Joyous Homecoming

Exodus 32:7-14
Psalm 51:1-10
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10

We want it Simple, But life is messy

We really do like it simple: we want everything black and white, either Good or Evil. There are good people and there are evil people. We are the good people. They are the evil people. God chooses us, not them. But life is much messier than that. We are all simultaneously God-made saints and self-made sinners.

We are all sinners

Bill of AA

In the early years of Alcoholics Anonymous, at many meetings a comfortably dressed and well-groomed man would enter, not as a person of importance expecting special respect and appreciation. He never even sat in the front with the regulars. Instead he would choose the back, the place where someone new was likely to be sitting – someone with the shakes –someone with an odour that he recognized. He knew that odour. He could find it in the back of his own closet at home. Reminded how he was once right there dying with that smell, he loved that man.

When the time came he would stand and introduce himself like everyone else at the meeting. “Hello. My name is Bill, and I’m an alcoholic.”
He did not add that he was one of the co-founders of AA.

The back of our Closets

We all have ugly skeletons in the back of our closets that remind us how broken we really are. It is not easy to acknowledge what’s in the back of our closets, so we often say in confession: If we say we have no sin we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.

The important truth is that we are self-made sinners.

Do we have to make it to God,
Or does God come to rescue us?

How is it that we move from being sinners to being righteous before God? Of course we would like it to be simple, we just go to God, or God just comes to us. But real life is not that simple.

How far lost we can be, even far from the ocean waters

Huts on a deserted island

During a raging storm lightning struck a cruise ship disabling all communications and controls. Drifting far off course, hours later the ship struck a reef and sank off a deserted island. Having no end of conflict during the voyage due to outspoken beliefs the survivors sorted themselves on to the island according to their beliefs about God so as to avoid the ongoing conflicts.

Freewill

The largest group built huts helter-skelter around the lovely sandy beaches. Most organized themselves in small groups, working terribly hard, some to build a raft to float back to civilization, some to build a communication system to call for help, some to make themselves as comfortable as possible. A small number of them simply did nothing but gather food and coconuts to make alcohol.

This disparate group from all religions, even agnostics, believed that they had to save themselves. God, if there was one the agnostics added, was not going to intervene. It was all up to them. They said they had great moral guides, but they did whatever they could get away with, so trouble constantly arose between them. They fought to prove that they had indeed done enough good to earn God’s favour. This large group lived like God did not exist at all, even though they said they believed in God, except the agnostics.

Alice and Double Predestination

Alice’s group built huts far from everyone else, facing a square yard for the kids and adults to walk in and meet in. The believed God was in charge of everything, including everything bad that happened. They wanted to have as little to do with the others as possible. They knew that God had saved them and not the others. They lived to prove God had chosen to save them. This group could not admit that they had ever done anything wrong, so they stuffed their closets full of old skeletons. In the dark they exercised those skeletons all too well, but when the sun shone they denied everything.

Inside Alice’s group a sub-group set up in their own corner. They believed as well that God had saved only them, that God was in charge of everything, including all evil, like their shipwreck. Instead of trying to prove God saved them they just gave up and did as little as possible. God was going to do what God was going to do and there was no way to change that. So why care about anything? They simply let life progress as it would. It was all up to God.

Martin Luther’s messy Single Predestination

A third large group believed that God alone could save them, but they still had freewill to choose to walk away from God. Few of them could precisely describe their beliefs. They built huts all around the island. This group constantly held joyous meals, celebrating that, when this member or that member had walked away from God, by Grace God had brought them back.

They were usually the kindest people, but they admitted, sometimes also as cruel as could be! They said God saved them many times each day, just because God chose to. They believed their life purpose was to extend God’s Grace to everyone. This group had people from all faiths, even Lutherans. They understood Evil came, not from God, but from humans choosing to turn away from God, as God created them to be able to.

They neither hid their sins nor tried to hide from sin. They just didn’t worry about or focus on their sins, yet they weren’t reckless with sin. They trusted God’s constant forgiveness, and worked to be God’s people of Grace.

Simultaneously Saints and Sinners and Golden Calves Galore

They accepted Luther’s paradox that all God’s people are simultaneously saints and sinners. They understood all too well that they had been right there next to Bill at the back of the room and, many times, at the bottom of their own Mt Sinai, building their own golden calf, so like Moses’ people had.

