Ode to the Contra

Sometime back in February I saw a sign for a "community dance -- squares, contras, waltzes" and decided to attend. I remember feeling awkward and nervous as I met new people, and I had been in the county only three weeks or so. But once we started dancing the nervousness yielded to the happiness of doing folk dances I knew perfectly well, and I met a few of my first non-church friends. As the evening went on I offered to sit in on one tune so the other bassist could dance.
Here I am, now, two weeks from the end of my time here. We had a dance tonight, and my position in it was significantly different from that first dance. Tonight I had organized the band, borrowed and set up the sound system; I called 80% of the dances, played 30% of the bass lines, and locked up afterward. We had upwards of 30 dancers, nearly a dozen musicians (despite everyone's earlier insistence that they could not come!), and a rocking good time.
I will eternally be grateful to the Wallowa County community dance group, for they welcomed me, invited me to try calling, challenged me to do more, and finally just gave me a push and said "you can do it." I admire them for running such a truly wonderful dance (nearly monthly, and always with live music) and keeping it populated by so many young people -- in such a small rural county! They are talented, committed and unabashedly FUN people.

I am also grateful for the gift my parents gave me, by rooting me in folk dance. Whenever someone asks how I came by so much dancing knowledge, I explain the scenario: imagine me at 9 months old in a car seat at a folk dance, plopped down underneath the piano, as my mom plays the pedals with one foot and rocks my seat with the other. The music and dance is in my blood! And this has given me an "in" in so many places... when I went off to college I already knew someone in the area (the ladies on the morris team, which I joined, of course)... when I studied in Prague I found respite from the challenges of conversing in Czech, by Scottish Country Dancing which needed few words... I am grateful for being part of the dance community. The folk world is a blessedly small one: tonight a visiting musician from LaGrande and I compared pasts, and discovered that many years back (and in different years) we both were taught how to morris dance by the same person. Beat that for non-biological family connections!



Some days I have to rack my brains to come up with a gratitude list.
Tonight there is no such problem.
Thank you for dancing!

On Leaving

Word has been getting around that I am leaving soon. Two parishioners have taken off on month-long vacations and said their goodbyes to me already. A preteen at church wrapped her arms around me recently and said authoritatively “you can’t go.” And I have it on good word that when they found out about my impending departure the little neighbor kids cried. (“Real tears,” the mother said, as if to underline the injury I’d given to their young senses of permanence).
This is all too familiar for me. I have been in many short-term ministry places, from the house church in Prague where I studied abroad, to my 5-month and 3-month stints in Uganda, to counseling at summer camp which is, by definition, a temporary community. There are many places where I’ve been invited to “stay;” to make my temporary home a permanent one. But I have kept moving, drawn forward by the next adventure or “call.” And while I accept that God has called me to several and varied places, I wonder if it is an intrinsic part of God’s call that I must keep moving like this, or whether at some point I will actually get to “stay.”
There is, of course, a missiological model for my transitory ministry. The Apostle Paul was on the road for many years, and had close ties to churches in many cities. Jesus himself was an itinerant preacher, and according to Matthew his last commission to the disciples started with “Go” (Mt 28:19). Christians have been on the move ever since, seeking “unreached peoples,” going on crusades, making pilgrimages, and sometimes even intentionally adopting the lifestyle of uprooted poverty.
The Presbyterian church is not as uproot-happy as, say, the United Methodists, who typically relocate their pastors every three or four years. A PC(USA) pastor who finds a good fit in a church may stay for decades, if everyone is happy with the arrangement. Still there are many elements of temporary ministry in our current setup, from the 1-year YAV program, to 1-year internships, to the temporary and rapidly shifting community that is a seminary. Demographically speaking, Americans move around more than the people of most other nations do; but Christian leaders seem to move a lot more than even that. Is this according to God’s call, or is it a convention we invented for ourselves?
What I am specifically uncomfortable with is the division of space and time between the pastor and the parish. We have on the one hand a population of solid Christian non-pastoral leaders who will stay with the congregation, maintain it, minister and be ministered to in it, and hear a call to make it their spiritual home in the name of God. In Lostine many of these people will belong to the same church for their entire life. On the other hand is the pastor, who belongs to a certain group either privileged or cursed (depending on your attitude) with frequent Uprootings and Sendings, who consider this moveability to be sanctified by the call of the same God.
I appreciate the call to uproot, both because of the example of the early Christians and because it reminds us well that nowhere on this earth can be our true home. Relocation is a spiritual practice that continually challenges me to travel light – quite literally to be sure all my worldly possessions fit in a station wagon – and to keep free of idolizing the non-essentials. Being a stranger in a new place is also a spiritual discipline which opens our minds and humbles us. Yet I feel that most of the other Christians in the congregation do not identify with these spiritual practices much if at all, and I am uncomfortable with this division.
One question is about the relative worths of doing maintenance work vs. new development. My clear bias is toward development, which lends itself to an outsider-led, short-term model. I have not a little scorn for doing long-term maintenance work myself, because I have seen several pastors spending much of their energy on propping up near-dead congregations. When a project at Lostine has come to rest entirely on my shoulders for maintenance, I tend to panic at its non-sustainability. I hope and pray that my bias against doing maintenance will not lead me to declare myself “finished” with a congregation prematurely, or to jump ahead of God’s call. Gentle maintenance must surely have a place in a healthy congregation too, and provide a reason for a pastor to stay in a call for more than a few years.
The counter-question, however, is whether new development work, led by outsiders and done on a short-term basis, ought to be reserved for pastors, or whether other folks with non-preaching inclinations ought to also be “called” out of their home congregation to bring their skills and energy to help another congregation. As a church that confesses the priesthood of all believers, saying that the only difference between the elders and pastors is whether they “rule” or “teach,” I wonder how we could learn to share the burden and blessing of relocation more evenly, but I do not have an answer to this.
A Biblical comparison may shed light on this question. Jesus sent his disciples out two by two, and Paul always traveled with companions. With the exception of married clergy couples (two ordained persons who often take a job that one person could do), this is scarcely the model in the church today. The lone-wolf model has personal implications in terms of burnout, but worse implications for the shared nature of our Christian vocation. The question arises, “is Talitha called to go to Uganda” but a better question would be, as a community, “are we called to send people to Uganda,” and if Talitha is particularly willing to lead this venture, “whom else can we send with her?” I wonder if an approach more in this line would share the uprootings more equally between those with theological gifts and training, and those with other giftings. It would require much more rigorously interdependent communities, and would hopefully bring those communities into closer touch with one another.
The clergy/lay divide is one of the aspects of “church” as we know it that frustrates me most. During my time in Lostine I have felt in many cases that the work is wonderfully and equally shared. Pastor Steve is not the center of the church, and people joyfully step up to do their part. So now my awareness is shifting; Lostine is a great example of the church as it could be, but I am going back out into the great institutional maze of “the church as it is,” which sets me apart as a leader and gives me the privilege and burden of relocating.

