Congo Cloth Connection

Southwest Michigan in early April: gray and grayer, rainy and rainier. Chilly. Spring on hold. It was especially bleak yesterday because I was just back from a glorious, warm, sunny, convivial staff retreat in Sanibel, Florida.

I was desperate for color and so I delved into a project I’ve been working on called the Congo Cloth Connection. The idea is to promote awareness of Congo in a way you won’t get by listening to the news, which is infrequent and always horrifying. Without downplaying the horrors, we want to share the beauty and vitality of Congo as it is represented by cloth. We want to use the cloth that is sold and worn in Congo to connect with Congolese people, especially women.

My friend Nina writes more about the Connection here, and  I describe my own connection on that blog as well. We’re not sure where the project is going, how long we can ask travelers from Congo to bring back suitcases full of cloth, or whether we will have the wherewithal to bring portable Congo Cloth markets to churches and groups as we have started to do.

All we know is that the connection works. The cloth gets snapped up, beauty creates more beauty, like this quilt made by Mennonite women in Indiana.

The personal links between women are taking hold as well.  I’ll just give you some pictures to feast your eyes upon, in case your days are as gray as mine.

Forgot to pray

I intended to honor two prayer requests yesterday and I forgot both of them. These were requests to pray at a certain time. One was to pray at noon for the nuclear situation in Japan, specifically for the healing of the radioactive waters. The other was to pray at dusk, when a certain prisoner in Alabama was scheduled to be executed. Our friends Mark and Sara had befriended this death row prisoner over many years, through letters and visits, and would be present at his execution.

These are not trivial matters and yet they fell totally out of my consciousness. Two questions arise. Do I believe in prayer? Perhaps the forgetting was a sign that I really don’t. And the second is, even if I do believe, was it important for me to be praying on these matters at those times? Perhaps the forgetting was a sign that those prayers were not mine to offer yesterday.

Oh there’s a third question, too. Am I totally losing it? Yes, probably. I’m not as post-menopausal foggy as I used to be, like when I forgot a birthday dinner for a friend to which my husband and I were the only invitees, but things do evaporate from my memory. I am easily distracted by such things as the presence, yesterday, of my grandbaby and the arrival of spring. See below: Hazel in front of jasmine-fragrant witch hazel and the first hepatica blooming in my woods.

Do I believe in prayer? My belief has been intermittent but in recent years I have been more of a believer than an unbeliever. Belief, for me, requires experience. It is not a matter of putting my trust in something that somebody else tells me is so; it has to hit me in the face, or the stomach and even then I lose faith. The power of prayer has demonstrated itself many times. I have prayed and things have happened. I have found peace and answers to knotty problems. Loved ones have been healed and helped. Protections have held. I have seen signs and wonders. So yes, I do believe in prayer, though my belief requires the constant nourishment of experience.

The second question comes close to what I believe about prayer. Were these the prayers for me to offer? I did pray yesterday but not for these things. Maybe I’m wrong but I do not believe in perfunctory prayer. Instead, I pray about what is front and center in my attention. I have come to believe that the matters for prayer seek me out, and the nature of the prayer itself is also given. That is, I may not know what to pray for, or how to pray, and then I do. So prayer is not a matter of imposing my will on a situation but of entering into a larger harmony that brings peace to all concerned because it represent divine rightness. Prayer is participation.

Both of the prayer requests represented that potential and I wanted to participate. But my attention was elsewhere and so I participated in something else. A different prayer was given to me. May yesterday’s prayers, by everyone, be blessed. And today’s.

A psalm of lethargy and resistance

 I resist, O Lord, the tasks before me.

The creative tasks demand too much risk. I may fail and today I cannot BEAR failure.

Do not ask me why.

Is my life so burdened that one more failure will kill me? Hardly. And still I prefer to steer clear of failure, so the creative tasks are out of the question.

The tedious tasks are too boring. O Lord, I die of boredom! If I take up the boring tasks I will hate them and my life will be filled with resentment and I will die!

Is this really true? It is not and yet, I prefer not to put it to the test.

The tasks of service to others are too demeaning. If I do as I am told one more time I will die of shame and embarrassment! I am too old to follow other people’s agendas, wishes, and instructions!