Golden Calf – God Changes God’s Mind

Moses’ people feared God had abandoned them. God became visible to Moses just 3000 yards away, but they did not dare venture up that steep trail. So they waited for Moses to come back, but he didn’t. They impatiently needed a god who would be available to them. So they collected their gold, melted it into an idol and worshipped their little godlet. Their false worship settled their anxiety, but it ate out their hearts and souls.
God sees all this and asks Moses to leave him alone so that God’s wrath can burn hot and consume this perverse people. God goes so far as to tell Moses these are Moses’ people, whom Moses brought out of Egypt. That may be all true, of a sorts, so Moses reminds God that God has delivered the people, they are God’s people.

[May we never be in need of such boldness before God. But then if it need be, may we speak only the truth! And trust that God’s Grace will prevail also for us.]

Then God remembers God’s promises, and God changes God’s mind, from deserved annihilation to gracious forgiveness. God doesn’t smite the golden calf people. Instead they will stay in the wilderness for 40 years. The next generation will enter the promised land.

We would prefer to hide all the skeletons of golden calves

What are our ‘golden calves’?

What are our ‘golden calves’? How many times have we set up our own little godlets, not that far from the Altar of the Eucharist where God is visible and handed to us in the bread and wine?

It can be something as simple as the colour of the new carpet, the stewardship campaign we run, the prayers and music we can use in worship, or even who is welcome in ‘our’ church. In our daily lives our little godlets take on a variety that could more than fill all the stores and warehouses in the world.

God’s response to our sin

How does God respond when God sees all this? God remembers God’s promises, and chooses not to consume us with fury and wrath, which we deserve! Instead God changes God’s mind and does not smite us sinners as we worship our godlets of so great a variety.

Jesus eats with us, rejoices at our return

Instead Jesus eats with tax collectors and sinners, like us. And Jesus explains it like this: The shepherd loses one sheep of 100, leaves the 99 to find the lost one, and rejoices at it’s finding and celebrates with friends. The woman loses one coin, looks thoroughly for it, finds it, rejoices and calls friends to celebrate with her. So also as God all too often loses one of us to sin. God’s glory is not in smiting us out of existence, but in rescuing us. God delights and rejoices in bringing us home.

God comes all the way to us and through the sacrificial blood of Jesus reclaims us as holy saints. God makes us sinners into saints, and though we remain sinners we are simultaneously God-made saints.

What is it to live in God’s Promise to Rejoice at Forgiving Us Sinners?

How do we reflect our faith that Jesus came into the world to save sinners? Are we to sin all the more that God can continually delight in rescuing us! No, bound to sin and unable to free ourselves, we have all given God plenty of opportunity to save us and then to rejoice and celebrate our coming home.

We have no need to try to sin more. As much as God delights in our homecoming, God enjoys us most when we live at home with all the other saints in light.

Living in Grace: Not Simple, But Joyous!

We may want it simple, but there is never a simple answer to how to live Grace. It may sound simple: we sin, God saves us, everyone rejoices, repeat. That we repeat without end makes the cycle anything but simple. It is so far from simple, though it is profoundly joyous at each coming home.

It is not ever a treat to look in the back of our closets at all the godlets of our past, but when we do, and when we fully admit who we are as sinners, then God has already reclaimed us and is busy returning us home. The whole of heaven and all the saints celebrate our return. We, too, can rejoice. When others stray to worship their golden cafe godlets and God brings them home then we get to rejoice again.

Our Prayers

We pray that we might learn to love each other, especially the ones sitting in the back barely in the door but here, shaking with ugly sin as we have all done. We pray that the Holy Spirit will teach us to love the one’s we think we cannot love, and to rejoice at each one God brings home.

AMEN

Finding One’s Way

As the Seasons Turn

The leaves, after the cool nights, turned colours

leading one to believe fall had arrived.

Have the seasons shifted earlier, like puberty, with the age of maturity now put off into the 30’s if not 60’s or not at all?

It’s not Fall for another 10 days, and the leaves turned first at the beginning of the month.

Do we need to know, or would it just be nice, comforting? Like finding that trail marker after three hours of hiking not seeing anything, walking for hours on what appears to be a mere animal trail up the side of the mountain, with just the right angle to keep it not too steep.

The woods’ floor covered without a hint of a trail.

Days like that march into months and years of any normal life, if one cares to actually ask something serious about knowing yourself. Which way ought one turn, this way towards quick success at projects completely owned by a multi-national company driven to earn profits for the shareholders on the backs and lives of the employees, sharing the ‘wealth’ along the way with enough employees for people to convince themselves the project may even be valuable?

