Construction noise is louder than highway traffic but, like the dogs, I hardly notice either anymore, until I drive to town.  Indiana countryside, field and forest mainly, has been turned to rubble made of limestone and red clay.  The hammers pound boulders into rocks (thus the name), to load and haul them somewhere else.  I hear the stones hit steel and the back-up beeping as dump trucks pull away.  Twelve, thirteen hours a day they work right now to maximize June’s daylight.  The newspapers tell no end of the complaining, broken contracts and budget overruns.  They say the whole project is now years behind schedule.  All the same, a road is coming into view. 

I’d like to ask an expert to explain the difference between art and engineering.  Are new roads as beautiful drawn on paper as when laid upon the earth?  The math alone must have cost a thousand pencils!  For all the bother and delay, it’s wonderful to watch these workers work and imagine their pride in building something so useful as a road. 

I’m not so naïve I don’t know the purpose of this road is to make rich people richer.  But all the same it still reminds me that we can do most anything we set our minds on doing, anything to which we apply this gift of God called human imagination.  We can now catch the wind and sunlight.  I have a jacket made of soda bottles.  Some Indiana farmers I know grow a special strain of corn [see www.bhrp.org] and ship it to the world’s poorest people who thrive on it even if they have nothing else to eat.  Talk about whole food!  Once upon a time each was a person’s idea, a dream.  Amazing!  I pray this beautiful day offers you the space to nurse the ideas in your own heart and mind. 

~ peace & prayers,
pastor annette

And a Recipe:  Something new and yummy I’m eating this summer is spinach, water-melon, red onion, feta cheese salad.  In a big bowl use about equal parts spinach and watermelon, a generous dump of feta, onion slivers and only a tablespoon or so of oil.  Mix it up and let it sit in the fridge a few hours.  Stir the salty, watermelony, slightly oniony runoff back over the spinach and eat a big pile of it.  Summertime for your mouth!

Beloved:

One family rode their bikes to church on Sunday.  Their kids’ heads smelled like sunshine when I hugged them.  I’ve got tiny tomatoes on the vine.  I picked a batch of basil and stirred it into a salad.  My whole kitchen smelled like summertime.  Southern Indiana is so beautiful in June, sometimes it hurts my eyes.

I think it such a precious thing to be living now in the same place I was a child.  Alone in my yard I sometimes fall out of time and am not sure if I’m eight years old or fifty-three.  Not because I’m senile (yet!) but because the air and light and scent are acutely familiar.  My eight-year-old self  didn’t know she loved being by herself outside:  reading a book, swinging, doing nothing.  I didn’t know I was happy.  I was just a kid whose mom said, “Go outside and play!” – to which I never once answered, Thank you for this most perfect gift.

I’ll thank her every June, July and August morning left to me.  Picking berries and carrying weeds to the ditch.  Dragging water hoses and loading the birdfeeders.  Plucking off the tomato worms and filling up the egg basket.  Knowing it was always her idea, that I go out and play.  And a gift from heaven, I suppose, to move away, then end up back here after all.
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I like thinking about how all over the world, in places as different as can be from here, people are just as much at home as I am here among these green hills, below this blue sky, where crickets and frogs sing each other to sleep as I write.  Wherever home is for you – a place or a person or maybe a memory – I pray you have a moment there sometime soon.  

These are a few pics from my playground these last few days.
1.) Chicken wearing a hydrangea bonnet  
2.) Annabelle hydrangea in peak bloom ~ same as on the Communion table this past Sunday
3.) Lungwort and lemon balm taking over
4.) Yellow squash plants
5.) Licorice Anise smells amazing!

​Beloved:
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Sunday afternoon I collapsed and I really didn’t move much until Tuesday morning when I decided to stay home and spend the day to catch up with myself.  Yesterday I stayed home all day to catch up with myself and am a new person today for it. A hundred thank you’s to my colleague, Elder Wanda Hosea, for introducing me to this phrase.  We were leaving a meeting and she tossed off the phrase, “Well, I’m going home to catch up with myself.”  I didn’t ask her what she meant, but dropped the phrase in my pocket all the same.

Last week was Vacation Bible School, you see – the one week in the year I work about 70 hours (which I know some people work every week - blessings be upon you!) and never see the inside of my office or my kitchen at home.  For 70 hours I mostly cook and clean and shop and clean and play with kids and clean.  I laugh a lot and enjoy my job and these people altogether.  I don’t do anything but VBS the whole week long, and I love, love, love, love it.  I’m also thrilled when it’s over, at which time I collapse for about 40 straight hours.  Then I get up and catch up with myself.

Other believers talk about their centering practice or centering prayer.  I think they mean something like catching up with myself, but I also imagine them as profoundly spiritual people sitting cross-legged on the floor thinking no thoughts, just inhaling silence and exhaling calm.  People who, when they are active, speak of quotidian practices and finding meaning in the ordinary.