damned dog

These two stood, half in and half out of the water, for three hours today while the neighbours Shepherd menaced them from the top of the dike. They were afraid to move out of the water and the dog was smart enough to listen to their growls and hisses and not take them on. In the end I locked the mutt in the barn for an hour so these raccoons could be on their way. Another small drama on a cranberry farm.

We should start harvesting somewhere around the twentieth of October. Everything is ready and now it is just a matter of waiting. Of course I fret about how things will go. Just my nature, I suppose.

I am now three weeks into mentoring our EfM group at St. George's. Melody provides a good strong lead and the group is forgiving of my early short-comings. The great thing is that I am enjoying the lessons as much now as I did when I took them. Pretty neat. I think so much hinges on experiencing what another sees in the program and then examining that in contrast to what I see.

dunging out

For ten years, give or take, I've been drawn along a faith journey.

For ten years I've struggled to make meaning of my life as I lived it during those years between the day in my seventeenth year when I turned my face away from my faith and the day in 1999 when I stepped onto the pathway of faith again.

Today I spent two hours dunging out Grandma Knight's battered old hope chest.

For the past thirty plus years this wooden box has served as repository for stuff that I couldn't throw out. Today it is empty and two garbage bags await a run to the tip.

What a collection!

Expired drivers licences and hunting licenses and car insurances papers and bills of sale for a dozen or more vehicles, owned, used and gone.

Three marriage certificates.

Copies of three sets of divorce papers and the bills for securing those divorces.

Hundreds of, not quite good enough for the album, photos spanning three marriages and a dozen work sites.

Negatives of photos kept and photos long lost. Never to be re-developed.

Clippings from newspapers. Whole newspapers. Yellowed and brittle in some cases.

The account of my only arrest (Public Mischief: I was 19 and the price was 3 months in the can or a five hundred dollar fine. Back then the courts believed in big sticks!)

The account of my son's first arrest. (It was a shock to open the paper that day and see the he was a known heroin addict and drug dealer. (3 months, 1 year of probation.)

The whole Victoria Times Colonist from the first moon landing.

The same paper from Pierre Trudeau's funereal date.

The Vancouver Sun with a front page photo of a group of us from Local 40 rallying outside the offices of some desperately evil employer.

Memberships in shooting clubs, hunting clubs, camp grounds, canoe clubs, book clubs, music clubs... these must be who I thought I was.

Scads of paper from UVic documenting my short foray into university life before a good job in the bush called me away.

Journals from a dozen different points in my life. Pages where I read back and shudder at my immaturity and where the pattern of failed relationships can be seen, book to book, to repeat over and over.

Letters ranging over twenty-five years from, and in some cases copies of letters to, girlfriends, wives and lovers. Ah, to be able to steal a scene from a movie and go out and say, I'm sorry.

Stuff from when I cooked for a living, from when I worked building log homes, from when I gardened, from when I worked for a union, from when I fancied myself a budding poet.

Credentials and invitations. To the Older Boys Parliament in Victoria, to Synod in Toronto as a guest ( not quite old enough to be a youth delegate, if they had such back then), to the Lieutenant Governor's New Years Tea, to Diocese of New Westminster Synod, to the Union's International Convention, to Mt. View's 20 year reunion, to attend court to deal with this or that motor vehicle infraction...

What would all of this mean to my girls if I dropped dead and they had to rummage through it? I doubt that much of it would change how they see me. I suppose they would laugh a bit and perhaps cry a bit and then do what I have done...two garbage bags.

All the while that I spent emptying the box I kept thinking of Zoe Fetherstonhaugh, a parishioner at St. George who died in January of this year. It was her wish that the following poem be read out at her funereal:

Dust If You Must

Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be better

To take a picture or write a letter,

Go to whist or plant a seed.

Ponder the difference between want and need.

Dust if you must, but there's not much time,

With rivers to swim and mountains to climb.

