31

According to the Book of Discipline, a young adult is someone who is "approximately" 18-30 years of age. Which means that I am now, officially, young only in an approximate sense.

I do, however, give thanks for all 31 completed years, and for celebrations yesterday, which included cobbler, cake and a choco taco. (Plus a full moon, good company, and the rest of Weeds, Season 2. I'm hooked on Weeds, which is, I suppose, how a show about a drug is supposed to work. I should be glad it's not named for a more addictive substance. And, since we're never going to have Showtime, I'm attempting to cultivate patience as I wonder what will happen to dear, deep-in-trouble Nancy. It's all clever social commentary. And has that addictive "Little Boxes" song that Pete Seeger used to sing. I would not, however, recommend showing it to small children.)

My folks have been here this week. I just took Mom to the airport, and am working at my transition back to regular life. It's fun to show them my life, but, as one might guess, life is different when they're here. Oh, the impossibility!

My neighbors of the Garden Club have been coming by in search of access to a little piece of ground where they can plant whatever they want; I've been too busy to come out and play. Maybe tonight. Or tomorrow.

word on the street

To Matt, she said:
Yo, your house is phat juiced up.

I take that as approval of our new paint scheme. Rock on.

more beautiful things

i'm just excited because i got to see sinead o'connor sing last night.


and, as grace would have it, it's giving me things to ponder as i read contemplate how to preach Jeremiah again this week.

one thing i love about sinead is her resilient and bold inability to play to audiences. mad props to sinead for dedicating a song to britney spears, speaking up for a mother who's being trashed in the press. "keep your chin up," sinead offered her, along with a rockin song. it feels similar to the line she keeps walking between giving voice to powerful lines from scripture while distancing herself from the churches that use them.

she talked about how she's been talking to lots of christian press folks as she promotes this album. and how they're not all thrilled when she says that god doesn't like war. (she used different langauge for the "not all thrilled" bit, as i remember it.)

amen, sister.

on color and things i find beautiful

I found someone near me who has chickens--17 wonderful, varied chickens in her backyard on the canyon. And, she sells their eggs. They are a beautiful collection of wondrous colors. (As are the chickens themselves. They looked very happy.)

I'm glad to have a local source of well-raised eggs. If you're in the area, and would like to know where to get some, let me know. I'd be happy to connect you!
And, this morning, I'm pondering how long it will be before I change my profile picture. My house doesn't look so much like that any more. It's more colorful now.
I don't know if it's the new color of the house or the growth in the garden, but it seems like many more people are stopping to tell us they like our garden these days. A family came by a few weeks ago, and asked after the too-dry-for-sweet-corn ears of corn then standing in my yard. I shared some corn, and they came back that evening with fresh tamales!

Last night, the littlest member of what shall henceforth be known as the Garden Club (that is, the kids who live next door who are keen on helping in our garden) was helping me pick grape tomatoes so I could take some to book club. After finding five or six in the midst of what's become an overgrown region of sprawling tomatoes, leafy rhubarb, out-of-control strawberry plants and more bermuda grass than I'd like, I was ready to give up. Little D, though, kept going--finding so many they wouldn't all fit in my bowl. With a mischievous 3-year-old smile, he'd lift up his arm and say, "Another one!" There were plenty for snacking in the garden AND for taking to book club.

help with the yardwork

I made friends last week.

Two girls who live next door--one in the front house and one in an apartment in the back, off they alley, came over and knocked on my door.

"We really like your garden. We think you look nice. Will you be our friend?"

So now I have two new friends. One who just started 7th grade, and one beginning 4th. (Plus, her little brother who's about 3.) They want to help in my garden.

Last week, I didn't work outside very much. (At least, not after they'd already come by.) But this past weekend, we planted some things in the back yard: calla lilies from a church friend, and papaya seedlings that grew from seeds from a fruit enjoyed this spring. Oh, and we got to play with the worms that live in the backyard's dirt.

What could be better?

compost is like grace

This morning, Matt decided we should rent a little trailer and take all the junk--like the old window trim that we tore off--that's lying around the house to the landfill. I persuaded him that, as long as we've got a trailer and are going to the landfill, we might as well get some fresh compost for the garden.