Or does one stay true to one’s well known self and work for peanuts, sometimes cashews, or even weak crackers, like for a parrot, except one gets to speak one’s mind intelligently, clearly, with deeply rooted integrity? The price is one may never be listened to, and one easily goes hungry, dropping off everyone’s radar into obscure poverty in old age. But one’s path will always be interesting, or better described, one’s path will always be enthralling, for the matter of each day is not just to plod on with some promised reward, but the project is to have a project worth the life one gives to it. By definition that must be fully engaging.

Can one find that path?

Or, in truth, can one stand to continually struggle to avoid this path? This is what we all were created to be and do. To settle for other is to run out of sync with life, like a two propeller airplane setting up vibrations that can rip the whole plane, the whole plain life, apart. Even far short of that total disaster there is the profound dis-ease of living with the noise and vibrations of a life lived out of sync with creation.

Once one learns to live in sync, like a pilot that finally learns without thinking to set the props in sync, that ease and sense of oneness compared to the jarring throbs of being out of sync remind one that when God finished each day of creation God said, “It is good!”

Being Somebody

Or walking and dancing 500 miles!

Being Somebody
Dorothea Sölle gave the usual list of the 5 basic requirements for life:

clean air
clean water
nourishing food
appropriate clothing (not fashion, but function: safe from the environment.)
shelter
to these she added two more:
meaningful labour
love – being loved and being able to love others.
And to that I will add that one needs
culture: art like music and photography.
Tonight, after a day of church and work continuing to set up a campsite for the remainder of the allowed 14 days before breaking it all down and moving off for 72 hours, we decided to go for a walk.
It was after supper, so with a few tools, we headed out on a trail rarely used, and apparently not at all for the last year or so. As we went we cleared it so that coming back would be easier, and others could use it. There is a great deal of good fire wood to collect, that will otherwise rot.
The temperatures out are a comfortable 20⁰C dropping to 17⁰ before we got back just as the sun set orange out over the lake.

So I have much to give thanks for:

Air
the air is clean

Water
there is plenty of clean water to drink and to clean with.

Food
there is for this day nourishing food.

Clothing
I have good clothing for living in the woods and for this walk enough deet spray to cover my shoes, socks, jeans, and a special hat that has flaps down over the ears and the back of one’s neck. Sprayed with deet that hat keeps the bugs off the entire head. And gloves, oh so crucial, leather gloves to protect the hands from all the brush and mosquitoes!

Shelter

There is a very cozy camper to return to, in which no bugs survive for long, it is temperature controlled, with a place to write, sleep and wash up.

Meaningful Labour
This work of clearing off the path took just the right amount of work, soaked my shirt with sweat completely, and did not over tax any of my aging muscles. And the benefit of our labours will be enjoyed by countless people.

Love, given and received!
This I all got to enjoy with the love of my life, who loves me unconditionally, who I can safely love unconditionally. No, we are not perfect nor are our lives, but we are both kind, and kind to each other.
And we dance delightfully together, with our own kind of stepping marvellously in tune to the other, with the ability to start and stop and change the step to a great variety, so as to allow the aging bones and muscles a variety of movements to not freeze up from repetition, yet alone to leave one’s mind frozen in one count or hitch.

Culture
That is always a bit of culture, that remains a joy for both of us, and most all who witness us at graceful play.
So on return I got to enjoy:
a great option to clean up with hot water!
A great hot cup of spice tea, with just the right amount of milk added, which somehow reminds me of growing up with 5 brothers and 5 sisters, and taking an afternoon break with my dad, who always had a cup of tea, and easily allowed us one as well if we added milk.
Along with the tea just right I had some lemon yogurt, just the right mix of sour and sweet, the pucker power reminds me of my youngest son who loved lemons, just so. As we puckered up and said it was great vitamin C!

