Currently reading: The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (includes The Ascent of Mount Carmel, The Dark Night, The Spiritual Canticle, The Living Flame of Love, Letters, and The Minor Works) by Saint John of the Cross 📚

Someone posted a Spotify playlist that neatly approximates the big AOR station of my Atlanta youth/adolescence. I’ve got that going in the background while the grill’s fired up again. Styx, beer, and barbecue smoke make for a pretty good combination.

These just went on the grill - dry brined overnight, then covered in an apricot glaze. I’m using apple wood to smoke them and the whole mess will wind up in tacos when they’re done. It smells ridiculously good even now.

Finished Zinn and am still trudging through Gramsci. It's dense to say the least, and I can't say I'm getting a whole lot out of it right now. So much of it (so far) is deeply situated in the Italian politics of the time. In any event, this will close out this period of politics and I'll be glad to switch back into spiritual reading (Saint John of the Cross), renewed efforts at regular lectio and so on.

I've been listening to a lot of retrowave via Spotify lately. It works well as background music while I'm working and scratches a deeply nostalgic itch. If you're not familiar, it's electronic music made today, but made to sound like it was made in the mid-to-late-1980s and 90's. A slightly creepier alternative, mallwave, can best be described as the music you might hear in...well, a dead mall: the lo-fi upbeat Muzak-pop-simulacra that you might hear crossing an atrium on your way to the Orange Julius.

Having reached Midsummer, I can report that the garden still seems to be doing well. The squash bugs finally arrived and now it's game of attrition to remove the little egg clusters as I find them. When I find the adults, I pick them off and feed them to the chickens, which is extremely satisfying. When the squash is done, I'll nuke that bed and we'll put something else there. Maybe spinach and mesclun mix. The cukes are booming and the tomatoes are starting to blush. The companion-planting is also coming along, though I think that planting it sooner would have given it a better head start in terms of rain. The hot peppers we direct-sowed also came up nicely. No blooms yet, but the heat is definitely agreeing with them.

The vocations office dropped a note last Friday: forms from St. Meinrad (library and network access), class schedule for the coming year, retreat in October, first session in a couple of weeks and bring something to take notes.

TL;DR: Diaconate things are about to ramp up. 

St. Ephrem the Syrian, pray for us!

Wrapped up Mystagogy tonight with a session on basic apologetics. Got to the church with enough time beforehand to visit the confessional and spend 15 minutes or so before the Blessed Sacrament.

Still working my way through Zinn's People's History and the second Emergence collection. My wife is auditing some classes in preparation for post-graduate work in mathematics and spends the mornings on Zoom classes doing calculus and other arcana.

We're in a daily-thunderstorm sort of weather pattern at the moment which is good for the garden. The squash and cukes in the raised beds are going absolutely bonkers. Once again I've planted too much, and once again it's a constant struggle to keep vines trained on panels before they bust loose and take over the whole area. The Three Sisters area is still pretty chill, but I expect the pumpkins to take off before very long.

The hot peppers I direct-sowed are coming in and looking pretty good. Here's hoping they bear well in our long growing season. I really want to dry more of the chilis this time and the pickled habaneros from last year are still absolutely delicious. So yes, more, please. And this year, I will get garlic in. Two full beds, if I can pull it off. And then there are the plans for that asparagus next year, etc, etc, etc.

Radio stuff has been slow as of late. A bit of SWL with the RSPdx - utility stations and whatnot. Made a SSB contact with a Museum Ship on the Air, up in Muskegon, MI. I'll do more in the fall; there's too much to do outside in the good weather.

Three sisters

Currently reading: The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore 📚

Currently reading: A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn 📚

Beautiful summer cumulus

Churches in the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition inherited many of their ideas of sacred space from Judaism. The center of their church, like the metaphorical center of the Jewish temple, is called the qidduse qiddusan, the Holy of Holies. In that center rests the tabot, a replica of the biblical Ark of the Covenant, another borrowed symbol. Only priests can enter the Holy of Holies. Enclosing this sacred center is a larger circle—the meqdes, where people receive communion—and outside that lies a still larger circle called the qine mehelet, the chanting place. All three spheres are contained under the round church roof, but those circles ripple outside the church itself.

Beyond the church building lies the inner wall, which forms a circular courtyard around every church. According to tradition, the proper distance this wall should stand from the church is the armspan of forty angels. During my visits to different churches, I watched many people enter these inner courtyards. Before crossing the threshold, they performed various gestures of piety—crossing themselves three times, dipping a knee, perhaps kissing the wooden doorframe. It was clear to everyone that when you crossed the inner wall, you were entering holy ground.