Presbytery!!!!!

Our congregation hosted the Eastern Oregon Presbytery this weekend. It was a great experience! Since we are so far-flung, we have two two-day meetings and one single-day meeting per year, and everyone drives over hills and valleys to make it there. The host church gets to provide hospitality, and in return everyone donates generously to whatever the host church is interested in (for us, our local mission efforts).
So all the hospitality-providers of our church rallied up and cooked, cleaned, decorated, and opened their homes to the elders and pastors and staff that came. We had sign-up sheets for weeks in advance, collecting signatures for everything from meat and potatoes to cinnamon rolls and quiches.
I turned our kids into hospitality-providers by firing up the cider press. The kids got to work and provided more than five gallons of cider for the Presbytery. The next day I reached the "offering" section of my worship curriculum for children's Sunday School, and it was concrete and made sense: this work is an Offering. It was also joyful work of course, and I apparently came away "glowing" from that joy.
Here's a picture of the process: when you squeeze cider you are left with pulp. The pulp of one pressing formed pretty solidly into an "apple cake" which the kids mimed at eating:



The business of Presbytery... was also joyous! I do believe every vote was unanimous, with several resounding YESes and AMENs. We did have a few moments of utter presbythink, such as "well the committee came to agreement so quickly that we thought, something must be wrong, so we're asking for another hour of discussion in the whole council," ... and ... "we have redevelopment funds available as soon as we define the word redevelopment." (hit palm to forehead. do it. what else can you do???)
But OTHER than those moments, we had some great and momentous pieces of business. The Administrative Commission that formed to revive a dying Tutuilla Presbyterian Church a few years back was disbanded with thanks for their effort. The church is now quite alive, with 19 in attendance at the "new members" class, chiefs of rival tribes sitting next to one another in worship, a youth group, a Sunday School, a thriving new CLP (commissioned lay pastor). The congregation does not need any more of the helpful Administration from on high -- they are ready to stand on their own feet.

Grateful thanks were given to a retired pastor who consented to serve as interim in the LaGrande church. He should only have a few weeks left in that position because.... drumroll...
PRESBYTERY APPROVED a clergy couple to fill the LaGrande vacancy. They are to share a single full time job, and have time left over for their 2 year old son. They are fresh out of Austin seminary, this will be their first call AND their final qualification for ordination. The way we do this is to read their statements of faith, bring them up to the floor mic, and interrogate them on their "Christian faith and views in theology, the Bible, the Sacraments, and the government of the church." (Can you lose your salvation? Why does salvation matter anyway? What is your theology of baptism?). Having satisfied ourselves with examination of the candidates they were sent out while the presbytery debated their suitability for the call and for ordination. We brought them in, all stood and all applauded as they grinned and laughed.




(Talitha, did you take notes? This is what you face in a few years.)


The soon to be REVERENDS Keith and Laura Hudson. Welcome to Eastern Oregon Presbytery!!!!