Music
The greatest part of the evening is to return with enough solar power collected to allow an hour of so of music, from my playlist.
Notably (which means these pieces evoke some of the deepest most thorough joy I have known):
Good Lovelies, especially and starting off with Lie Down Beside Me, to be reminded of the goodness of love and of it’s loss.
Rufus Wainwright singing Cohen’s Alleluia, a haunting reminder of God’s presence in the darkest times of my life.
Over the Rainbow by Israel k. Just goodness of life!
The Proclaimers’ I’m On My Way [to Happiness] which always gets the base turned up, the volume up too high and smiles, reminders of many a dance step of grace, enjoyed by us and the band that noticed us.
A great number from ABBA Take a Chance on Me, Fernando, of course Mama-Mia, and Cohen, not least of Take this Waltz, Anthem, and Closing Time.
I toss in a bit of Mozart French Horn, the beauty of brass, even though I played the Euphonium, I always envied the French Horn players.
And to top off the end of the music before too many volts are consumed:
The Proclaimers’ 500 miles, a simple and thorough statement of being a man who will live ‘in love’, which we know is a choice of health!

The Photo

But the photography that is always there is the desktop I’ve chosen recently of a photo I took this year on 19th July at 21:34.
It haunts me every time I see it, even though I am the photographer whose taught for years. This photo keeps me from getting right down to work each time, but the time is not wasted.
Right there the essence of culture meets my mind no matter the colour or gray of the day: There is light at play from all sides collecting on the birch logs and waves, but pulling attention to the clouds on the horizon spanning from tree to tree with the blue of the water countered with the orange of the setting sun!

The photo haunts even me the photographer.

Why is it so haunting?
Clue a panorama so that the light and wave patterns are just normal enough and yet out of place to be intriguing, if you do not discount it as a panorama.

There is nothing quite like it: spice with milk, lemon with sweet, the fresh air, clean hot water, the mosquitoes kept at bay, the cozy camper a home not quite a home, a path nearly cleared, all this shared with a kind person who loves me without guile or selfish demands, and spiced milk, sweet lemon, and the best music selection short but good enough to change one’s heart from set and hard to lively and inspired.
Life is great!

It is a miracle to be somebody,
somebody who knows how to enjoy life fully, with so little, but with everything that makes for a full life.

How’s your days measuring up? Are the daisy’s still down? Can you still dance with grace through all the challenges that come your way each day? Do you know God’s love is so assured that it need not even be mentioned as part of the essentials of life?
Do you have music that inspires you to love all of life completely, to a 4/4 two step, or a 3/4 waltz?
What are you missing? Ask and you shall receive, for God gives us all that we need, just not everything we ask for!

Be Somebody:
share the essentials of good life everyday with someone new. Everyone needs them!
And smile, God created you, and us all, to be able to enjoy the deep based line of nature’s best music.

The owl may hoot every night, but I am not the one tagged for death, I am the one tagged for extraordinarily important things to happen around and because of:
It is enough to see one’s love dancing to the Proclaimers’ “I am going to be the man who will grow old with you. I will walk 500 miles and I would walk another 500 miles just to be the man who walked one thousand miles to fall down at your door.”

Being Somebody?

Be Somebody!

Afraid: men women will (kill them with) laugh

2019 Mar 26 Men, Fear Or Vistas of Hope

Margaret Atwood’s quote, ” Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” is too simplified to honestly live on it’s own, unless it is just meant to honour women, and disparage men.

That’s the real deep problem of illuminating only part of reality, but that is what we are at most capable of.

Used as misadrism it’s not really helpful, it kills the human spirit.

More honest is to say:

Women are afraid men will kill them, men they know, but especially men they do not know. Their fear is real, and tragically accurate of a few men.

Men are afraid women will drive them to kill themselves, especially women they know, but generally all women. Their fear is real, and tragically accurate of more than a few women.

This fear is of real, literal death; but also of smaller deaths, even figurative deaths, deaths that rob a man (or a woman) of life at the core.

The real killer is the fear. Living in fear limits the horizon to only well guarded, defensive stances.

Or as Atwood also wrote: “I hope that people will finally come to realize that there is only one ‘race’ – the human race – and that we are all members of it.”

Life for each and every one of us is intended to be lived looking to God’s horizon that is so far out-reaches any of ours that we can only be astounded as we glimpse the vistas available to us, each and all.

Health is measured in how we help each other see those vistas and the creator of them.

Rain was forecast this morning. Instead we received snow, fluffy big heavy flakes that made noise landing on the tarps shelter.

Spring is the time of re-newed life. But first, as the snows of the winter melt, we must face the dreck of the life through the winter, records of the mess we’ve lived and made.

So instead of rain that makes mud, to get snow that gives a fresh cover again over the remains of past efforts to live, including many painful failures,

This vista reaches deep inside as the horizon is clouded away and the light is dimmed.

