Scattered Writings of a Blogger

I stumbled upon a word not too long ago that I didn't know. In reading the definition I found I had found the very word I required to use for something I have often experienced. The word was  Hiraeth: (hear-eth)  n. (Welsh) It's definition:  A spiritual longing for a home that perhaps never was home, and an earnest desire for something past.  It is the echo of the lost places of our soul's past and our grief for them.  It is in the wind, and the rocks, and the waves.  It is nowhere and it is everywhere.     While the word I stumbled upon was meant to describe the feelings of a Welshman for a time that no longer exists, it is not a feeling exclusive to the Welsh.  Several other countries including the Cornish, Bretons, Portuguese, Germans, Ethiopians, and Romanians also have similar words with exactly the same meaning.  It seems to be something in common with many people. I've experienced this feeling of nostalgia for places tha...

It had been a hard week.  I was weary and wanted to be anywhere but miles away from home, late in the day, yet there I was.  As we drove through the grocery store parking lot, we noted a van in one space and on the opposite side of the road a young man with an electric violin, amplifier, and FX box (that he could loop music through).  He had placed a sign on the grassy verge.  I'd seen only enough of the sign to know he was asking for help of some sort.    We watched as children tumbled from the van and saw the man wave them back with his bow. As we sat in the pharmacy drive thru, I let the car window down a little.  At that moment the violinist began to play.  Music wafted around us on the breeze. The music was beautiful and ethereal.   I didn't recognize the piece and wondered if it was an original composition.  Whoever composed it, the music was lovely and soothing and soared in the cold air, seeming to become part of the ch...

When I worked at the nursing home, I met a patient who had terminal lung cancer.  His name was James.   James had spent his life living rather hard.  He'd been in airplane crashes in the Korean war, car accidents, bar fights and had been badly burned in a housefire caused by a burning cigarette that dropped one night as he slept.  Admittedly his appearance was off-putting.  He was missing some portion of some of his fingers and had scars on his arms and hands, though he wore long sleeved shirts to hide what he could.  His hair had never quite grown back in a place or two, and what was left was gray and thin.  One ear was notched and missing a portion of the outer rim.  He was battle scarred by the life he'd lived.  When I met James for the first time, I took one look at him and thought of an old dog I had dearly loved  named Mutt.  Mutt was torn and scarred by his life chasing and catching bears and wildcats in the woods, indul...

  I noted something the other day, as I was making bread.  I follow the same recipe I have now been using for years.  Each time I measure out the sugar, the yeast, the water, the flour, the oil, the salt.  In breadmaking I don't guesstimate. I might guess when making biscuits or cornbread or muffins or pancakes, but with bread, I take care.  I measure.  I mix it in the exact same way every single time.  I use the very same cycles on my bread machine.  I time the last rising of the bread and heat my oven to the very same temperature and when I place that bread pan in the oven, I time it the same number of minutes that I've learned it requires in my oven. I do make mistakes at times, but I can pretty well tell you when a loaf fails why it has failed and what I missed.  But there are other times when the dough is just not right without any mistake at all being made.  Why?  Same amount of yeast, sugar, water, flour, salt and oil.  ...

  I have been reading the last book of the Elliot family trilogy,  The Heart of the Family  by Elizabeth Goudge and the opening chapters were hard, so hard, to read.    That morning they were hard to read though I've never noted before they were so difficult.   But Saturday morning they were hard and heavy and I could have wept for the characters whose souls were tortured by nerves and near madness and deep despair.   It brought back too clearly the days when I lived in those dark places and couldn't see enough light to find even a tiny crack to reassure me that light existed. Perhaps too it was brought on by the knowledge that some I love dearly are suffering at the moment, in their own dark places.   And the knowledge that there are others whom I don't know, struggling and straining, attempting to hold on to the very last bits of what remains of sanity and salvation and feeling they shall never find their way out of the dark deep ...

  Each time I come across the story of David, I can't help but look at the story of Michal, daughter of Saul, first wife of David.   Here is a woman all too often maligned for her behavior towards David when he danced before the ark as it was brought home but can we just stop and look at her from a human level?  The Bible is a true accounting of  humans  and  human nature as much as it is of God's nature.  We can't slice off one without getting some of the other.   We are intertwined even though we might choose to think otherwise.  And while human emotions are often tangled and confusing to us, they do serve a purpose to show us God's nature in some form.   After all, it is God who created emotion within each of us. So let us look closely at Michal for a little bit, shall we?  What made her as she was?  When David was a youth (supposedly between 16 and 19 years of age), he was an experienced shepherd.  He wa...

  I haven't been able to get out in the yard more than a time or two since September.  So this evening, I made up my mind that I was going to go out.  I knew it would be dark by 7pm but there was a half hour and here I was longing to go outdoors.  So outdoors I went.   I cut herbs: chives, oregano, mint and the teeny basil that never did much after the late planting.  I cut coleus (4 varieties) and moss rose (also called portulaca) which was begun from a cutting and popped in a container mid-summer.   Then I went out to the shed flower bed where the cosmos, zinnia, and marigolds had bloomed so much that it was ample compensation for the frustrating lack of flowers all summer long.  And that's where I discovered something I'd never known and which filled me with awe.  I discovered how bumble bees sleep on these cool autumn nights.  They'd tucked themselves deep and tight into the center of zinnias and cosmos and buzzed sleepily ...

I've been attending a Bible study on the prophet Elijah by Priscilla Shirer at my church.  We have the workbooks and are watching a video each week.   Last week our lessons were about the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17).   This is the passage where Elijah appears in her village and finds her gathering brush to build a fire.  He has been in the wilderness for 18 months or so at this point and I can't imagine what that poor widow must have thought when he appeared and asked for a 'little water' in the midst of a three-year drought...  I know what she thought when he asked for food as well, though, because the Bible tells us.  I'm paraphrasing of course, but she told him, "I've just enough flour and oil to make a small cake for my son and I to share and then we will die."   What came across most strongly to me at that reading was how weary she must have been.  Hungry, frightened, tired beyond words, worried.  It wasn't just the fl...