Presbytery!!!

oh boy oh boy oh boy. We get Presbytery WITHOUT TRAVELING -- they are coming to US! Many Presbies, at least in urban places, have presbytery meetings once a month, and they are full of Work and Controversy, and people hate going to them. Here in the Northeast corner of Oregon, we have meetings three times a year, and they are exciting because they are some of our very few chances for pastors to hang out with one another. But they are slightly a drag because you have to drive miles and miles and miles annd miiiiiles. Thus the excitement of having Presbytery come to us!
The Lostine Presbyterian Church is all a-tizzy about the impending arrival of many pastors and elders at the end of this week. Postcards keep arriving, addressed to the "Presbytery Arrangements Committee" (basically, me and Iva.) I am duly excited.
Some upcoming highlights:
Cooking and feeding!
Spiffing up our grounds for our esteemed visitors!
Pressing Apple Cider with all the kids!
Graceful and skillful moderation!
Robert's Rules!
Homestays with new friends!
Worshipping with a big crowd of confident hymnsingers!

and I don't know if I'm actually allowed to report this on a blog, but we may or may not be welcoming (i.e. voting and approving of) new pastors for a church that has been vacant for a while. And they may or may not be two ubercool kids who YAVved and Peace Corpsed before marrying and heading this-away. I may or may not be EXCEEDINGLY excited to meet them. Stay tuned.

Preserving the Summer - part II

Tomatoes.
A tricky crop -- you need to start them months early inside... I had them on a sunny windowsill and loved the scent of their leaves. Then you have to transplant them outside at the right time... I put a few out too early and lost them, crinkled and browned by frost. I ended up transplanting most into bigger pots (still inside) and eventually my patience was rewarded when I got them going outside.
Then, the season isn't long enough for them to all ripen outside. I got perhaps a dozen good tomatoes from the plants outside. Then, when the nightly frost was getting particularly frigid, I pulled them up by the roots and hung them inside, in the coldest room of the house. They continue to ripen and to bear!

After about a week on a strict dietary supplement of half a pound of salsa every day, I got tired of fresh tomatoes and looked for something to DO with them.
I borrowed a dehydrator (thanks Jenn!) and put about two boxes of the smaller tomatoes in it, sliced in half. I'm guessing that's fifty tomatoes or more. The dehydrator whirred along at 120 degrees for a day and a half, and yielded a great crop: One pint jar, not even full, and supplemented by basil and garlic. I filled the little jar with warm olive oil and am going to try to use it in the next few weeks (they don't keep indefinitely). Meanwhile the dehydrator is loaded back up again, and the next batch will probably be frozen for future use (pizzas? sauces?)

Everyone keeps telling me to fry my green tomatoes. I'm not quite sure whether this will happen however, as I've never tasted them or even gotten interested in the prospect. But there will be green and ripening tomatoes for quite some time yet!

Preserving the Summer - part I

As I may have mentioned, due to our snowy and elevated location, Lostine has about a twenty minute growing season. This means in the fall, *everything* suddenly and explosively gets ripe at once, and you desperately put it in boxes and barrels and in the fridge and the freezer and the cellar and hope you get around to cooking, canning, pressing, drying, or eating it before it spoils. You tuck in your still-living plants with frost cloths every night before you go to bed, and go inside and stay up late cooking and processing, and then you go door to door like Mormons -- trying to give away what you can't cook or store. People get very generous at harvest time, but it's born of necessity and overwhelm. Also, they all stop blogging temporarily, because there are just too many things to do and they don't have time to wait for the photos to upload.

Project#1: Applesauce
My fabulous friend Lori had me over to her house... I came with two coolers full of apples, and she showed me how to can, and how to use her ginormous pressure canner, and she asked me about Uganda and told me about Ethiopia and played us a book on tape! She also created an apple crisp from the excess apples. It was a lovely day. Lori is an expert canner, and proof that canning is not only *useful* but *decorative* as well; her shelves are chock-full of neatly alternating colors, from peaches to beans to applesauce. I should've gotten a picture of her display!

This is how you can applesauce:
you cut apples into pieces, getting rid of the gross stuff.
You cook the apples to a nice mushy texture, and then force them through a food mill. Cinnamon and brown sugar!
You wash your jars, fill them up, put lids on, and put them in the canner. You heat the canner with the pressure vent open for a while, then close it and raise it to a specific pressure, watch it and maintain that exact pressure for a specific time, turn the heat off, and don't open the pressure canner until the pressure is zero!
Then when you finally remove your jars (using a spiffy jar-removing-tool) you have to sit them carefully, prayerfully, delicately on a table and not jostle them for several hours. The mystical truth is that as you patiently watch and wait they will at some point "seal," suddenly making the reverse of the sound a jar makes when you open it. This is apparently because the pressure increase that happens when it cools down pulls the lid in.










finished apple sauces -- and apple crisps!