Fresh

Clean

Promising

Hope

Sounds like a winter baptism of the world and for the creatures.

The Clear Blue (-ish white) of Spring Snow

Fear, of how the past will catch us, is no way to live. There are renewals that do not hide or cover up that past.

They are called forgiveness, reconciliation, and hope …

hope that allows one to laugh with instead of at another person.

Beginnings

Beginnings

The snow is deep enough to ski.
I could not ski today.
The cold is mild enough to enjoy.
I could not enjoy today.
The sun was just bright enough to shine through the trees.
I could not take time to see the sun.

Its November only, already deep winter and I need to prepare …
And have little to prepare with, but much to prepare for … maybe.

What I did have is lumber scavenged from a garbage dump, solid 2×4’s 10’ and some 2×6 of various lengths.
And pallets that I pulled apart to use the light 4’ pieces as horizontal supports
For a shelter, an anteroom outside the door, for wood heat to be figured into,
For there is coming a wood stove.
A gift to compensate for the lack of money for propane.
A hope.
A back up.
A plan to use wood
For warmth when the propane gives out or the furnace takes leave again.
Or just when.
It’s a new beginning, not much of one, and it has a long road between today and the use of wood for heat.

So I did take time to see the sun rise … well to see the light of day break in.

And I noticed I am hardly alone in making a new beginning.

A seedling makes its fifth winter

I’m just in the end cycle days, instead of the start-up days.
More like the grass that is here one day and gone the next.

May the last days be many,
Filled with awe-filled wonders,
And great light,
The light of the world,
The King’s light,
Spectural light,
That shines
Through
The cracks in us to reveal the healing wonder of the Holy Spirit.

And yours,
May your new beginnings be worth the price
We all pay for choices
Away from
And towards
Somethings
The exact meaning and cost for which we can hardly know when we make the choices.

But choice we have, the basics of love.
Which is no guarantee that the force of evil will not mow us down long before our long fifth winter.

Still God stands by
Us
Engaged in helping us withstand the trials
And assaults on our being,
Consequences of choosing other than love.
But God does not end the assaults or trials, the consequences,
Nor cures the illness that is the cause.
As the seedling, we have the possibilities to grow strong,
And wave at the wind, the blowing of the Spirit.

There are no guarantees, just chocolates, of which we never know what we will get.

Thanks to the Forest.

Progress ?

Progress ?

What is progress?

I do not mean just what is the definition of progress

But what is it to actually make some progress towards what is the ultimate goal or purpose of life?

So the question begs first the other question: what is the ultimate goal or purpose of life, and then what can one do to move towards that goal or purpose?

Better stated: how does one live, so that life is good?

To use Julian of Norwich’s words:

How does one live, so that

All will be well, all will be well, all manner of things will be well,

even when there is no evidence that anything is well at all?

There are so many considerations for all of that, which today I am not even going to try to approach yet alone address, or, maybe not.

But I saw

Progress

Right before my eyes.

First,

the natural progress,

comprssd over just a few days,

from snow free on the first,

with water free to canoe across

To lightly dusted

showing only on the cleared areas and pathways

To fully snow covered

ready for skiing

and open water waving nicely at the wind.

To obscured by the condensation on the window in the early hours

To a clear view of ice

Hanging on the reeds

To the ice covering the lake

The ice formed all across the rest of the lake all at once.

Two hours before this photo taken at 12:26 noon

The lake was still waving to the wind.

I thought it was hello but it was a good bye!

So far, besides the sudden full lake freeze

This is just the progress of a fall in Canada.

Until sunset, when the forces of expansion,

Ever present as water gives way to ice,

Break the one piece surface.

The cracks show the lake’s breaking points

In vivid tracks.

Now comes the challenge,

a bit of photography,

A bit of philosophy

A bit of Grace

And a lot of Hope:

How to capture the scene in front of me that sings so wonderfully

Across my eyes and through my fingers to my brain?

Because, just trying to capture that teasingly intriguing ‘S’ of a crack

The natural tendency, especially framed by the bushes on either side of

this narrow canoe landing,

oops

this ski entrance on to the lake, –

the natural tendency is to put the ‘S’ in the middle of the frame

And as marvelous as it was in-person here the above photo kind of dies

A quick death as the eye stops with the ‘S’ and moves no further.

So it takes some moving and trying, and seeing:

S Right

So the photos above and below are an effort to move the ‘S’ off the center

to invite one’s eye to dance around the photo.