We've picked up free compost from the landfill before, but the availability of a trailer opened up a new possibility for us: they could use a big machine to load the compost for us.

Scale is difficult at the landfill. Huge piles of trash. Little bitty people.

Turns out it costs $4 to have them load you up with compost. But it's WAY worth it.

The biggest scooper truck I've seen comes over to help us. (There's probably a better word for this piece of machinery, but "backhoe" is the closest approximation I have and this is WAY bigger than any backhoe I've seen.) The very large man in the very large truck looks at our receipt and starts loading. Just before he dumps the beautiful, smelly compost in, though, he beckons Matt over to his cab. (Well, like, over to 10 feet under his cab.)

"Is this for your garden?"

When Matt nods yes, he backs up, dumps the compost back where it came from, and takes off. Turns out, we get the top shelf compost this time. "Food compost," he called it. The best they have. He came back with his scooper less than half full.

We'd been having this discussion about volume. Our receipt indicated that we could receive 1 cubic yard. I realize that cubic yards are a lot bigger than cubic feet (like, 27 times bigger, by my math), but it didn't seem like a lot. I told this to Matt. He told me a cubic yard is big.

So the nice big man in the nice big truck dumps his partially-filled load of the good stuff in our trailer. Suddenly, it looks bigger.

Now, as darkness falls over City Heights, it looks huge.

Here's the pile that's left in the driveway, after I spread a layer liberally around the garden. (Gardening liberally is a specialty of mine...)
I think we have enough.

Our windows are all open (on account of it being really-hot-for-San-Diego today). It smells like compost around here. Pretty cool that this all comes from our trash...

stuff you probably didn't even want to know about me

Erika tagged me again. Here are my answers to the big questions of life:

Breakfast Items That Are Critical To My Happiness:
Coffee and...
My day just doesn't feel right without starting with a cup of coffee and something else--often peanut butter and jelly on toast. (Now that I've got homemade jam, it's taken up a notch.)

Oh, and it all goes with the morning paper, except on Thursdays, when I'm always running too late to get to the paper.

People I Would Most Like to Share a Table With On a Cruise:
I don't know if it was because it was a Carnival cruise, or what, but the cruise vibe just isn't really me. What I'd really like is to share a table at home, filled with homegrown goodness with Matt and dear friends. And, while we're at it, it'd be cool if I could make those friends live just a few blocks away. ;)

Rudest Thing Said To Me This Week:
Not sure--I try to forget these things.

Rudest Thing Done To Me This Week:
Again, I'm failing in memory. And grateful that I don't live and move in the midst of rudeness. Would the incessant littering that goes on in my fence line, sidewalk and garden count?

Jobs That Have Made Me Go, "Huh?"
It's trash day, and the window's open...so I continue to harbor a mix of emotional reactions to the handful of people who regularly move through our neighborhood, sifting through trash and recycle bins for bottles and cans that are redeemable for deposits. On one hand, I'm grateful that our trash can generate income. It also seems like a miserable way to make money.

Jobs I Have Had That Concerned and/or Confused My Mother:
More than my jobs, relocating at great distances from Nebraska is probably what has most confused my mother. Boston, Niger and California are all pretty far.

Favorite Curse Words That I Can Use In Front of Children Without Too Much Fear of Repercussion:
I've been known to say things "suck."

Curse Word That I Use Most Frequently After Leaving the Children:
Variety is the spice of life.

Most Honest Bumper Sticker I've Ever Seen:
War is not the answer.

Changes I Would Make If Money Were No Object:
Ah, if only money could solve our problems. The ones that it seems money could solve--access to safe drinking water, hunger--I suspect to be much more deeply rooted in our ways of setting world priorities. And in (not) honoring the dignity of all humans and all of creation. If we're going to solve things, it can't just be generating more money; we need to reallocate things.

That said, I'm pretty thrilled that we have the money to repaint our house right now.

Favorite Piece of Technology:
This week, ceiling fans. It's San Diego hot this week.

