out my church and the new, non-threatening direction we're trying to take spirituality.

More information about the Sketch Comedy Bonanza and the link to buy tickets online is here.

I consider this to be a new kind of tithing since the spiritual practice of it revolves just as much around giving our time and transforming our relationships just as much as it involves our money.

We're still new at this. Want to be part of the experiment?

Coffee?

For the past four months, the lower left-hand side of my jaw has hurt. Sometimes with stabbing pain, sometimes with an ache, sometimes with fluttering waves of flames. Occasionally, I would forget and chew with that side and the surprise of pain would cause me to jump, yelp and involuntarily put a hand up to it.

So, when the fragment finally broke off and the dentist could actually do something, it was actually an improvement to my daily life. Nothing hurts anymore. The metaphor seems a little obvious. Sometimes it takes a big break or disappointment to find a little relief. In this case, I'm experiencing the relief that comes from getting outside validation that I'm pretty cool.

At D&D tonight, the professional psychic and ghost hunter asked if I'd like to get coffee sometime.

It is such a relief to have this additional object lesson that I'm not going to have to chase down every guy that expresses interest and demand, "Are you sure?! Because I'm willing if you think you're sure! Here, let me help you!" Relief that there are some men out there willing to go out on a limb for the chance that an almost total stranger might want to explore how well they might get along.

Totally worth giving up that little rotten guy. . . I mean . . . tooth.