Simple Moodlings \'sim-pѳl 'mϋd-ѳl-ings\ n: 1. modest meanderings of the mind about living simply and with less ecological impact; 2. "long, inefficient, happy idling, dawdling and puttering" (Brenda Ueland) of the written kind; 3. spiritual odds and ends inspired by life, scripture, and the thoughts of others
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| Cornelia among the three sisters |
All three contest entrants will receive an I'm-not-yet-sure-what by mail at some point down the road, when the exact right thing crosses my path. It's out there somewhere!
In the meantime, Cornelia has withstood some pretty heavy rain storms and is doing a fine job of protecting the corn tops, though some of them are a bit worse for sparrow wear. Hopefully we'll have some nice full cobs in about a month's time!
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| Today's harvest... |
I really love the music of Brandi Carlile, and I think she's an incredibly cool musician and person besides. If you've never heard her song The Joke, click here and watch the video... it's deeply moving for anyone who has ever felt alone or ostracized, and who among us has never felt that way?
What I appreciate most about Brandi is that she is unapologetically herself, and she sings right from the bottom of her toes, and from her heart, too. Her voice has a bit of a rough edge that gives her songs more strength or subtlety, as needed, or so it seems to me.
I've been meaning to musically appreciate Brandi (and this album in particular) for a while. So this morning when I found a cheeky little article from Sojourners' Magazine about God's Summer Playlist, the time had come.
According to the article, Brandi's song, Stay Gentle, is on God's list of top twelve tunes for this summer (I guess God works in twelves -- you know, twelve tribes of Israel, twelve minor prophets, twelve apostles, etc.). Have a listen, and see if you might like to add Stay Gentle to your own playlist. Its message is something we all need to be reminded of now and then.
Enjoy!
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| Photo by Alfred Schrock on Unsplash |
She picked up a few snacks ("I like them HICKORY STICKS!"), thanked us, and moved on to collect hugs from a couple of Bissell Centre staff members that she obviously recognized, and they her. She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, arms outstretched, just waiting to be embraced, and she was not disappointed. Their encounter made me smile.
Pastor Quinn and I stood at our little table of shareable items for almost an hour, having our own encounters with people who came for snacks, toiletries, dry socks and underwear (it had rained at least an inch overnight, probably more).
I love table time for the interactions with the locals. One guy made me laugh when he said, "I'm from Newfoundland, so give me the tuna and crackers kit, not that chicken salad and crackers sh*t." Inevitably, there are jokes and stories exchanged at our table. Some of the stories are hard to listen to, but the tellers of those stories appreciate that we listen and sometimes pray for them -- if they request it. Inner City Pastoral Ministry is a ministry of presence, of just being with folks. We can't solve their problems for them, but we can listen.
After we had given everything away to people who had come to our table from nearby encampments and other dwellings, Quinn headed inside to see if any of our regular community members were taking advantage of the Bissell's services, as he usually does. I broke down cardboard boxes and folded up our portable table, watching for Quinn's return, because he's my ride home. He was gone longer than usual, but eventually I spotted him further down the sidewalk, chatting with the little elder with shiny black hair and very few teeth at the small garbage bin across from the entrance.
When I arrived, Quinn was using the lid of the bin as a table for a tape dispenser, and carefully taping the arm back onto the elder's glasses. She had a small bleeding abrasion on the side of her nose where the nose piece of her broken glasses had cut into her skin, and a lot to say about it. "That STUPID woman had to hit me for NO GOOD REASON!" she said. "I'm sixty-six and that TWENTY-SOMETHING B**CH thought she'd take a piece of me. COWARD. Now she's HIDING inside."
Quinn confirmed that he'd seen a younger woman "clock" the older one, and that he'd gone inside to ask the Bissell's nurse for help outside (better to keep the two parties apart), but the nurse was already swamped by people needing attention. So I waited with the little woman while Quinn went back in to see what he might do for the elder first aid-wise.
I asked her name. "I'm Effie," she told me.
"But there's more to your name than that, I'll bet," I said. "What is Effie short for?"
"My full name is Ephthemia. It's Greek. Do you know what it means?"
"Greek!" I exclaimed. "It's a beautiful name. But how did you get a Greek name?"
"My dad knew a Greek guy," she said. "Ephthemia means Beautiful Butterfly. That's me. I'm a beautiful butterfly."
"You definitely are," I agreed, and pointed to her t-shirt, which bore the image of a woman with butterflies in her hair. Delighted that I'd noticed, Ephthemia wrapped me in a hug. I asked where she lived, and she told me she had a place in a nearby seniors' affordable housing building.
Quinn returned wearing medical gloves, carrying gauze and a little vial of saline solution. He asked Effie's name and got the same story I did, but without the hug. He carefully swabbed the cut on her nose and told her to stay away from the young woman who had hit her and suggested that she go see the nurse anyway to get checked for concussion.
Effie said, "I'm not afraid of HER! I've gotten worse beatings from a KITTEN." She gave me another hug, I told her to take care, and Quinn and I headed back to the car.
"Did you see what actually happened?" he asked me.
"No, I was folding up."
"I saw the girl hit her, hard, but I'm suspecting Effie smacked the girl's uncle on the head first, or maybe poked her as she walked by. I guess we'll never know."
"With a name like Ephthemia, she's certainly one of a kind," I said. "I wonder if it means what she says it does. I've never heard it before."
When I arrived home, I looked up Ephthemia/Efthimia, and it actually translates as "well-spoken." But if "beautiful butterfly" suits her self-image better, I definitely won't argue.
