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Bring the best you have to offer
The Rev. Lynn Unger accomplishes an amazing feat—summarizing her religion in three simple sentences.
Bring the best you have to offer.
Be fed by what is on the table.
Be grateful for the feast. (Facebook, July 27)
Shelby Meyerhoff reflects on pregnancy and parenting.
We are not coming to parenthood young; I’m 38 and I feel like a tree with many rings. There’s a lot of distance between me and that first inner ring; a lot of learnings, failings, false starts, joyful discoveries, and second acts; a lot of memories and, after all these years, gaps in memory too. And yet, with this child, I’ll be going back to the beginning of the cycle.
It’s another amazing and ordinary revelation, that not only can a middle-aged tree give rise to a new sprout, but that this is the cycle of life for many new parents and caregivers, for all those who feel covered in years of bark and old growth, but who take that giant step back to the innermost rings to nourish a new life. (Facebook, July 27)
Sky Yardley, who blogs about his journey with dementia, writes that contemplation of our mortality is beneficial.
Thinking about death is a gift—a gift to yourself and your family. To have the advance notice to make decisions, to talk about choices, to consider what makes for a good life—and a good death. . . .
I’m pleased. . . . to be able to live now, and not be concerned about what will happen at the end of my life. (Alzheimer’s Canyon, August 4)
When someone leaves a filing cabinet near her trash bins, the Rev. Catharine Clarenbach is delighted to discover that her city has a “Department of Illegal Dumping.” What, she wonders, would it be like if there were a Department of Illegal Dumping of the Mind?
I too often hold onto what has been illegally dumped onto my psychic doorstep. I let my mental front yard get cluttered with the refuse of past wounds–scabs and peelings every which way. . . .
I am inclined to make a meditation practice of clearing my front garden. To get rid of illegal refuse of the mind. . . . Let the Department of Illegal Dumping take care of those things, cart them away, and reuse, recycle, or compost them into something good and new and useful. (The Way of the River, August 3)
Andrew Hidas writes that, “It’s no small matter, maintaining our equanimity and even daring to be joyful when all seems engulfed in chaos and roiling emotion.”
I have always remembered a story I read from the Lebanese Civil War that raged from 1975-1990. It described residents of Beirut calmly visiting with each other and reading newspapers in a café while air battles and artillery fire were taking place along the Mediterranean Sea within sight and earshot of them.
The reporter was astounded, but the café patrons told him they simply refused to curtail their lives, refused to stop sipping their espressos and visiting with their friends. (Traversing, July 30)
Creating spaces
The Rev. Dan Harper says to his fellow Baby Boomers, “Step away from the power structure.”
Let go of denominational power. Just let it go. If you keep clinging to it, people are going to get hurt. Step away from denominational power, and no one gets hurt. (Yet Another Unitarian Universalist, July 30)
The Black Lives of UU Organizing Committee released a report about the hopes of Black UUs.
The development of Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism in 2015 brought a renewed sense of belonging and purpose among Black UUs. Black folks in and around Unitarian Universalism are tired…and we’re also hungry — hungry for a life in UUism that feeds our spirits, holds more hope than despair, and creates spaces for us to show up fully as ourselves. (Medium, July 27)