Farm City

I just finished reading "Farm City" by Novella Carpenter. It makes me want to go back to the United States. A smart, educated woman whose takes on the challenge of finding a fulfilling, interesting, and sustainable way to live both a city and country life.  I relate to it, trying to discover my next steps. My own challenge is feeling the current pull to be in the countryside. Yet I am pulled back by the dull roar, the energy of the city.

Right Relationship

"The challenge to living a right-ordered life is that it is so different from what the dominant culture portrays as a happy life."

John Woolman

Cityscapes

Four Tibeten monks sit in front of me on the train. They are wearing maroon and orange tunics and we are all traveling to Washington DC from Baltimore MD. What they will be doing there, I don't know. Perhaps I have seen them before on the street. I am going to visit my past and possibly my future.

I am enamoured with Baltimore. Lovely. Cohesive. People find Mexico City overwhelming because the visuals are jarring, radically different from one building to the next - even the walls that disconnect the mansions from the tin slums are thin. This makes Baltimore pleasant to me - brick building after brick building, rows of a larger architectural vision. Factories, industry.

A Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore -
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over -
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

- Langston Hughes, 1951

A Singleness of Eye

I wrote this reflection last summer for my spiritual support group. Tonight it speaks to me as I look back on the last six months, as I continue to ask the questions I raise below. 

I had a beautiful, relaxing weekend. I sat on the beach and read A Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, which seemed placed on the bedside table in the guest bedroom where I was staying, placed for some important, higher-powered purpose.

Lindbergh's book sat for years on my shelf at home, It was the book that made me go to Smith College. I received it in high school as an award from the Smith College Alumnae Association identifying me as a woman representing the values of the institution. As a result I applied to Smith, yet never read the book.

This weekend I sat on the beach of the Chesapeake and read it. It spoke so deeply to me. It spoke to me as a woman, as a person of faith, and as someone who struggles with maintaining (finding) the spiritual silence.

El latido

Let me take the pulse. For posterity's sake.

It's 2011. Is it the beginning of the apocolypse? The United States is dropping bombs on Libya. So are the Europeans. No one knows who is in charge. I continue to be intregued by Gaddafi's wardrobe.

The footage of Japan's tsumani continues to haunt. My 21st centrury brain cannot help but suspect that everything that happened on the island is some sort of Steven Speilberg epic, rather than the crushing reality of natural disaster.

We half joke that Mexico City's smog will block the radiation riding on the wind.

Hay Tanto Que Quiero Contarte

I want to write deep and meaningful things, but lately that has meant at the expense of writing anything. I have bits and pieces of written adventures, of deep thoughts, of revelations, reevaluations and reflections, yet for weeks they have not amounted to anything fit to post.

So, here are a few of the crumbs:

Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday. Why? It's all about family and food:

"I am so blessed! Yesterday I celebrated a beautiful gringo feast with 50 people here in the Casa de los Amigos. Between staff, guests, and friends, we represented seven countries - Mexico, Canada, Finland, England, Singapore, France, and the US. Most of the group was Mexican and for many the celebration was a first." So much food, laughter...most of us stayed hours talking and every helped clean up.