Effie will have a shiner today, but hopefully it won't matter too much because Ephthemia knows she is a beautiful butterfly. In my books, and in God's sight, she is.
Day 1 Edmonton to Langley, BC
Day 2 Vancouver
Day 3 Langley to Vancouver Island
Day 4 Gold Stream Provincial Park
Day 5 Butchart Gardens
Day 6 Victoria and Willow Beach
Day 7 Gold Stream to Parksville
Day 8 Rathtrevor Beach Provincial Park
Day 9 Rathtrevor Beach/Campground and a Nanaimo visit
Day 11 Spider Lake and Rathtrevor Beach
Day 12 Parksville to Langley
Day 13 Langley to Martha Creek Provincial Park
Day 14 Martha Creek to Home, sweet Home
If a picture paints a thousand words, there's 13,000 words right there, but I'll add a few more in explanation. We had a wonderful trip last month, and fine visits with Don and Lucy, Lynn, Louis and Sarah, Cathy and Jim, Ron and Claire -- thanks, friends and relatives! It was a pretty spectacular and very relaxing time, but there's no place like home to watch our own flowers grow.
So I got creative with some old clothes, a paper bag, and a too small hat and made a fourth sister to stand among the other three sisters that brilliant Indigenous peoples knew all about planting together: corn, beans, and squash. (If you've followed these moodlings you might recall that I've moodled about them before.) I'm curious to see how long it will take for a bird to sit on top of the lady's hat.
Hopefully madame scarecrow will keep this year's planting as the nicest one yet. I did things right this year -- the corn sister got enough of a head start over the squash and bean sisters for all of them to grow well together. Last night we had cheese stuffed fried squash blossoms for supper, yum. And we're looking forward to some good feeds provided by all three sisters, God and weather willing.
One minor problem: I'm not sure what name to give the extra sister in the three sisters' patch. My cousin made me laugh with her scarecrow's name, which echoes a line from Copa Cabana, a Barry Manilow dance tune we liked when we were kids -- "Her name is Lola, she is a scarecrow" ("was a showgirl" is the actual lyric...).
I'm not that clever... so let's have a Name the Scarecrow Contest. Send me your suggestions, I'll pull one out of a hat, and the winner will receive... I dunno -- a dinner invitation to a harvest supper? A shipment of fresh garden produce in the fall? Some sort of small surprise. Anyway, I'd love to hear from any of my readers who have ideas. You can leave a comment below, or send a quick email to simplemoodler@ gmail.com.
Once upon a time I owned a cassette tape of Gordon Lightfoot's greatest hits. Gord's Gold, it was called, and I listened to it until it wore out. The album originally came out when I was ten years old, and my parents had a copy, I think, but I didn't truly discover it until I was twenty-three, picking up my cassette on a whim at a sale table. I was teaching at the time, and Gord's Gold accompanied me through a lot of late afternoons and evenings in my classroom as I marked, planned and prepared lessons. Every song on it just felt good, and there were enough of them with so many different styles that they didn't ever bore me.
When Gordon Lightfoot died recently, I meant to do a little tribute. As I moodle here, I'm surprised that two and a half months have passed already since he's gone. Not knowing him personally, it doesn't really seem like he's gone, as there have been so many occasions where I've heard his songs floating off the radio or TV -- in his own and other voices. His music lives on in those who sing it, in all of us who love it, and that's probably the best kind of immortality.
This morning began with a gentle rain, and immediately, Rainy Day People came to mind. I suspect that the musician who was a bit of a wild child when fame first reached him eventually became something of a rainy day person himself.
Thanks for the music, Gord. You really were gold.
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| Unruly rhubarb |
Things have really grown since a month ago, when I was showing my readers raised bed boxes that had just been planted. Now you can tell what's what. The corn seems to be growing about an inch a day, and the squash, beans and many other things aren't far behind. If you're in the neighbourhood and feel like wandering through a garden, I'm happy to give tours, though next month there'll actually be veggies to eat as we go. For now, just a few Saskatoon berries, strawberries and raspberries... yum!
Oh, and anyone want some rhubarb?
This morning as I walked around my garden, a long lost song sprang into my head. Unsure of the lyrics, I put "Thank you for every tree and flower song" into my browser, and proceeded down an internet rabbit hole, learning about one Petula Sally Olwen Clark, a famous international singer who is now 90 years old somewhere in Switzerland, and who has been singing publicly since she was 7. Petula has had quite a life (it takes a while to read the wikipedia link above), has befriended a lot of interesting people, and was still performing as recently as January of this year in honour of Stephen Sondheim, God bless her.
Given that my 2023 word of the year is "Appreciation," and we've just passed the year's halfway point, it seems fitting to post Petula's "Thank you" song today. It came out the year before I was born, is sung in five different keys, and has lyrics that can seem rather trite to our more sophisticated sensibilities.
But should that be the case?
In a world where so much seems to be going wrong, our so-called sophistication can make it a challenge to remember to say Thank you, but it can't be said (or sung) often enough.
Thank you, Petula, and Thank you, God.
Listening to the news this week, I was very aware of the many ways that our Christian judgments of "who is worthy" and "who is not worthy" have created many dangers for our family members who are homeless, dealing with addictions and mental health issues, our immigrants, refugees, trans people and others in the 2SLGBTQIA+ community, and the many BIPOC Canadians who live here. Basically, people who do not look like me or choose to live or love differently than I do are facing dangers I don't have to face... and so I pray:
