Autumn Vacation

Trish and I just returned from a little vacation. We had been asked to make a presentation to the community at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, and so we decided to make a bit of a holiday of it. After our presentations, we traveled on to "The Land Between the Lakes" and then eventually on to Mountain View in Arkansas. We will probably have several entries here over the next few days.

When we lived in Arkansas 40 years ago, we visited Mountain View, a small community nestled into the hills of the Ozarks. At that time, it was a sleepy little town, but already know as a center for "mountain music." We attended a fiddle contest--an experience that we both remember vividly. By happen-chance our visit this year coincided with the 2009 Statewide Fiddle Contest, and so it was a little like deja vu. However, things have changed a lot in the last 40 years.

Mountain View is still a little town, but not quite so sleepy. It is the home of the Ozark Folk Center as well as a mecca for all sorts of music--mountain, folk, country, spiritual, bluegrass, etc.

First the Ozark Folk Center.The Ozark Folk Center is a unique state park devoted to preserving Ozark crafts, music, and heritage. Traditional craft demonstrations, live music performances, living histories, apprentice programs and workshops tell the story of this mountain culture. Here we visited broom makers, coopers, knife makers, soap makers, weavers, carvers, etc.

While wandering about, we happened upon an old man, fiddle in hand, who was sitting on an old desk and telling stories. His accent was wonderful and he told stories and played us a tune and danced about.


And everywhere was music:



Then there is the music. It is everywhere. Its in the Folk Center. Its in one of seven different nightly shows in the area. It is in the CourtHouse Park--the night we were there, there were seven sessions going on simultaneously. Here is a link to a favorite of ours, Shady Grove, sung by the Patchwork Gals on their album Patchwork Stringband. (Unfortunately, their web site is down and so I cannot provide a link or tell you how to get a hold of this album. Their address is P.O.Box 812, Mountain View, AR, 72560.) At the Brickshy (that is as in "brick shy of a full load") we heard the Leatherwoods. They have a ton of albums, but again, I cannot find a website for them. Here is Angel Band from their Gospel Treasures Album. (Their address is Dancing Doll Music, P.O.Box 64, Mountain View, AR 72560.) And lastly, here is a group that we did not get to see--maybe next time. This is a little traditional tune called Whiskey Before Breakfast from their Harmony Combined Album. (Their address is Harmony, 858 Crooked Ridge Road, Mauntain View, AR 72560.) Here are some pictures of the Leatherwoods.

Iowa Summer Writing Festival

One of the highlights of last summer was a week spent in Iowa City at the Iowa Summer Writing festival,  thanks to the gentle and persistent persuasion of a dear friend who has been trying for years to get me there. 

Now I know why so many people have been going back year after year.  It was exhilarating to be in the company of other people who love words – reading them, writing them, talking about them, and thanks to Iowa City’s literary walk, walking on them.  The Literary Walk is a series of bronze panels, connected by quotes about books that have been stamped into the concrete sidewalk.  Because each bronze plaque features short excerpts from the works of well known authors with ties to Iowa, those of us who love to read can do so while strolling along both sides of Iowa Avenue from Clinton Street to Gilbert Street.  There was good reason to go wandering through down-town Iowa City because of all the good restaurants, coffeeshops and galleries to be found there.  Not to mention the bookstores – like Murphy-Brookfield at 219 N Gilbert St, where in addition to finding an outstanding selection of carefully arranged used books, you can also make the acquaintance of a literary cat who lives in a box on the book-seller’s desk. And then there’s the famous Prairie Lights Bookstore,  which itself is worth a trip to Iowa City if for no other reason than to be reminded of why browsing through the nooks and crannies of an independent bookseller’s shop is so much more satisfying than the same old same-old that greets us when we set foot inside those clunky big box bookstores that are showing up everywhere.

Someone once said that he has always imagined paradise to be a kind of library.  Or how about a really terrific bookstore?  That sounds pretty heavenly to me.  On the other hand, books have also been my downfall.  (Literally.  Once I stumbled over a bag of books and ended up shattering my ankle so badly that I had to have a steel rod and 8 surgical pins implanted before I could walk again.) The problem with bookstores is that I keep stumbling over books I want to buy and I tend to agree with whoever it was who observed that the worst thing about buying new books is that they keep us from reading the old ones! Nevertheless that doesn’t stop me once I’m set loose in a bookstore.   And so, after spending much more money that I should have at Prairie Lights and Murphy-Brookfield, I should have simply headed back to my room at the Iowa House and stayed there until it was time to go home.  Instead, my friend Teresa and I walked around the corner and headed into the Chait Gallery  where I spotted a marvelous ceramic sculpture, titled the Obsessive Reader. 