I'm tagging Marian (so I can see her new blog), Krista and Deb.

friday five: giving credit

I figure, what the heck. It's about time I played another RevGalPals Friday Five. Today, it's about art, which I dig. Here goes:

Name a

1. Book
Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." Especially lately, I've been thinking about food a lot on this spiritual and physical journey of mine. I treasure the way she brings the intricacies of turkey life cycles into crisp, beautiful invitations to live differently in this world.

2. Piece of music
While naming the Indigo Girls is tempting, as they sang me through some critical years of spiritual development, I'm gonna say Sinead O'Connor's "Thank U for Hearing Me." Exquisite. (Bach's "St. John's Passion" gets a shout-out, though, too.)

3. Work of art
Matisse's cutouts. They are so clearly made by human hands, so grand in scale, so vibrant and such a testimony to the possibilities we humans can find to express ourselves, even when we lose physical abilities.

4. Film
Shawshank Redemption, I suppose. It's a good one, anyhow. Nothing soars like that opera music through a prison yard...

5. Unusual engagement with popular culture
"Unusual" is such a tricky category. I listen to country music these days; I especially like to wake up to its honesty and direct way of speaking of things. (Later in the day, I love rich, metaphorical poetry, but there's something to be said for just layin' it out there, especially before coffee. I mean, how do you beat this kind of clarity:
id like to see you out in the moonlight
id like to kiss you way back in the sticks
id like to walk you through a field of wildflowers
and id like to check you for ticks

That have helped/ challenged you on your spiritual journey.

Bonus: Is engagement essential to your Christian faith, how and why?
If engagement means being involved in all the richness of language, visual perception, our hearing, relationships with others, and turkey mating, then my answer is: yes.
All we have are these bodies through which to know God and seek to live in the world as God intends it to be. We're certainly called to engage, for ourselves, for our communities and world, and for God's sake. (Am I allowed to say "godsake" in this?!?)

thresholds

We got a new door to our house yesterday. (The neighbor installed it for us.) I like it a whole lot more than our old door. And, it's one piece of our current round of home improvements, most of which are aimed at tidying up the outside of the house. (That is, improvements like patching the siding under the kitchen window that's been a gaping hole since January.)

It's incredible how much better I feel coming home to a door (and lack of hole) that looks beautiful to me.

And it's not even finished yet.

All this is making me wonder about the importance of thresholds, entrances and boundaries. If it feels this good to walk through a beautiful door, how can I do a better job of opening beautiful doorways into our church?

Wednesdays often make me think these things, because they almost always include communion worship at Vespers. Standing at the communion table speaking words of grace is a little bit like opening a beautiful door.

And, today these doorway thoughts are even stronger for me, as I made a visit to Strength for the Journey. I've always (like, "always" meaning "every year since I've been a real pastor" which is, in human terms, for six years) been a part of camp, often in what felt like big, responsible leadership roles in this retreat for adults with HIV/AIDS. This year (#7), I got to pass leadership on to two people I look up to in ministry. And, today, they let me come for a visit. (Ostensibly, I was there to share our portable labyrinth as a workshop option.)

Today felt a bit like poking my head in the doorway to check on things. And, I was delighted to find that the magic of camp, with all it's grace-filled possibilities, is most definitely still happening. In beautiful ways.

And the horrible part of me that was mildly disappointed to see that things go fine without me was also delighted to be warmly received. I love the community that happens at Strength for the Journey.

And, I love it when "church" opens its doors wide enough to make space for people living with HIV/AIDS--gay and straight, male and female, young and old, sick and healthy, Anglo, Hispanic, African-American, at all places in their lives of faith (or lives without faith). If only it were all the time and not just for a week, up in the mountains.

'Til then, I'll try to enjoy my new, wooden door. And keep it open as much as possible. Celia, my neighbor who taught me that "elotes" means "corn" like corn-on-the-cob, is extravagant in saying hello, and I'm starting to feel more like I know my neighbors.