Recently, I made biscuits.  I ended up with a baby biscuit.  I always have that last wee bit of dough leftover and I go on and make a baby biscuit with it.  Granny always made the baby biscuits and we grandchildren fought over whose privilege it would be to eat that tiny biscuit.  I smiled, thinking of Granny as I made my biscuits this evening and ended with that little one. I've never been able to make biscuits as Granny did.  Mama used the same method but hers were never as smooth and pretty and so exactly shaped as Granny's, though they used the same amounts of everything.   Granny would put her flour in the wooden bread bowl, and she'd make a deep well right in the center of the flour.  Into that well went her measure of shortening and then she'd pour in the milk or buttermilk, and she'd squeeze that shortening into little, tiny bits in that cold milk.  When she felt no more big lumps and was sure that the pieces were all tiny, she'd grad...

 First, I must make a disclaimer and say I don't really 'do' gardening.  I'm not at all serious about it.  I spend more time puttering and arranging my pots of things rather than actually doing the big work that makes a beautiful yard.  I'm not methodical about planting.  I tend to take what I can get through divisions from my own stock or someone else's yard if offered.   I love gardening. I'm trying to do what I can with my personal limitations.  It's not that I'm too old or too frail.  I'm strong enough but I liken it to this:  Gardening my way and gardening in the real way is a bit like the difference between walking a mile or two and running a 15k marathon.  I'm up for the former but not at all for the latter! I have a few plants I've had in pots for years now and the soil has become compacted and hard.  This year I have the task of dividing and repotting many things. They need the old hard compacted soil broken up, the ro...

 A few weeks ago, I had one of those incidents that triggered something deep and dark within that sent me into an emotional tailspin.  After fifty odd years of sorting through my issues and tediously digging into my mental health, must I still have these sorts of things happen?!  Well yes, apparently I must. It started with an eye exam.   As per usual, I had to fill out forms and of course, health history.  I ticked the boxes next to diabetes and high blood pressure, listed my meds and felt a little bit smug that I was on my one little pill daily for each and managing them just fine, thank you. Maybe pride was setting me up that day.  I certainly sound as though it was!  

  When we came home from church Sunday, I sat and looked out of the windows in the kitchen sitting area.  I contemplated that morning's sermon and then fondly recalled other pastors who've preached sermons that stirred me deeply.  I thought how much those who don't attend or watch a church service miss. That made me think of a conversation with someone a couple of years ago who cried out that they missed going to church!   Well, there's one just about anywhere you care to look isn't there?  But I did understand what she meant.  She missed the church she went to most of her life, a simple country church that was closed down 40 years ago.

                                    My great grandmother Della Stewart and my father as a boy. There's an old hymn called  Beulah Land  with a line that always tugs at my heart.  "I'm kind of homesick for a country...To which, I've never been before..."  Well lately, I've been feeling homesick.  I was shaken to the core the other day when I realized the extent of my deep homesickness. I am homesick for much, not the least of which is my spirit's feeling of longing for, 'a country, to which I've never been before.'  More and more these days, as John listens to his news clips and political debates, I feel disenchanted and weary of this world in which we live, where the limits of how vile things can be is constantly being proven an ever-moving line to still more vileness.  

  A fat yellow bud is dangling on one of the daffodils.  It is in a spot where it should be the last to bloom as it's facing due north and is in shade.  But no... it's getting ready to burst forth in joyfulness, not at all caring that it is far ahead of the other daffodils who only this week sent up stems with gently swelling heads as they basked in the sun.  Watching it there in that spot, in that shaded, cold place that rarely gets sun, makes me wonder why I have struggled so with blooming where I am. We went to the mountains on vacation about two years ago.  While we were weaving our way around a stony old mountain face, I spied a wildflower growing out of the face of the rock.  Just that one flower, right smack in the middle of heaven knows how many tons of granite.  How that seed lodged there and found enough nutrient to bloom is only God's knowledge because it is beyond mine.  That was the vacation I spent weeping and moaning and being angry...

      I was prepared to worship.  I'd taken time before synagogue to study the Torah, Prophet, and New Testament readings for the week.  I'd been in prayer all the previous day about the service, praying that it would be a blessing to us, to everyone who came to service. The first thing I noticed that morning was the scant crowd.  It's not a huge synagogue but generally the room was filled.  Not this week. Then someone said the Rabbi was not there and the alternate music leader was ill with strep throat.  She was telling another person that she had put together a worship program using CDs and had asked the Davidic dance team to perform.   I was disappointed.  It had been a long time since I'd tried to worship with 'canned' music, and I'd never really seen the dance team perform as they usually stepped into a side room which wasn't easily viewed.  I tried hard to bite back the deep disappointment that I felt. John join...

    I was reading a blog the other day about a young woman who'd had a troublesome day with her two-year-old.   She linked to another blog with another woman who'd had a troublesome day with her little boy as well.   I was amused and went to the comments section to leave an encouraging word, but many others had been there before me.   Most all of them had small children and they told of their bad days.   I read.   I laughed.   I commiserated.   I am a mom.   I know. Amie was a good baby, except for her desire to stay up ALL NIGHT LONG.   She did not sleep a full night through until she was eight years old.   She truly was a good child, with only two 'bad day' memories for me. There was the first day. She was two at the time.   On that day, she locked me out of the car I'd just put her into.   Thankfully on a cool autumn day.   When I finally convinced her to unlock the door it was because she had to go po...