Much as I tried to argue against something as impulsive as buying a piece of sculpture on the spot, in the end I just couldn’t resist.  And my friend Teresa proved to be no help at all. She kept agreeing with my rather lame argument that the sculpture would make a fitting memento of a week spent surrounded by books and writers.  (If I wanted a memento I could just as easily have picked up a University of Iowa coffee mug or tee shirt.  It would have been a lot cheaper.) In the end, of course I gave in and purchased the Obsessive Reader who I have christened “Lexie” - short for lectio the Latin word for reading.

The Obsessive Reader was created by Iowa artist Linda Lewis. You can check out her work at her website  or at the following galleries:

From Our Hands
E 4th & Locust
Des Moines IA 50309 

Outside the Lines Gallery
409 Bluff St.
Dubuque IA 52001

"People are attached, not only to what is inside books, but to the object itself, the old familiar form that first took shape over four centuries ago.  A laptop computer is a wondrous thing; it is inconceivable to me now that I ever did without one. . .but a computer is no substitue for a book. No one wants to take a computer to bed at the end of a long day to read a chapter or two before dropping off to sleep."
                   ~ Ann Quindlin
                  How Reading Changed my Life

 


 

Mornings at Dawn

If we weren't morning people we'd miss out on so much that's worth getting up for! Like this, for example:

Since our usual time for getting up is between 5 and 6 am, we're usually going strong by the time dawn arrives, which as far as I'm concerned is probably the most spectacular part of the whole day. It's definitely worth being around for because like it's counterpart, dusk, it is a quiet, gentle time. A time for noticing things we might otherwise miss - things that make our world such a beautiful place in which to wander around.


The Abbott of New Melleray Abbey once told me that monastic tradition has always considered dawn and dusk to be the great hinges of the day. Dawn swings open the doors to the daylight and dusk closes them again as darkness falls.

In the early morning hours one of our favorite things to do on a morning like this one is to hop in the car and head out into the country to watch the night-time turn into the day.


And now that it is September, a drive along misty country roads at dawn is a chance to roll down the windows and breathe the crisp tang of late summer grasses and listen to the drone of insects rasping their melancholy early autumn songs.


On a mist shrouded morning as the sun rises above the horizon, it almost seems as if we've wandered far away and have ended up in an enchanted kingdom miles and miles from home. But it's just southern Dane County, Wisconsin and we are only about 20 miles from where we started when we left our driveway. But no matter how many times we travel these same back country roads, it always seems like there's something new that catches our eye and makes us pull over to the side and stop for a while.


In this case, it's the unmistakable evidence that summer has gone and spent itself and is getting ready to be transformed into that familiar tapestry filled with the colors we always associate with autumn.


Once the sun has burned away the early morning mist and lit up the fields and pastures of the rural landscape, we head for home ready to begin the day, telling ourselves - as we have hundreds of times already - why it is that we love living in Wisconsin and why it is that we love waking up early.



Why I Wake Early

Hello, sun in my face.
Hello, you who made the morning
and spread it over the fields
and into the faces of the tulips
and the nodding morning glories,
and into the windows of, even, the
miserable and the crotchety –
best preacher that ever was,
dear star, that just happens
to be where you are in the universe
to keep us from ever-darkness,
to ease us with warm touching,
to hold us in the great hands of light –
good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day
in happiness, in kindness.

            ~ Mary Oliver
           Why I Wake Early: New Poems

At the Art Fair with Lissa

Our friends Rick and Lissa Brown were here for the weekend.


Lissa is a weaver - one of those people you see at art fairs in little white canopied booths smiling serenely as people come and go, occasionally answering inane questions (“where did you buy the material to make all this cool stuff?” “I don’t buy it, I make it” “you mean you, like, knit it?” “No, I’m a weaver. My stuff is all handwoven on a loom.” “Oh yea, that’s cool.” ) So yesterday we helped her get set up for an art fair in New Glarus and it was like, you know, cool.


The thing I love about art fairs is the “handmade-ness of it all. In this age of big box stores where you can find row after row of shelves stacked from floor to ceiling with mass-produced, often shoddily made but expensively priced merchandise (much of which hasn’t even been manufactured in the United States) there’s something heartening about art fairs. What you see as you stroll from booth to booth is the work of someone’s hands – usually someone who’s right there ready to answer any questions you may have about whatever it is that has attracted your attention. I love the wholesomeness of art fairs – the fact that much of what you find there has been made out of natural materials: clay thrown pots, hand spun and naturally dyed yarns, wood that has been whittled and carved, or shaped and crafted. I like knowing that in a society where more and more of what people buy looks exactly like what everyone else is buying, it doesn’t have to be that way all the time. Fortunately there are still artists and crafts persons around, like my friend Lissa, to thank for that.





But I’d never thought about how much work goes into setting up and taking down those nifty little art fair canopies, not to mention the display racks that are so artfully arranged inside.