The brilliant move the priests made was to take the idea of the inner wall and replicate it. Using the same design, they built a second wall of dry-stacked stone just outside the forest boundary, thereby extending the invisible web of sanctity to include the entire forest. Suddenly the holy ground surrounding the church expanded from the size of a backyard to a vast tract of ten, fifty, or even several hundred hectares.

Fred Bahnson writes about the remnants of Ethiopia's highland forests, and how the Orthodox Church is preserving them. The companion film is gorgeous and well worth a look too.

Nice! Emergence Magazine vol 1 is back in stock!

✅ Ordered

My seeds came early so I was able to get started on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. The corn is in, so now we wait until it’s about 6” to add the beans and pumpkins in and among them. Very excited to see how things develop.

There have been several sightings of foxes in and around the yard; yesterday I found their den. Or one of their dens, anyway.  I also found evidence of a chicken dinner, though a head-count in our coop proves that it wasn't one of ours. The den is situated not far from the road and as I drove by yesterday afternoon, I pointed it's location out to the kids and lo, there was  fox sitting bold as day next to the entrance.  I'm going to try to get some pictures, but there's no good place to really conceal myself. They picked a good spot - hidden reasonably well but with an excellent vantage point in nearly all directions. The best shooting location is directly across the road in the middle of someone else's driveway, which might be a little weird.

My three sisters seeds have shipped and should be here by Monday. Everything else is growing apace, except for the hot peppers. I directly sowed them rather than following all the directions on the package. Maybe it's not warm enough for them yet. I'm hoping that's the case. It would be nice to know for sure before the local places sell out of vegetables and I lose the window to re-plant.

Mystagogy went well the other night. Our next topic is Discernment, which should be interesting.

Oxeye Daisies

Stonecrop

You can tell they are sisters: one twines easily around the other in a relaxed embrace while the sweet baby sister lolls at their feet, close, but not too close — cooperating, not competing. Seems to me I've seen this before in human families, in the interplay of sisters. After all, there are three girls in my family. The firstborn girl knows she is clearly in charge; tall and direct, upright and efficient, she creates the template for everyone else to follow. That's the corn sister.  There's not room for more than one corn woman in the same house, so the middle sister is likely to adapt in different ways. This bean girl learns to be flexible, adaptable, to find a way around the dominant structure to get the light she needs. The sweet baby sister is free to choose a different path, as expectations have already been fulfilled. Well grounded, she has nothing to prove and finds her own way, a way that contributes to the good of the whole.

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, "Three Sisters," Braiding Sweetgrass

I finished this essay last night and was immediately inspired to try a Three Sisters garden while we're still early in the planting season: Hickory Cane Dent Corn, 'Iron and Clay' Cowpeas, and Small Sugar Pumpkins.  I expect to battle squash bugs with the pumpkins as usual, but maybe I can get enough of them to hold out for a decent harvest. We've tried sweet corn before and had decent success, but it never seems to yield enough for the space it requires. We'd need a whole lot of it to be worthwhile. This will be our first try with a flour corn variety.

It turns out there are quite a few red mulberry trees in the yard, all of them female, and thus bearing fruit. What is equally certain is that the wildlife has known about this for much longer than me. Never having seen any mulberries on them, I had assumed they were male trees. Nope. They're just getting picked completely clean. I did a bit of research and it seems that they propagate pretty well by cutting, so I may give that a shot later in the summer.

The blackberry brambles are also blooming like crazy now. They should be spectacular by late June. Hopefully the birds will be too full of mulberries to care.

A Baltimore Oriole stopped by the feeder out front, just long enough for me to get a look before moving on. I stuck a sliced orange out there to see if he'd come back, but nothing so far. Here I thought the Indigo Bunting that hung around one day was going to be the high point, but no! The hummingbirds have also begun staking out the feeders in the front and the back. Begun, the nectar wars have.

Still nothing in the swarm traps, but it's early yet. The weather's been on the coolish/dampish side the last week or two and the clover is just starting to bloom hard, so maybe another few weeks to go.

Last night's Mystagogy session explored charisms. I was frankly a little nervous - so many lists! and tongues? Yikes.

In the end it went very well and I got several requests for the slides afterward. Glad to oblige. We closed with a prayer by St. Catherine of Siena, which led us to a short discussion about the Dominican Tertiaries and other third orders. It turned out we had a Tertiary in our midst. She spoke at length, and it was really neat stuff. 

The presentation wound up with a look at charisms and how they might manifest in concrete, down-to-earth ways. You might look at something like Tongues and decide it's just a bridge too far, but if you've found yourself drawn to being a Lector, or have a natural gift for the written or spoken word...well...you might have a charism! Find yourself engaged in social justice works, letter-writing campaigns, and the like? Maybe you have the Prophetic charism. We turn out to be more charismatic than we think.