I've had two fabulous visitors last week and this--friends from college. Getting to offer a little bit of hospitality to people I love is cool. Plus, it's like making time-travel doorways that span 10 years. So, thanks for visiting, David and Z! What fun it is to open my door to you.

eating some very local food

Yesterday and today, I've been enjoying fruit from the yard. Marian came over, and we ate figs, with goat cheese. (Don't worry: I don't have goats in the yard. I got that at the store.) Delicious. I'm liking learning to eat figs well.

We made 'em into a little pizza, too. A splendid combination of savory and sweet. The rosemary from the yard set it off perfectly.

(We made a tomato and basil pizza, too, but didn't take a picture. It was good, but nothin' like figs and goat cheese. Marian told me: "They can't all be figs and goat cheese." I should just be delighted that it was fresh and tasty.)
Tonight, I had my first corn from the garden. My favorite summertime meal: a blt and fresh corn. Good stuff.

garden perspective

Today, I've enjoyed looking at how things have grown 'round here. The bananas in the backyard seem CRAZY big. (At least, crazy bigGER than they were...I'm hoping they keep growing taller, so they don't hit my in the face when I walk by.)

Here's the backyard when we planted it.Here's that same little banana plant today. (The fig tree and kiwifruit are a lot bigger, too!)
(Excuse the window, leaning against the fence, that's waiting to be installed in the house...)

And here are our vegetables. That's a six-foot fence the corn is towering over. The first pumpkin looks about ready to pick.
And, my little delight for the day is how well the stephanotis is doing. It's just growing away in the backyard, filling the area with smelly delight.

i heart tomatoes

for breakfast, lunch and dinner
in salsa, soup, salad and sauce
tomatoes, tomatoes, tomatoes!Not that you asked for it, I thought I'd share my tomato joy. It's joyous enough that I've been able to share with neighbors and friends. (I'm hoping that my sharing will prompt the neighbors across the street to want to share their Chinese water fruit with us, so we can try it... See, I have my motives.)

I'm rather enjoying this summer harvest (even if I am a bit disappointed with our zucchini's resistance to growing well, and if my flower bed looks fairly wretched and rather patchy...)

Here's what the vegetable garden looked like before camp, the last time I thought to take a picture when it was light out. The corn has grown considerably since then--this was July 13, I think.
I keep thinking these long summer days will give me time to do more projects around the house, during the week. Alas, so far, this has not been the case. By the time I get home from the church, I'm ready to just sit on the couch. I try to convince myself that, because I don't have a television to turn on, it's not that bad. But I spend a lot of time living vicariously through other more-active people's instructions for how to make cool crafts and revolutionary gardens.

Oh, and searching for the ideal colors for the exterior of our house.

If you lived in a neighborhood where you could--really--paint your house ANY color and it woudn't look out of place, what color would you paint a cute, little (and did I mention "little"?) wood-sided house built in the 1920's?

figgy

It's been a while since I've posted, so I thought I'd share a tasty piece of today's joy. My first fig.



It comes after another break-in at the house. So, I'm praying that it's a signal of Micah's good promise for us (and all creation) about the time when we'll all have vines and fig trees and no one will make us afraid.

And, it comes after Jr High Camp, which was most excellent. I'm glad I get to hang out with junior high age people sometimes. It's good for me. As are the fabulous adults who work with them.

fresh mountain air

We're just back from a little vacation to the mountains--a backpacking adventure in the Sierras, a bit of lounging and a day's work in Julian on our house-building project.I love high mountain meadows.

It feels so good to have time out and away. Reminds me of the goodness of Sabbath rest. And, it reminds me that too often I use my time "off" to work on projects, or at least scheme on them. Having, like, five days in a row when I didn't think about projects and schemes and dreams felt really good. I can only hope that God was doing all that good stuff inside and with me that'll make my work more than work, and more than I could be if I did things on my own.

Today, though, I woke up exhausted, fretting about all the things that need to be done today (and tomorrow, before Jr High Camp and another week away from the office...). Sigh.