Rick made the wooden racks Lissa uses to display her beautiful scarves, shawls and table runners.

It takes a lot of muscle hauling all this stuff around, and when Rick’s not around to help Lissa does it all herself. You’d never know it to look at her, but she’s one sturdy lady!!


It was a beautiful day for an art fair and I enjoyed hanging out with Lissa watching people come in, admire her work, and observe them as they stood there trying to decide whether or not to buy whatever it was that had caught their eye. Even though most of them didn’t, enough of them did so that by the end of the day Lissa felt it had been a good show. And Rick was pretty happy about it too!

A Monastic Funeral

Yesterday afternoon Mother Columba Guare, Mississippi Abbey’s first Abbess, died after a difficult illness. She was buried this morning. There was no undertaker, no embalming, no cosmetic prettiness, no satin lined casket and heavy vault to cover it, no artificial grass to disguise the mound of dirt at the burial site. Instead once Mother Columba had been pronounced dead, her sisters who had lovingly cared for her these past 14 days as she lay dying, proceeded to prepare her body for burial. They dressed her in the monastic habit and laid her on a simple wooden bier at the foot of the altar in the Abbey church where she had prayed day and night for over 40 years.

Those of us who stood to whisper our silent prayers at the side of the bier looked down at a face that had not been tampered with by a skilled mortician in order to create the illusion of health and vigor. There was no artificial glow on her cheeks. Instead her face was drawn and completely colorless. She did not look like she was sleeping peacefully. She looked like she was dead. The customs that surround a Cistercian death and burial can seem unusually severe to those whose attitudes and experiences have been formed by our own death-denying culture. In spite of a near-obsessive fascination with the blood, gore and graphic violence that pervades so much of what masquerades as entertainment these days, most people remain painfully unable to deal with the reality of death when faced with the need to confront it. But Cistercians have a completely different approach. And what else would you expect from people who take seriously St. Benedict’s admonishment about “keeping death daily before your eyes?”

And what they are keeping before their eyes is their utter conviction, born of their deep faith, that death is not an ending but rather an amazing and awesome entry into what life has been leading up to all along. And so the sisters are able to balance their deep sorrow at losing someone who was dear to them, with a genuine sense of joy because they truly believe she has just begun to live.

It is that conviction that comes through in such a profound way all throughout the funeral liturgy, culminating at the gravesite in the burial itself. For the sisters, the procession from the church to the cemetery is one of the most important elements in the funeral liturgy because it symbolizes the passage from this world into the next. And so at the end of the funeral Mass, after the sisters had sung their last song of farewell, Sister Columba’s funeral bier was carried out of the church, preceded by the large white Paschal Candle, a symbol of Christ’s resurrection. The rest of the monastic community fell into the procession, followed by family and friends, each of us having stopped first to take a flower from the large arrangement at the foot of the altar.

To the tolling of the monastery bell, the procession made its solemn way the short distance to the little cemetery surrounded by trees on the side of a hill overlooking one of the Mississippi River’s bluffs. The grave had been dug by hand by teams of sisters working in shifts all yesterday afternoon, and two sturdy planks had been laid across it in order to support the bier until it was time to be lowered into the ground. Following a final blessing, two sisters covered Mother Columba’s body with a white cloth. Then the planks were removed and the pallbearers gently lowered the bier into the ground while one of the sisters sang the Suscipe (Receive me, O lord, as you have promised, that I may live. Do not disappoint me in my hope.)


At the conclusion of the hymn, Mother Nettie stepped forward and dropped a rose into the grave and then one by one the other sisters, followed by the rest of us, stepped to the edge of the grave and did the same thing. Slowly, silently, we each tossed a single flower onto the shrouded figure that lay at the bottom of the grave until it was almost completely covered with roses, dianthus, chrysanthemums, miniature sunflowers, and delphinium. Wiping away tears, but speaking calmly and steadily, Mother Nettie recited a last blessing and Sister Gail, the former Abbess, led us all in final prayers of intercession. We then said the Lord’s prayer and joined the sisters in singing the Salve, the beautiful hymn to Mary that is sung each night in the monastery. Then Sister Nettie took a shovel, scooped up a generous portion of dirt and cast it into the open grave. As the rest of us took our turns with shovel and spade, the enormity of what we were experiencing could not be ignored or denied. Death, like birth, is one of the most profound of all realities. And as I stood watching Columba’s grave fill back up with the soil the sisters had so painstakingly dug up yesterday, I kept thinking about the words of the Hymn we had sung during Communion: “Now the green blade rises from the buried grain….”

For those who believe that Columba’s death is after all simply another birth into another life, she is like a seed that has been planted deep in the soil, to rise again like a green and living blade of wheat.