Seasons

A quote from Henry David Thoreau:
"My profession is to be always on the alert to find God in nature, to know [God's] lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas, in nature." I thank Wallowa County for the gift of many convenient halls from which to experience these wonderful masterpieces of Godly art.
There are so many these days...
the perfect (fibonacci-numbered) heads of sunflowers drying by my door
the apple tree, exuberantly hurling down new apples each day into our waiting buckets, bags, hands
the cold, frosty, starlit nights and the 80 degree afternoons

I went for a long evening walk (wishing for once that my cat were a dog who'd accompany me) and received the priceless performance of nature... hawks wheeling around above me, cattle looking up from their grazing to stare deeply at me, irrigation ditches running fast with water, the last rays of sunlight and the very first few yellow falling leaves.

My father, on his visit, pronounced the landscape "unreal" and on an "inhuman scale." Wallowa has higher mountains, colder lakes, taller trees, larger rocks, and greater fields of wildflowers than we ever typically experienced back East. This is no park. These things were not placed here for our enjoyment (much less our use) -- they are God's spontaneous and abundant creativity.
I thank God for the privilege of living here and being witness to all these oratorios and operas.

locavore

In some other areas of the world I've lived, it's trendy to be "locavore:" to eat food grown only within a strict radius, in order to reduce "food miles" and support the local food economy. I tell you the truth, for 10 months out of the year, this would be a rather treacherous diet to keep in Wallowa county. There are, of course, those who have greenhouses, and many people do can or dry food to last through those other months.
But for two months or so, this county is bursting with food from every corner. Plums and apples fall from the trees, and many people have small veggie plots if not an outright Garden.
Being a professional visit-er-of-persons, I get a lot of gifts.
Here is just today's count of fresh food:









Back in seminary I lived in a community house and we got a CSA box (community supported agriculture -- it's basically vegetables by subscription, giving us a lower price and the farm a constant and reliable customer). We'd nibble on things all week long, but invariably there would be much uneaten. I got into the habit of making Friday night veggie-box-soups; throw everything in a pot and spice it up somehow.
Today I'm not feeding 8, but a small version of veggie box soup is coming right up. Potatoes, carrots, leeks, and green beans on the side.

I want to be a Community Organizer!

And by that... I might mean something different than others.
Don't get me wrong -- I love marching for the unions... especially if I get a bucket to drum on. I am a proud member of Seminarians for Worker Justice. I believe in bathroom breaks and health benefits.

But as for my new passion -- I'm talking microcommunity here, not these big systems. I'm talking a 60-person church, a 24-unit housing project.
I love getting things together. I love convening committees. One of the things that makes my church so awesome is that there is so much free-floating energy that just needs focused (as they say here).

Yesterday - on my birthday - I was invited to a brainstorm session regarding a particular low-income housing project in the next town over. It has meth dealers, impoverished folks, elderly disabled, young families, a bad reputation, and a locked "community room." At the meeting were reps from DHS, community non-profits and government agencies, the women's shelter, the library, and NorthEast Oregon Housing Association (the landlords of the project in question). And two concerned clergy. Absent from the meeting were any residents of said project.
They gave us a whole shpeel on how effective it would be to provide "wraparound" care at this place -- to provide childcare, transportation, food bank, and educational workshops for the residents on-site -- and how greatly it would improve everything.

I sat there thinking of college residence halls. Although I was never an RA I was one of approximately four people who did attend our RA's sponsored programs, because I felt bad for her and I wanted her programs to be successful. Our RAs gave us budget workshops, resume-writing workshops, cooperative baking nights, family-style dinners, etc. The only successful program I can recall was Assocksination, wherein you "kill" your floormates by pegging them with a pair of socks. We residents were all well-off, educated, functional young people (with the exception of not a few cases of raging alcoholism) and yet most programs failed.

And here, in Enterprise Oregon, are a bunch of excruciatingly well-dressed social-service do-gooders, and they think they'll get all these residents, entrenched in generational poverty, attending their educational workshops on depression?
RIGHT. says I to me. YOU ARE MISSING A VERY IMPORTANT ELEMENT. And I raised my hand a billion times and when I finally got the floor I starting shpeeling, myself, about adding value to the community itself. About ownership, about bottom-up, not top-down, and especially about how the project will need to develop the amount of pride and self-policing that is necessary to keep a community room UNLOCKED and USABLE.
We talked. I really don't know if those landlords heard it, but at least by the end of the meeting lots of us kept on saying "bottom-up," and talking about surveying the residents with the question "what can we (inclusive we -- us AND Y'ALL) do to make this place work?"

Well today we had another meeting. This is the Faith Community Collaborative, normally a hodgepodge of said social service do-gooders, and clergy. Coincidentally, only clergy showed up today (we prayed - don't tell the supervisors of the state-sponsored conference room in which we met!) ... and we talked, a lot, about this. We talked about college again too. Good old SUNY Binghamton, and the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship there... I told the story of how Christians used to isolate in "suites" of six people on the quiet nerdy side of the campus where they stayed up late playing video games (sorry for stereotyping, it's the truth). Not in the raging alcoholic side of campus where I lived with my musician buddies and various other suspiciously non-Christian folks. I used to say "I live in Newing" and those nice Christians would work hard to mask their horror -- wow -- i'm sorry -- i know a friend you could move in with on the other side of campus if you want ... But after I left, under the leadership of the fabulous Carrie Moorhead, those nice quiet Christians started moving in the opposite direction, INTO the nasty dorms, where they commenced to have Bible Studies and to generally live life with people they used to avoid. Many people were transformed and I do believe the fellowship grew because of it (both wider and deeper).