Next week is Prayer Life, a personal favorite.

In other news, I'm slowly assembling backpacking gear for a potential trip this fall, just the two of us. I haven't been backpacking since high school, and our attempts to camp with bunch of little ones left very little time for relaxation. Having rediscovered the joys of hiking this seemed like a good next step.

Currently reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer 📚

Long Hunter State Park hike

So I guess the big news first: we're to be grandparents! Our daughter and son-in-law gave us the news just the other day and we had to sit on it for a bit longer, but now it's all out in the open! Neither of us feel old enough to be a grandparents. And there are still kids here at home! Just as we feared expected! Still, we're over the moon. This kid is going to come into a family with eleventy uncles and aunts (on both sides) and who-knows-how-many cousins when it's all said and done. Further reports as events warrant.

We finished The Woman in the Window; neither of us liked it very much but we were determined to see how the story finished up. When it finally ended, our mutual reaction was "well...that was certainly a thing."

By contrast, I am still very much loving How to Read the Water. I go to sleep at night dreaming of ripples, streams, waves, and bays. I also recently received Volume 2 of Emergence Magazine. I try to follow them online but much of the writing demands a level of attention from me that only a physical copy can provide. I've only gotten through the first couple of pieces in it, but will be ordering Volume 1 as soon as it's back in stock.

My employer has declared tomorrow to be a wellness holiday for all employees and I intend to do a bit of hiking if the weather permits. As it happens, the trail I'm thinking about tracks closely along a lake so I figure my eyes will be on the water for most of it.

I'm in the midst of the Mystagogy period for our recently-received and it seems to be going well. I attempted to do this all remotely last year but attendance dropped off pretty badly after the first session. Zoom fatigue, I imagine. There's a good number of folks who've turned out for these first few post-Easter sessions and the energy they bring comes right back to me so we're having a good go of it. This past session was on the laity, and our threefold vocation as priests, prophets, and kings. We focused in particular on the lay apostolate, which will dovetail nicely into next week's session on charisms. Pivoting from learning to living seems like it ought to be fairly straightforward but after a long period of preparation (several years in some cases) and the rush and emotion of the Vigil, the week or two afterward might feel like something of a letdown.

Well, now what?

They are not at all displeased to hear they - all of us actually - are still very much at the beginning. Yes, reception creates a demarcation point, but now it's salt-and-leaven time with a new understanding of things, new graces, and new knowledge.

In other news I got cajoled into joining the new-ish youth program at our parish and attempt to moderate small group discussions...with seventh-grade boys...on the virtues. 

Saint John Bosco, pray for me!

I kid, but only a little. There is, to be sure, a fair amount of goofing around - but most of them are well-catechized and we get really good discussions. They also come up with some very interesting questions. Last night's session was on the need to forgive our enemies. One of our priests teed off the evening: love - as an act of the will - does not depend on sentiment or emotion. I wanted to use this a leverage point in our discussion. You might not ever come to like someone, especially someone who has hurt you and never apologized, but you can still choose to will their good just as God does. Forgiving them down the road may be more about letting them out of your head more than anything like reconciliation. This, I thought, might make the concept of forgiving one's enemies a little easier for them to get their heads around.

Instead, one of them asked if we could (or had to) forgive someone after we died. Even say, our own killer. Luckily for me, Father was roaming the groups at that time and took that one for me. This, in turn led to more Last Things questions and a bunch of our time got eaten up, which was fine. By then I was starting to lose the small bit attention they were giving me. 

Gardenwise, the beds are in and mostly planted: tomatoes, peppers, and spaghetti squash. I need to order a little more fill for one of them and we'll plant some cucumbers. The final bed will probably be a mish-mash of these leftover flower seeds I have. We'll turn over one of the beds in late summer and use it for garlic, which we'll harvest next spring. The pots out front are full of herbs and the older apple trees are tantalizingly full of little bitty apples. Here's hoping enough are spared for a harvest!

It’s raining today so I’m building the raised beds in the garage. They’ll eventually be moved outside of course. Daisy is here keeping me safe from the rain, FedEx, Amazon, and UPS.

Currently reading: How to Read Water: Clues and Patterns from Puddles to the Sea by Gooley, Tristan 📚. Picked this up, along with Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer on a recent road trip which included a stop in Savannah, Georgia. I love hitting indie bookstores when traveling, and find myself gravitating to the nature and regional sections every time. We started an audiobook on the trip and have had to re-borrow it from the library so we can finish it: The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn.

It’s nice to take a break from theology for a bit. We tried one of the Brother Cadfael mysteries (we’re on something of a mystery-genre jag right now) but it was a little tough to follow in audio format. Will definitely be looking into them in hard-copy at some point.

…and the vineyard (lol) is also done for now.