Music to hear and books to read,

Friends to cherish and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the worlds out there

With the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair,

A flutter of snow, a shower of rain.

This day will not come round again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind,

Old age will come and it's not kind.

And when you go and go you must,

You, yourself will return to dust.

Today I dusted. Thanking God that it was time to stop dragging this stuff along. Thanking Zoe for the poem and wondering at the beauty of the love that informs relationships n our Christian family. Now there are all of those other things to do. Life...

Now here is a beauty! We get a good number of bears coming down from the hills to partake of the bounty of the neighbour's blueberry fields. The farm next over has strung electric fencing for the past two years to deter the critters, but the neighbour, lacking common sense has set the line at the innermost edge of the municipal ditch. The bears work up a fair speed going down into the ditch from the roadside and go through the fence at the field side at top speed, hardly feeling the charge in the wire as their passage breaks it.

I suppose the blueberry grower will figure it out sooner or later...or maybe not. Though I have read reports of bears in the eastern US eating cranberries we've never seen them do this at our farm.

Rumours had the largest farm in our area shooting half a dozen bears last year. It is indicative of how screwed up our environmental protection laws are that such is allowed to happen. There are relatively inexpensive ways to discourage bears from getting in amongst the crops, none of which require killing the critter. I have always figured that by the simple expedient of requiring farmers to report publicly when they shoot bears or coyotes in the fields the carnage would cease. The citizenry should be appalled that for the simple presence of a bear in a blueberry field the response has to be, bang, bang.

idle thoughts

It is definately the dog days of summer at the farm. Not much to do in terms of field work except watch the weeds grow and wait for the berries to size up and colour. This is the season for cleaning ditches with our EX60 and spraying dike weeds and, of course, dreaming about the harvest. I always remember, After Apple Picking, at this time of year.

Summer at church has been slow, as is usual. Lots of folks go away on vacation and some, with Sunday school on hiatus for the summer, just don't come. Another couple of weeks and we'll be back to our regular attendance.

I came across two wonderful quotes this week. The first was W.B. Yeates who said that he takes full credit for all interpretations of his poetry. The second was Wilfred Owen who wrote, during the first world war, that on the battlefield there was often no distinction between blasphemy and prayer.

the evil one

Yesterday, in the absence of our minister, who is on vacation, we had a Service of the Word at St. George. During the course of the Homily, given by our postulant to the Diaconate, reference was made to, 'the evil one.'

By other names, Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, Old Scratch, the devil and so on.

One of the stranger cultural artifacts that the writers of the books that make up the New Testament have left us is that they refer to this entity more often than they refer to the Holy Spirit.

In portraying this creature those authors depart from the image in the Hebrew Scriptures of Satan and craft a new and troubling image of a creature with godlike powers, holding dominion over the earth and it's inhabitants.

Much of modern North American Christianity has seized on this image and regularly uses it as a tool to encourage correct behaviour/belief, or to condemn those who do not share 'right belief', as agents of the devil. The great western church, the Roman Catholics, have also given cult-like status to the devil.

The devil, a curious malignancy that has flourished, been nourished by the church, and that is, in many ways, crippling the body of Christ here on earth.

St. Augustine took the view that God created the world and saw that all things were good. For him, God certainly did not create evil, nor did he create a lesser order of gods who include the devil and demons.

It is troubling that the absence of good in a moment, in a thing, should be characterized as the work of an outside agency. Especially troubling in that by crafting or acknowledging such an entity we are so easily prepared to surrender the monotheistic underpinnings of our faith.

At the heart of our humanity is the ability to choose to do right, and on the flip side, our ability to choose to do wrong. God has built into us the gift of discernment and given us the right of choosing. There is little need to look to an outside agent as the cause of our choices, we must look to ourselves.

When John characterized Jesus as, 'the Way,' he was personifying in Him the choice that lies in each of us.

Flip Wilson's cry, 'the devil made me do it,' was a joke, not a theological statement.

Perhaps Solzhenitsyn said it best when he wrote, 'If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the dividing line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.'