S Left

Somehow they just still sit under the wonder, somehow flat.

So the idea is to look around in a different direction to see something more.

And with that effort still missing the wonder of the view

I tried getting more,

literally more of what was in front of me:

The panorama of the whole view out the canoe, opps, ski access point.

It’s all there and still that wondrously difficult and intriguing ‘S’ falls dead compared to the reality in front of me.

So …

I tried for a little less of everything

Which becomes intriguing

with the clear focus on the near, iced shore,

a view of the ‘S’

heading off to the sunset

leaving us at the far shore

catching a ride back to the near shore,

broken by – well it’s

still not quite right with the small branch breaking in on the left,

A ‘merge’ that distracts the eye out of the essentials to the big ooppps.

But it is -20° C

That’s minus 20° Celsius

I’m using voice activation to start the photos,

Which does not work for panoramas

so off come the gloves to shoot.

And my bared fingers are crying SOS

(which always gives way to them splitting more painful cracks at the tips in protest, which take days to heal),

So I did not get that even normally simple merge corrected,

a small step of progress towards good,

That I normally would not pass up on.

Still the sun rises again the next morning, gorgeously red and promising …

Promising of more snow

Which comes in spades

Or inches

Or millimeters.

But it fills the skies after 10:00 until dark and beyond,

The land gets a new cover, perfect for skiing.

The furnace has developed a hole in the combustion chamber, pumping C0 into the cabin,

And I have to turn it off through the nights, and only when I can get by without it’s heat does my head clear enough to deal with all the challenges which a furnace-less camper presents.

I move from flowing water, even heated water,

to ‘running’ water:

I run,

to get water,

then I have running water.

Progress.

You

See

What is progress?

The progress that is inevitable

And the progress which is the result of

the labour of hope and photography

Which catches and communicates the wonders of creation

To demonstrate

Pure

Beauty.

God’s beautiful world.

What progress have you made lately?

Not just getting through each inevitable day,

But moving each day a step sideways and deeper

Toward those things that

Are worth living

For

And

From?

Well,

Will

all be well,

Not just in words,

But in the soul of your life?

In the soul of this creation?

In the face of challenges and temptations that open the door

To evil and sin allowing them to prevail?

Or are you a Saint, by grace, giving witness to God’s presence everywhere, always.

Do you love your neighbours as your self, and your enemies,

and the LORD your God, with all your soul and your might?

Only by Grace,

is real progress possible.

Start of a Sweet Month

1 November, All Saints Day
Start of a Sweet Month

It is a sweet month, November is, a month when winter is not set, though the sun sets early and rises late. The hard cold is not yet, and the water is still clear for canoeing.
A month to prepare, a month that is the end of the church year, a month when travelers are few and far between and solitude and peace are more easily found in old haunts and newly explored places.

Then on the first day of this sweet month, with temperatures already below zero often in October, the cold arrived over night at -7 with a low forecast of -4. In town it’s -3.
Halloween was a cold one again.
And November came in with just a skiff of snow.

Snow on the canoe.

A closer look at the obvious presence

Of a beaver, obvious because of the telltale tooth marks on the trees, as the beaver prepares for winter, setting the food of trees in storage next to the beaver house, not 50 meters distant downstream.

This, just a stone’s throw from the wake up view, is the outflow creek of the lake. The beaver have taken this creek, dammed and controlled it to keep the lake at high water marks and made a quiet pond, a home for them, and for us to canoe on just down the creek a bit, over a couch some fools left on the ice one winter past.

This the stillness of wonderful weather, quiet from the throngs, and distance from the noise of the city, but not out of reach of the military jet sonic booms as they reach out to distant sorties.

Here the soul, on All Souls Day, can live well.
Here the saint, on All Saints Day, can live well.
Here creation is good.
Money is scarce, fuel for transportation and electricity (generator made) is short, and propane for heat is dwindling.
Ah, a wood stove in a shelter on a trailer, which would provide dry heat, a system for heat that costs labour and chainsaw gas and oil, and truck gas to haul in the wood. But that’s a pipe dream.

Even so, here, whatever may come,

all is well, all is well, all manner of things are well.

Home, Sweet No-Home

Home Sweet No-Home
This Halloween

The autumn this year has been mixed as to whether we are going to experience a bit of summer finally or at least a taste of fall, or is the weather just going to quick-jump right into freezing temperatures and snow cover, but never enough to ski on.