We clergy started talking about moving into the housing project. Not moving one of us, in particular (although they unanimously recommended *i* should do it, were I to be here for more than 3 more months), but our parishioners, our church members, our friends. It will take some Doing, as this place has such a bad rap -- but what it takes is looking it as a ministry opportunity rather than a last-resort living arrangement. Once having "planted" someone with the mindset of ministry, (and support from their faith community) we start them with "I'm inviting my knitting circle over this Saturday, would you like to join?" and down the line, "I'm having a Beginner Bible Study next week, would you come?" and "want to help me plant flowers in the front of the project?" and "we should have a BBQ" and ON AND ON YOU GO and the place has VALUE and PRIDE and COOPERATION.

This is the community organizing I want to do.
It really is too bad I have to go back to school. I would do this. I would organize capture the flag games with the kids in the project, and lasagna bake-offs with the food bank donations we'd have stocked in the unlocked community room, and plant a kick-butt garden, and spread the GOOD NEWS OF GOD by word and deed alike.

Rockjack World Championship

A most auspicious event took place here this weekend: the Rockjack Building World Championship. Yes, that's right, world championship. Some of you may have missed my earlier blog on the Great Rockjacks of Wallowa County, and you may not even know what rockjacks are... the quick explanation is that they are a creative way to put up fence where the ground is too thin or rocky for a fencepost to stick in it. They are a Wallowa County specialty, although they spread to other parts of Oregon and Idaho, but apparently people as far away as Wyoming are unacquanted with their construction. So really, folks, this is the epicenter.
At today's local Stockgrowers' Association meeting/rodeo/shindig, after the cattle branding competition and before the cowdog trials, we hosted the world championship in Rockjack construction. Each of the men began with a single long log, a pile of rocks, and a handful of nails. No power tools were used. They were judged 50% on quality/durability, and 50% on speed (the fastest was - I believe - 13 minutes).
First you split your log, and start constructing a triangle:

then start putting rocks on it:

when you finish you nail your nametag on it:

and i believe the right-most one is the WORLD CHAMPION ROCKJACK, built in 13 minutes or so???! Be amazed, people, stand in awe.

OK maybe I do like rodeos

I started out with the premise "well, I'm just not a rodeo type of person" which would be completely understandable if you saw what I wore to the rodeo, while everyone else had tight jeans and western shirts, the hats, the sequins, ETC.
But it's a local event, a big one, and I felt obligated to have this cultural experience - so I went, anyway, and found myself enjoying it a lot. There was a great show of respect for the Nez Perce Native Americans who started us off ceremoniously. Solemnity regarding how these people were fought against, and dispersed, and treated badly - and then how so many of these folks turned around to be patriotic americans and to join our own armed forces. Actually, last week I was at a Native American event called Tamkaliks and got a deeper view into that -- into their warrior pride, and the honoring of not only physical wounds but the psychological wound of war. Last week there was an amazing dance competition, and I'm currently missing another one that's taking place up at the rodeo grounds.


I loved the horsemanship most of all. A drill team of six horses performed, and at the end they stood still at the ends and center of the arena, while a couple DOZEN more horses (ridden by rodeo queens and princesses from all over) galloped a serpentine around each one of them as if they were posts.



There were also a couple other wonderful horse moments -- after a round of steer wrestling (um I think I won't explain that) the one horse was running loose, and the cowboy had successfully wrestled his steer and let it go -- that riderless horse caught sight of the steer and herded it singlehandedly out of the arena (depriving the rodeo princesses of their herding duties!)

Those ladies are amazing riders.

Okay, but you know what, I DO have some objections to some of the rougher sports.
Evidence in case you don't believe it: that stallion has a flank strap around his rear quarters, as you can plainly see, not *on* but *close to* his you-know-whats, a remarkably sensitive area, and that's why he bucks. I BET THAT YOU would buck too. After the cowboy gets off, someone rides up to catch the stallion and grab a quick-release on the incriminating strap, and he stops bucking. Regarding this practice... definite ethical qualms. That's just not NICE, people!

Wild Cow Milking - though - I consider a little fairer, especially since all but two cows fairly beat her would-be-milkers. Ropes and horses notwithstanding, and even though it was two cowboys to each cow, those cows would drag the cowboys, chase them, jump over them... all but saying out loud "you want my WHAT?"

Also the clowning was first-rate. And I'm picky. My sister was in a circus which had wonderful clowns. Last rodeo I went to the clowns were eh. Punny, silly, not actually funny. But here, the one clown, plus audience volunteers, had us all in stitches!