Unable to resist a game of tag with my friend Erika, here are my answers to questions you didn't know you wanted to ask:

Four Jobs I've Had
-My first job was as a weaver for a friend of my mom's--first in her basement making denim rag rugs and handbags made out of denim rag rugs, and later at a living history museum in Nebraska where I got to live out my Little House on the Prairie fantasies.
-For a year, I was the accompanist for a children's choir at my church (back in the day)
-I worked as a summer camp counselor at Nerd Camp (they didn't really call it that) at Duke U
-Pastor (which is my present gig) at a United Methodist Church in San Diego

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over
-Rubin and Ed (I know. You haven't seen it. It still makes me laugh, but I hope you won't decide if I'm cool or not by your opinion of it, should you ever find an old VHS copy and decide to watch it. It came at a formative time in my life...and I cannot resist saying many of the lines along with the movie)
-Moulin Rouge (with singing-along)
-Microcosmos
-Goonies

Four Places I've Lived
North Platte, Nebraska
Niamey, Niger
Boston
San Diego

Four Places I've Vacationed
Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado
the Big Island of Hawaii
Zion National Park in Utah
Palm Springs, CA

Four of my favorite dishes
Enchiladas Verdes (one shitake and one cheese) from Rancho's in San Diego
Bean and Cheese Burritos from any drive-thru in San Diego (a staple of my diet)
Apricot Salmon (a new dish in my attempt to eat locally-ish)
any good lasagna

Four Sites I Visit Daily
Common Dreams
MySpace
Urban Dictionary (I love dictionaries of all sorts!)
Erika's blog

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now
-in bed (with the laundry done. Is that too much to ask? Man, that sounds old and boring.)
-in the mountains (any mountains will do), preferably in a comfy lounge chair from which I can see the big moon and the stars
-on the beach, listening to the waves (again, with comfy chair)
-in a better-stretched-out position on this very couch where I presently sit

Four people I'm tagging:

Marian
Vanessa (it's dangerous to tell me you read this thing)
my mom
Sharron
(if I knew anyone else out there, other than my brother whose blog isn't given to such games, i'd tag them, too. ;))

Sunday garden tour

I didn't have as much time to spend in my garden as I'd have liked today, but I did stop to enjoy it, just before sundown. Wanna come on a tour?
I picked the first tomatoes today--"Juliet" grape tomatoes. They were tasty. My challenge for the day was figuring out what to do with the rowdy Brandwine tomato that has outgrown its stake and made it fall over. Tonight, it's strung up with twine, tied to the fences. A little sketchy, but mmmmm, those tomatoes are gonna taste good!

And, as you can see, the corn is more-than-knee high, and it's only the first of July, so things are looking good. The chard won't stop growing. The squash and pumpkin are flowering and making fruits...

My surprise is the pot of calla lilies you can see way over on the left (just an edge in the top picture)--Matt planted the bulbs back before Iraq, when we were in the condo. The whole pot looked rather dead, but I decided it might be worth watering. And, by grace, it's in bloom!

Bonus points to anyone who can identify all the edible things growing here. (I counted 11, but I have some advantages. Like I know what I planted.)
The passionflowers on the fence keep blooming--I was afraid they'd quit by now. I like 'em because they don't like to show their faces in the morning any more that I do. (They're an afternoon-opening flower...)
The sunflowers are growing tall--this one's over six feet, and glorious-looking. I love sunflowers.
And, for kicks, I thought I'd throw a craft project (a little bit o' garden art) into the tour. Here's one of my recycled wine bottle lantern prototypes, hanging in the backyard. It's not glowing, but you can use your imagination...
Now I'm back to dehydrating things for our backpacking adventure...

evan

We went to see Evan Almighty. Good stuff.

I especially liked recasting the story without the whole "destroy-nearly-all-the-world" bits. But I guess that's what the rainbow promise was supposed to be all about.

Favorite bit: the speech where God tells Evan's wife to act on her prayers, as co-creator. (My word, not theirs.)

This God is a kind of "almighty" that I love.

with power comes responsibility

I'm currently reeling from the news that I was elected to lead the delegation of folks from our Annual Conference to General Conference next spring. I'm not entirely sure what this will mean (and I suspect its many meanings will come into being as we go along), but I'm sure that it feels like a daunting task.