Summer to Snow

Snow lays on the ground even before the leaves have all fallen.

Bare Brown

The snow is gone and the leaves with it.

Piles of Ugly

The trash shows again, that people thought it was their privilege simply to toss along the path into the woods.

There are high piles of ash dotting the edges of the campsite and the woods around, as if to carry and pile them around were to have cleaned up after oneself. Nails, broken metal rods, pallet plates, bricks, concrete blocks, half burned plastics, old cans, broken plastic you-name-its, and the most disturbing, an old quad lead-acid battery. (We got that back into the recycle system thanks to Primco Dene’s staff at the car wash and oil change business!)
The bad behaviour of humans should no longer surprise me, but it does. Good behaviour is always welcomed and I try to remember to thank people for it.

The real joy of being home, at no-home, are the views and light and water and sky.

Standing Together

Whether it’s the solid white-ish grey trunks of the poplar,

Cross Tops
Or the tops of leafless trees crossing the grey skies.

Leaning White

Or the white birch barely hanging in there on the shore.

Wedges of Reality

There simply is nothing like being able to canoe out on to the lake to see the afternoon sun playing with clouds and pure reflections making harmonious orchestration wedges of trees on the shores.

Beckoning Light

Until the sunsets behind the trees on the shore beckoning me to wander closer to the wonders of creation.

Ending Delight

Then the universe comes together in specular beauty as the water reflects in ripples my presence in the canoe in the reeds as the sun claims clouds on the horizon as its playing field.

For being homeless, this is a wonderful home, creation with a small wonderful place for me.

Where is your home?
Do you see beauty all around you?
Do you see creation as a gift?
Life, each day, each hour, each moment as time to marvel at all that is, bad and good, ugly and beautiful
In creation and creatures alike?

The View in Words

The View in Words
Wake orange on dark blue black water waving still in a hardly breeze.
No animal, then a neck or nose, a loon or a beaver?
A Sock under the water out a foot into the water, wool and warm and orphaned.
The wake joined by a second this closer and obviously a loon or duck maybe, and then the other moves and two new wakes colour the water.
The red spread of sun having set small in area with tinges of red reflected in water and clouds.

The muskrat’s footprints, and then a crow’s footprints. Clear water into the sand and reflecting amid the reeds bent in submission to the cold, doubled in their own reflection curved top and bottom breaking the water view, but still coloured by the setting sun.
The orange water catching the sunset not red but orange as if the sky were more beautiful than it is.

All these words

because I missed the sunset canoe ride and forgot my camera, even my cell phone, and must remember the view as it is, until another showed up with a camera and I borrowed it to record what I took note of in my mind as the view for tonight’s setting sun.

This is the sunset.

Tracks

The colours, the view, the sunset.

Words, as great as they are, are not as verbose as a photo.

Relief Canoeing Again

Relief! – Canoeing Again

I went to sleep again to the sound of loons.
And woke to moderate temperatures (9° C) and the sound of the wind.

Sun catches the tree tops

Before the sun disappeared into the bright light of day behind the clouds
I paddled in my canoe against the wind and waves
And found beauty right there:

Launch in foam and little waves that seemed large.

Keep paddling, even if everything is against you,
When the wind blows against you as you head out,
The trip back home is easy.

Peace is not the absence of discord,
But the presence of Christ in the inevitable discord.

Joy is not the lack of sorrow, dismay or despair,
JOY is the presence of God in all that life brings.

Of course the basics requirements for life are good to have as well:

Clean air,
Clean water,
Nutritious food,
Proper clothing,
Sufficient shelter,
Meaningful labour,
And
To be able to love and be loved.

And how many people of our current 7.7 billion on earth do not have the basic requirements of life?

Many, many, too many!

It is not for lack of the basics. There is plenty.
It is a matter of greed, hording and consuming beyond need, and turning a blind heart to those who need the basics, which are consumed by others as luxuries.

With thanks to God for the basics that I do have; and a prayer that the others will be mine before it is too late.

This time it was just a scare, until the response came back containing this:

After our discussion this morning I can clarify that the Alberta Environment and Parks has no issue with you camping on Public Land for the 14 day period and vacating for 72 hours as per the Public Lands Act and Public Land Administration and Regulation.

Which is exactly what I told the RCMP constables as they evicted me, an unjust and unnecessary eviction. Cost me more than a few days in court prep time, anxiety, and money to move the camper off in less than 14 days.