Vacation Bible? School

When I moved into the manse here I explored one of my extra rooms and found a stash of mysterious objects. Brightly colored things that seemed like soft styrofoam, in funny shapes - incomplete shapes - pieces of shapes. Bagged in sets of twenty each, packaged in more foam (as if they weren't soft enough?), accompanied by "foam glue" and special markers. I was befuddled.

You see, my church never *did* Vacation Bible School. We went camping, yes, and put on musicals, but never had summer-camp-at-church. We missed out on the whole phenomenon of VBS crafts, a subject that is still foreign to me, but now I've done some research and found out what I was missing. A crucial part of VBS is, apparently, gluing small pieces of pre-cut foam together to make a predetermined craft shape, which then you bring home and give as a token of affection to your adoring parents who can't think of a blessed thing to DO with these crafts, so they accumulate on the counter until the child has forgotten to be proud of them or concerned with them.

To help make VBS more cohesive, the geniuses at the Oriental Trading Company have developed more than a summer's full of themed VBS packages. For example, you can have a "safari" theme, where you bring home tiger and lion crafts which remind you of the Bible because Samson and David used to kill lions, and those stories were in the Bible somewhere. Or maybe the connection was that lions and tigers are brave just like Jesus was brave? Something of the sort - I forget.

In all seriousness OTC carries a "crocodile" VBS theme, although they can't decide whether it's an alligator or crocodile, and it comes with such catchy slogans as "looking out for God's Love" (eyes poking out of the swamp), "hungry for God's word" (toothy grin), and "basking in His Glory." So if your kids remember these slogans, perhaps THIS activity:

will pack some punch.
But I wouldn't be surprised if a few of your kids come home at the end of the day a little confused about what they were supposed to be learning. Odds are the "gator snacks" (reconfigured gummi candies) will be the most memorable.

Some of you have probably never heard of such activities, and are scandalized. Some of you probably just finished your own crocodile-themed VBS and have reasons why it was great. Be it all how it may, I really do question the need for such an industry of disposable entertainment under the banner of raising up children well-schooled in the Bible. The Word of God ought to be attractive enough without the murky filter of swamp water making it "fun."

Our church is trying to re-focus VBS. We renamed it, as if that would help, but we also chose our own non-commercial theme, a little more Biblical: "the Light of the World." We'll still be doing crafts, but they will be focused on the useful tradition of candle-making, and foam glue will not be implicated. Our Sunday School Superintendent is working on her own original tunes for them to sing. Stay tuned to see how it actually goes... attendance has been low in the past few years, perhaps because the local children know this church doesn't give out gator snacks. We'll see!

went to Boise

Boise, Idaho, pronounced boy-see not boyzee. Population 200,000. Two hundred miles away from Lostine. A convenient airport.
I had to drop Luke off at the airport so he could fly to a conference after a weekend (plus) of festivities with me. We had a fun time driving out. We visited an Oregon Trail tourist trap on the way too, and saw how tiny their wagons were. On the road he (city boy) commented on things like cows and fields. I (identifying myself at least temporarily as country girl) commented on novelties such as "street lights!" and "multiple lane highways!"
Also, I drove 75 mph legally in Idaho. That is noteworthy, if not fuel-efficient.
In Boise I also parked in a parking garage for the first time in forever, which is an exciting city experience, but only paid $2.50 for it, which is a different kind of exciting. In this mental arena of urban/vs/rural experience, my mind was blowing all kinds of gaskets, as I used to consider my college town of Binghamton, NY to be a tiny podunkville nothing (area population 250,000), but yet arriving in Boise I was overwhelmed by the urbanness of it all.

POINTS FOR BOISE:
bicycle-friendly, in fact, bike-infested
many attractive young men, some on bikes
foodie food available (can I say mint-arugula-mushroom pizza??)
walkable fun downtown area with live music, hippies drumming, and a sprinkler for kids
good locally brewed beer

POINTS AGAINST:
100 degrees
six lanes of traffic going a single direction

eh, that's all I can think of for now. I'm glad I went!

Great Rockjacks of Wallowa County, or, why you should be glad I don't have a slide projector

When I grow up and become a great-aunt, with anciently long white hair and lots of quirks that embarrass my relatives, I am going to sit everyone down and show them a slideshow (or whatever analogously out-of-date technology we could use in 2063) of the Rockjacks of Wallowa County, because I find them fascinating and apparently everyone else is not really all that interested. So it sounds like a good way to oppress my great-nephews and great-neices.

a ROCKJACK is when you're putting fence up in some really scratchy poor-quality land that has only a little bit of topsoil, and there's not enough soft earth to send a post down, so you build a thingymajigy, drag a ton of rocks over, and create something heavy and strong that won't move and will hold up the post you wanted to put in the ground.
Out on the Zumwalt prairie near here, the ground is so poor that they use rockjacks every five posts or so. IMAGINE how hard it was to fence in your land!
What, are you yawning already? children, children, this is interesting stuff!