Or, as Walt Kelly, a truly great American said, 'I have seen the enemy and he is me.'

Turkey Vultures, EFM and fresh blueberries

Not a really good image, but if you click on it you can see that it is a Turkey Vulture. First ones that I have seen in Pitt Meadows. It and it's mate were feeding on some critter that had expired in this field for two days and making sport of chasing a couple of Eagles away while doing so. Always some thing new on a farm.

Speaking of something new, we have had record breaking heat for all six days this week. It does get a tad oppressive at times. Then there is the futility of trying to sleep when third floor bedrooms have been building a heat load all day. Oh well, these will be pleasant memories in January and February when the rain is cold and the wind is helping it find every crevice in the wet weather gear.

EfM and my debut as a mentor in September has been much on my mind over this past week. I signed up with a web-site that connects mentors and was quite blown away by the incredibly generous welcome that came my way from folks who have been mentoring in the program for many years. Over my lifetime it seems that Christians, in all of our varied guises, have worked quite hard to give ourselves a less than positive name. Perhaps I'm being too hard on us as a collective group. That being said, I am regularly refreshed by the expression of welcome, of acceptance as you are and of sister and brotherhood that flows out from so many of those who have taken the EfM journey.

I've done a few bits and pieces for one of our neighbours who farms blueberries as well as cranberries and they gave me a twenty pound crate of the little blue beauties yesterday. About nineteen pounds more than Alley and I could go through so I passed them on to my favorite baker. She was quite pleased and my reward will be that in the depths of winter a blueberry loaf will appear to remind me of the summer. Not a bad exchange at all.

Everything good goes around.

to Janet Land, whenever this may find you

Forty years since Eagle landed on the moon. Forty years. There is a part of me that wants to rage at how fast those years have gone. At how carelessly many of them were spent.

Oh well, raging does little good.

When that first pair of humans touched down on the moon in 1969, I was in the back seat of a car with Janet Land, travelling down a dirt road near the Sooke potholes outside of Victoria. I think we were in Dan Mercer's car, but am not sure about that. The radio signal was poor, but we pulled over and heard the landing account and then listened when the station segued into, Good Morning Starshine.

What a wonderful thing, to have been born in the fifties and to have come to adulthood in the sixties and seventies.

Janet Land. Hmm, five foot nothing, blond hair, fair skin, the most beautiful eyes imaginable and a lovely voice. My first love. Well, I'm not certain that the infatuation I felt was really love; but sure as hell it was the closest thing to love that I'd experienced in my eighteen years.

I was about as naive as could be as high school came to an end and, for me, being with sweet Janet was nothing short of being struck by lightening. I clearly remember the blend of grownup desire leavened with the fears instilled by parents who equated anything sexual with sin and hell and all over-laid by my sense of being a six foot two, hundred and thirty pound dork.

It is a strange thing, how certain memories fix in our minds.

When I heard the news report of the anniversary of the first Apollo landing that moment in '69 rushed into my mind and the anchor was my memory of Janet.

We didn't date for long and late that year I moved to Alberta for work and that was that until one day in the early '90's when I was at Victoria General Hospital to visit my dad who was going in for emergency surgery and, who walked off the elevator that I was waiting for but Janet.

We talked for a couple of minutes, me preoccupied with the urgency of dad's condition, and said our goodbyes, and headed off in opposite directions. Maybe five minutes.

Five minutes when all of that stuff from '69 came flooding back.

So, I had this memory when I heard this news item a couple of days ago and I felt an overwhelming urge to call Janet and say, hi. To say, do you remember. To say, I do. To say, I hope that life has been good to you. To say, thank you.

I actually looked the number up in the Victoria book. Only one Janet Land, if that is still her name. Could be her. Could be... But I didn't call. I am blessed with that memory of that moment and that in itself is enough of a gift.

Whenever you might come across this, Janet, from forty years on, I thank you for the presence you left in my life.