Do I have an agenda of my own that is so important that I cannot accede to the requests of others? I do not, not today, but following other people’s instructions would only remind me of that shameful fact.

There remains for me nothing left to do but to pray for deliverance from the rock of my resistance, O Rock of redeeming love.

Redeem my paltry tokens of resistance for the pure treasure of energy.

Do not make me do it myself!

Well, perhaps I will make the first move.

There. I have written this bad psalm and sing it with all my heart!

Or at least half of my heart.

How to make a meal out of nothing

1.     Open the refrigerator and examine the contents. Confirm that there is really nothing there. No leftovers from last night, no fresh veggies, no eggs, no meat.

2.     Open the pantry and examine the contents. Cereal doesn’t count. Pasta, yes. Rice. Cans of stuff? Tomatoes help. No tomatoes? Canned soup even though you hate it? No? Not even canned mushroom soup? Bouillon cubes. Vinegar and oil aplenty, even blueberry açai vinegar. Onions. Garlic, lots of that. And a whole bottle of 49-Pound Rooster merlot to go with whatever is going to spring forth from your fertile imagination.

3.     Reopen the fridge and reconsider the definition of “nothing.” Is that half a bunch of limp celery in the vegetable drawer? One carrot. Some cheddar you could salvage if you sliced away the mold.

4.     Check the freezer. Half a bag of peas. The last of the sweet cherries you picked last summer.

5.     Go back to the pantry. There’s got to be something else there. Look. You will find it, the magic ingredient that will make these scrawny loaves and fishes multiply into a feast. No? Wait. What is that hiding behind the oatmeal—cornmeal! Cornmeal=polenta. Okay. We’re cooking now.

6.     Make the polenta with bouillon so it tastes meaty. Add a little olive oil and all the old cheese at the end. Sauté the carrot, celery and peas with lots of onions and garlic and olive oil. Add a dash of the blueberry açai vinegar and some cayenne to make your mouth happy. Heap the veggies on the creamy-cheesy polenta. Drink all the wine with your sweetie. Munch on half-frozen sweet cherries for dessert.

7.     Contemplate:

a.     There is such a thing as a free lunch.

b.     There is no such thing as nothing. Even the Creator used ingredients: chaos, clay.

Spring cleaning the psyche

In the winter I work in a rocking chair in the living room by the woodstove. In the winter my real office becomes a dumping place for unmade decisions. Today I moved back to my desk and it was a mess. I was feeling lazy and at loose ends, unable to start or finish anything.  With great reluctance, I began decluttering my office.

I not only dusted around the decisions but I made them, which mostly consisted of throwing papers into the recycle. Scribbled telephone notes; notes from long-ago meetings (was that just last October we were talking about that?); file folders full of information on topics that I might be interested in but am not, after all; thank-you notes and Christmas cards; all the do-this, do-that detritus of things that I have done or will never do. Time, as usual, had made a lot of decisions for me.

Hello Spring

Hello, Spring! You come today in fog. I light the fire in the woodstove in your honor. It may be the last fire, not because we trust you to warm us up but because we are running out of wood.

The ground aches for you. The Earth is tired of its brown dress. 

The Africans in church yesterday were excited because you are coming. It is not just warmth they long for; it is color. You have no idea, Spring, what kind of color they would really like to see because you do not visit Africa. It would blow your mind, Spring, those vibrant oranges and purples and golds. I would like to take you on a walk through an African market and show you what is possible. They do not make up the colors in their cloth, they pull them right off the flowers and the birds and the rich, green forests.

Fukushima forever

Since I wrote last things have only gotten worse but not dramatically so. There may never be a big boom to grab our attention and horror. Fukushima will just linger, a chronic illness. We will learn to live with it. 

The physicist Michio Kaku recommends entombing the Fukushima reactors like Chernobyl was entombed: dumping sand, boron, concrete from above. That is about as much of a solution as burying our heads in the sand. It will tamp down the radiation, perhaps limit it to a forever-contaminated radius of a few miles. It will help temporarily. But they are already planning to build a new, bigger, more expensive, hopefully more durable sarcophagus around Chernobyl.