Clothes

And now, it's time for a brief rant on my new pet issue:
How on earth do we all support our society's clothing addiction? I noticed it as soon as I got off the train in New York, because it was a Saturday evening and folks were dressed to the nines in a way you don't typically see in Wallowa county. Spotless, perfect, trendy new clothing, and as I walked through Penn Station the crowds of people just appeared in my eyes as yards and yards and yards of silk, cotton, god-knows-what-else, zippers buttons and sequins.
Bear with me for a minute. You might never have had this experience of mindboggledness, but I'll do my best to share it...
Backing up, in Wallowa county there's a fabulous little place called the Soroptomist's, which is a thrift shop that takes donations of everyone's unwanted anything and sells it all back at 25c each, or thereabouts. This turns into thousands of dollars which are donated back to the community each year as scholarships. AND although they sell clothes at the ridiculous price of 25c, they still end up with nonsalable items. My friend Junebug has (no joke) a SHED full of the reject clothes, because she's starting a quilting-recycling business.

If a county like Wallowa (a few thousand residents, and where clothing styles never change too fast because "cowboy" is forever in) produces sheds full of clothes that won't even sell at 25c,
IMAGINE
(and let your mind be blown)
IMAGINE
the tons and tons and cubic MILES of reject clothing that must stream off the island of Manhattan each week, into landfills or at best vaguely bound for a journey toward less picky folks in Africa or India.
But the thing is, I've seen the secondhand markets in Africa, and I know africans won't ever wear your tiny buttshorts and those other ridiculous approximations of "clothing," because some people want clothes to COVER them.
How did we get so crazy??

On the train I met Amish people in homemade clothing (not homespun, these days, they wear commercial fabrics, but they sure do sew it by hand). Okay, the ladies' hat situations are a bit weird, BUT I admire the simplicity that it's the same weird every day. I saw nuns in their similarly conspicuous habits, a sign to the whole world: "I live a simple life."
Shane Claiborne cooked up a new kind of monastic habit for himself, identified by dreadlocks, bandana, and brown self-sewn clothing. I'm thinking up my own version, even though I'm not a monk, but it will be less like sackcloth and more colorful than his because I'll make everything out of scraps from Junebug's Soroptimist Reject Pile.

A statement against the social conventions of appearance:
People Look on the Outward Appearance, but God Looks On the Heart.

A statement to the weary silkworms and alpacas and flaxplants and polyester fairies that supply us so endlessly:
I love you, Creature, Take A Break. (a sabbath? a full-fledged year of jubilee?)

A statement to the world of new things:
God makes Treasure out of Trash, and So Can We.

city mouse, country mouse...

Back from the Vacation and the Wedding. Crazy two weeks, wonderful train trips, wonderful family!

After only five months as a country mouse, I discovered I don't like the noise and crowding and smell of a city. I do, however, treasure:

ANONYMITY, that beautiful gift whereby you can walk down the street with your sister, talking your heads off about extremely odd subjects, and watch peoples' reactions with amusement and without actually worrying that it will have any effect on your social life.

COMPANY, pressing in on you from every side, even when it is seven people to one shower, and even when you wake up in the morning to meet someone's friend or future in-law or whoever, coming through the house while you're still in your pjs.

DIVERSITY of faces and skins and styles and ethnic food.

You know you're out of the woods when...

On my way to vacation in NYC.

You know you've left Wallowa county when:

1. you see a traffic light
2. highways have multiple lanes
3. you see three or more supermarkets in the same town

getting farther away:
4. scanning the radio gets you a new station in less than ten seconds
5. you get on a train that's going anywhere but the storage yard
6. you smile at someone and they don't say "so where do i know you from?"

and about halfway across the country (after leaving Montana)
7. you see more people than deer
8. eventually, even more people than cattle
9. your train pulls through town, and ten cars or more pile up at the railroad crossing
10. i don't know how to describe it, folks, but there's this antsy, jittery, GET ME BACK TO THE WOODS feeling you get...
******
This (above) was written on the approach to Chicago. Three hours in Chicago was overwhelming, and I hate to admit it, but I've lost a little of my citydwelling edge. I even hesitated before pushing through a crowd of people headed toward me! Then i got on another train and fell asleep, waking up in the beautiful (but manageably small) city of Pittsburgh around dawn, and for the next six hours we were plunged into the jungle of Pennsylvania, with nothing but forest and rivers and the occasional teeny-tiny town. WONDERFUL! then the re-civilizing process repeats -- the proportion of working vehicles on roads to wrecks rusting in front yards begins to increase again... I'm glad I took the back route through Pennsylvania and Maryland (strange and wonderful) instead of going through Buffalo and Syracuse (familiar and unsurprising).
When I grow up I don't think I'm likely to live in Chicago, but I think I'll live in a cabin on the banks of a river in the Appalachian Mountains, because I looked at them from the train window today and imagined serving God there. Unfortunately this is how decisions get made in my life. Inspiration seizes and I naively follow. Then when I get "there" (wherever "there" is) it's always way harder than I expected and I buckle down and make myself work on it until my time there passes and I've learned a tremendous amount -- and rinse and repeat.
LEARNED SO FAR:
I like country life.

