Month: October 2010

I was pouring over Saveur Magazine, trying to come up with some ideas for Dave’s birthday dinner when I read an article about a meal in Lebanon.

Dave’s family lived in Lebanon for a year, so the title caught my eye. I was moved by the idea of friends told to gather “whether there was a cease-fire or not”, their way guided by votive candles, lighting the blacked-out street and stairwell.

I think of my friends sometimes as those votive candles, lights that guide me through dark moments, and the article made me want to give them the same experience as the author—who turned out to be Carolyn Forche.

In the clear light of day, however, I realized I would need a staff to prepare such a feast. With twenty-nine trees to plant and two huge boxes of bulbs from White Flower Farm sitting on the . . .

In the garden later that evening, I looked up again, thinking how the miners must not be able to get enough of light and sky. I hoped for a long while the mining companies would stop using their workers as disposable machines, that these men would now be afforded light, justice and dignity.

Then I went back to my ordinary tasks—planting the lettuces—but with more gratitude than usual.

. . . rain of the season.

I’d just finished washing up the supper dishes and had settled into the rocker by the window, my favorite chair. Actually, it’s everyone’s favorite chair around here, including the cat Dudley. I picked up my book and wondered for a minute where Dudley was. I chalked his absence up to the weather. He must be out hunting, I thought. It’s been so warm.

Another wise person I find myself turning to right now is Parker Palmer. In a small book Let Your Life Speak (small book/big ideas), he writes about how the Quaker saying “Let your life speak” has guided him. At first he interpreted the saying to mean he should do REALLY IMPORTANT THINGS. Think Martin Luther King or Gandhi. Only later he came to understand that he should actually listen to his own life, not force it to say what he thought it should say, not force his life to serve his ego. This, Palmer says, is the only way to find a true vocation, and vocation, he points out, comes from the same Latin root as voice.