The Blur of Time and Space

Hello friends and thanks so much for checking in.

I will have to find the "Graceful Ghost Rag" that Victoria mentions, as I will admit that the lines between the living and dead have blurred for me this past year. And even geographic location blurs for me. For me, it has become a swirling, dirvish mass of life and living and raining and timeless connections to the past and future, here and now. What is that Lakota saying "we are all related" which refers to people, nature, time, and space. I can't spell it in Lakota, mitakue oasin, or something like that.

Gratitude indeed, for one candle named Bob that was *not* lit on All Saints Sunday.

Speaking of, I wanted to mention two publications who have been kind enough to publish this month some things I wrote . More blurs of time and space. . .

The Lutheran Magazine
A Harvest of Crops and Compassion
With thanks to an amazing group of farmers I met this past summer, who are donating a portion of their harvest to the common global good. It got a little cosmic for me as while I was writing this story I kept thinking about the farmers and how they were suffering drought. It felt like a sort of anorexia to me, like how I watched Bob waste away when he wasn't eating; a slow, slow, slow, dreadful witness to death. I wondered if that's how it feels for a farmer in drought, that constant gnawing everyday of worry that the feilds have not been nourished another day. Another step towards death. Then one night when the Twin Cities was getting all those dramatic storms, it was like the drought these farmers were suffering had somehow transformed into a tempest of good will all around the world. Thunder, lightening, and a downpouring of the spirit of giving. Like their compassion had healed the drought. Compassion had healed us, that's for sure. Anyway, well, I hope you will come on over to the Lutheran magazine and read about it and add to the online discussion. I would also like to thank the editors of the Lutheran for letting me write this up.

Lutheran Woman Today
The Valley of the Shadow
With thanks to "Another Terri," the wonderful editor whose blog I mention on the left side bar here, who is walking in her own valley, even as she let me tell our liver-gone-wrong story in this fabulous magazine to which you should all subscribe. Prayers for Terri's healing. I have worked with editors of this magazine all the while I've been with LWR and they have a real knack of linking articles and themes with real life stuff. One of my best weeks ever was time spent on the coffee farm in El Salvador with a previous editor of LWT; who returned home with the idea of "what would happen to coffee farm families if we could double the sales of Fair Trade coffee in one year?" And it worked. And the farmers survived. We are all related.

Take care everyone. Happy All Saints season. Let's all gather at the river.

With love, T