Graveyards

Memorial Day came and went, and a few days after we had this year's first funeral for our church. The death was not a particularly tragic one -- he'd had a stroke years earlier and gradually had become less and less well.
Graveside services were held at the Lostine cemetery, and a ton of people came out for it. I did not participate as we already had two pastors and the VFW participating. This was the first time I'd attended a veteran's funeral. Half of the VFW members were walking aided by canes, but they managed nicely. They fired a gun salute at the very end which definitely disconcerted me -- we'd started the service with a proclamation that "we are not mourning a death, we are celebrating a resurrection" and for me, gunshots are death -- not the hunting in the woods with friends -- not the comaraderie and discipline of military training -- to me they sound like gangs, urban violence, murder and sirens screaming a minute later. But disconcerted or no, I cried just like everyone else when they handed his widow a folded American flag.
And around here church ladies take great pride in "serving funeral dinners." This was also my first one of these. It's just a post-funeral reception, really, and the church basement gets decorated with photos and memorabilia, and everyone eats together. It was great except we had about four times more dessert than we had dessert-eaters. But the family thanked us profusely.

Another related story:
A few weeks back some of us Presbyterian Women went out to Tutuilla Indian Reservation, and as part of the day's PW program we heard a history of the church, one of the oldest Protestant mission outposts in Eastern Oregon. Here are just a few photos from their graveyard. I've seen plastic flowers as gifts in graveyards before, but I've never seen as many and varied gifts as these folks had placed on the graves. The whole graveyard is an interesting melding of a very European Christianity and the American Indian traditions.



.

Farmer Talitha has some opinions

What I know about agriculture can probably be retold in about ten minutes, total.
I know I hate thistles, and that they (and most other weeds) must be pulled out by the roots or they come right back.
I know how to tell if something like kale or rhubarb is about to go to seed, because they shoot up these long tall central stalks and you have to cut the stalks off if you want the leaves to continue growing.
I know tomatoes die if they freeze, but certain other plants can make it through a frosty night or two. I know you have to read seed packets to find out whether the seeds in question are frost-friendly or not.
Et Cetera. Simple stuff. To tell you the truth I'm not sure if the yellow leaves on my potted indigo plants mean they're thirsty or drowning. I did not grow up on a farm, so let's leave it at that.

But once upon a time on a cheap bus from Boston to NYC I met a permaculturist, he was very cute, with a beard and a shaved head, he looked semi-monkish and was very friendly. We were seatmates for the ride and we talked about permaculture because I knew what the word meant (and you can too! it means permanent agriculture - it's an all-encompassing philosophy of methods of mimicking nature in order to create a zero-waste system and utilize every available resource). My Ugandan kids had just started a project thanks to Permaculture Across Borders and I thought (still do think) it was about the best thing since gluten-free bread (j/k).
Anyway, this cute guy taught me one principle that has bugged me to this day. The principle is: if you leave soil open to the sun, it will lose water and nutrients. It will be sterilized by its exposure. Thus, permaculturers spare no effort in mulching their soil. No manicured gardens for them, they heap the mulch on.

At JuneBug's little backyard farm this morning, she and I hoed, planted, mulched. She'd tilled a whole row by machine ahead of time (no I don't know the correct term for the machine, it's in the tractor family) so we had beautiful black dirt facing the sun. As the sun rose and scorched ME, I certainly gave some thought to the scorching of the topsoil. We wondered aloud about the whole process together. Why do we till the earth up? To aerate it, yes, but also to get rid of the weeds. Why are there weeds in the ground? Because we've left this beautiful uncovered OPPORTUNITY and the seeds in the air just can't help but seize it. Because there are more dandelion seeds around than there are squash seeds (where are the squash seeds? the kitchen garbage, are they not?).
In my little mind, happily uncluttered by previous agricultural wisdom, I looked at this process I was involved in, and it looked like surgery. We're slicing open the ground, sterilizing parts of it as it gets sun-exposure, turning it around and around, breaking it up, removing the cancers, putting tubes and screws in place, re-seeding with the things WE want, and sewing it back up again with a nice top layer of mulch.
I don't think surgery is good health care. It's a useful resource and backup plan - yes. But I think ultimately good health care is about the everyday behaviors that create or destroy a body's health.
We're trying our darndest to give Mother Nature's earthy body the loving care it deserves -- so how about some preventative care instead of regularly scheduled surgery?

THIS IS MY VISION and I really think my naivete is fun here -- I just don't know all the "why you can't do it that way" things and so I'm free to imagine --
my vision is that if we understood what plants want and need, what makes them thrive, and even more importantly what makes the SOIL healthy underneath, we wouldn't need to slice it all open, scratch all around, poke at things, and overwork our aching backs in the process. A really good surgery might be needed to set things at the desired equilibrium -- but then stop. Hands off. Let Momma Nature do her thing. Take the seeds out of the kitchen garbage and throw them LIBERALLY - all over the place. Some will get eaten by birds, but they'll scratch up and fertilize the ground in the process.
Restoring Eden that is what I want to do. Reverse the curse.
...You can call me Johnny Squashseed...