Peace Pole

My son says that I need to blog more often if I expect anyone to visit! OK.

Just returned from a long walk around Hawk Hill and the lower Lake loop at Bishop's Ranch. On the way I visited the Peace Pole. The recent group that was at the Ranch tied many prayers to the Peace Pole so I took strips of fabric along to re-stock the prayer box. The old prayer ribbons are faded, the new ones bright. The Pole does not seem weighed down by all those prayers. The hawks and the lizards read the breeze as easily as do the ribbons and as lightly.

I visited the Trailside Sanctuary on my walk also. Built in memory of Leanora and Jack Miller Dowling, there is an altar in the center in which people have placed feathers, acorns, small pieces of tile, handmade paper torn from journals. It is all about love - love in action. mothers in love and fathers in love and children and friends, those we know and those we have yet to know.

As I walked I took enormous comfort in an impersonal god who's nature is to gush forth life in all forms, to bathe us all in light and love and to seek out the valleys and depressions and tightnesses wherever they are and heal them. Before I die I want to hear the wind as a child hears the wind.

peace,
Linda

precious lord take my hand

Sunday - the beginning of the week in which I move to Bishop's Ranch, outside Healdsburg. In this countryside diocesan headquarters, my home will be a studio overlooking the oaks and quail and golden hills of Sonoma County. That's out the back. The front overlooks the courtyard fountain and beyond that the chapel. A gorgeous place for healing, for writing, for contemplation, for prayer, for play, for coming to terms with life at 51 - a far different life than I ever imagined.

Coming back from the City this evening, after dinner with a friend - across from the Giants ball park, after they lost their last game of the season, to the Dodgers, 4 - 3 .... I listened to an NPR show on Gospel music. It moves me so deeply. So profoundly. It doesn't surprise me to hear the singers say that yes, they feel Jesus every time they sing. Every time, they are filled with the Spirit when they sing. They sing to help them through hard times, to lift up their hearts, and those who hear them. We begin the Eucharistic prayer, Lift up your hearts / We lift them to the Lord. Gospel does this - for real. Lifts up my heart. And like the Eucharist - the structure of Gospel is to sing out your troubles, but always in the presence of the community - and the community echoes back - we hear you, we're with you, we carry your burdens with you.... this is Christian community at it's best. It is what I have found with so many friends, Christian and non, and it has kept me going. Kept me uplifted. yes jesus!