In many ways.

But, before I get to the daunting, I ought to say how honored and flattered I feel. Whatever the reasons people felt compelled to vote for me, I feel honored that they would think me worthy of this role. Even those of us clergy who are given to cynicism about the church are likely to want to send good people to make church policy. We all have to live with church policy.

And, I hope my election is a sign of hope for things to come--in younger generations and in training and trusting new leaders. We don't always have a lot of hope when we talk about General Conference and denominational trends and such.

A lot of young people--and, most definitely, my dear friend Erika--advocated and campaigned toward my election. I don't think any of us really believed it possible until we saw the results of the first ballot.

So I'm hoping that being the person with the right to be on the Conference floor, participating in legislative committee and voting and all, will not be as frustrating as watching the Conference floor was 8 years ago. I don't have great confidence in the chances that things will go as I'd like at General Conference. (I'm too insistent that we need to be truly welcoming of gay and lesbian people, for example.) But I'm open to that possibility.

In the meantime, I have lots of prayerful figuring to do--what committee I'd most like to be on, how I'll relate to the others on the delegation and others in other delegations, whether to dress like others expect for delegates or like I'd prefer, how to balance being taken seriously and being a different, new style that the church might well need.

It's a good thing I have 'til April.

and off again

So many things seem blog-worthy, and then I let them slip by...so here I find myself checking last things and packing for my week away in warm ol' Redlands CA for our Annual Conference meeting. Church meetings in smoggy, hot inland CA. And, yet: I look forward to them. I get to room with dear friends, and share time with folks I don't see often enough. So I stayed up a bit longer than I meant to, making a pie to share.

I've been into making and baking lately. Since my dear husband's parents' apricot tree came into fruit, coincidental with the height of my Eat Local resolve, I've been working apricots into every meal, and experimenting in preservation. So, tonight, it was a batch of apricot salsa and an apricot pie that I thought I might be able to bring to offer to our gathering. Turns out that apricots make a pretty mean salsa... (And are good with carrots, salmon, ice cream, pie, bread, and more.)

Since our last batch of kitchen cabinets came to hang in our house, it's been fun putting things where they might *actually belong* in the kitchen. And then getting used to them. (I am amazed how even bizarre locations for cooking supplies, when they become habit, can seem "right." You'd think I'd adjust more quickly to the new locations. Maybe that's a part of my extra motivation for cooking these days--to re-set my habits in reaching for the right cupboard. It occurs to me that there's likely a good metaphor here somewhere, but I'm not quite ready to make reaching for the olive oil into a spiritual practice...)

Preparing for trips always brings me a mix of excitement, anxiety and pressure (to pack the right things and remember the little stuff. Who am I kidding: to remember the big stuff. I'll not forget to Women's Retreat where I forgot to put my suitcase in the car, but remembered the odd supplies for activities...)

In addition, Conference brings added excitement and anxiety: will the church (my church, and the folks I'm closest to in it) find vision and hope in its gathering? Will we make decisions that will be beautiful? We get to do all those rites of passage: ordination, retirement, memorial service. All of which make me wonder what the church will be like when I get to the latter two.

I hope we'll find ways to move forward boldly, hanging onto the good stuff that gives us life.

Certainly, though, we'll get to share apricots.

a farmer

I've been happy for a while now, knowing that I could go outside, touch some plants, and come back in with hands smelling of tomatoes. But now, oh, life is looking good. The fruits are growing.This afternoon, I drew a labyrinth on our driveway. (It was part of a project in which I'm living out my fantasies of being a graphic artist. A little chalk, a little Adobe Photoshop, some uploading, and life is good.)
While I was drawing the labyrinth (and before I played with Photoshop), a woman stopped to talk to me. She's from Somalia, and wanted to know if I lived in *that* house. I do. She told me I was a farmer, with a warm smile.

So, today I'm grateful for sidewalk chalk, labyrinths, my Mac, tomatoes, and neighbors--she says she just lives over on 50th Street.