I don’t know much about St Andrew other than he was brother of St. Peter. I need to study up. But that is a great image of him that some one painted. Man, I am pretty lame on my facts today.
But I do know that a hummingbird visited our new feeder a minute ago. Fun to see them in the bleak near winter, like little fairies flitting around. Oh, there is another. Maybe the same on, I don’t know. They are green females so far. The males have some red. What wonderful little beings to share the planet with.
Well I am fling out on Friday to Sacramento to join up with our Phil’s Camino magical mystery tour. Esther, Annie, REI, Padre Tomas, The Knight’s of Columbus, Catalina and maybe Electra will be along for parts of it. We will be in Sacramento, Monterrey and Berkeley. News is on Phil’s Camino Face Book page. I am just trying to stay healthy, seems like everyone and their brother has some version of a cold now.
Ok, off to work. Woodwork R Us. Remember St. Andrew’s Day, love, Felipe.
The Jesus Barn, Vashon Island gone by, Washington, USA.
This morning on FaceBook a local posted a pic of the “Jesus Barn”, a landmark here on the Island. It was beloved, if sort of taken for granted, by everyone. I say taken for granted because I think that we all thought it would last forever but no it collapsed I think in the 90’s. My Rebecca and I remember it in it’s hayday during the 70’s and 80’s. I don’t know the history of it. Maybe it just dropped out of heaven.
But the pic is gorgeous! Hayday shot if I ever saw one. You are looking directly north and the afternoon sun is over your left shoulder. The grass is all dried so it must be late July or later, high summer or better. It speaks of sustained sun and the heat it brings when we locals finally are able to uncurl our bodies locked in position still from the long winter.
Sometime the county came along and imposed it’s will on us and laid a grid down on the landscape and gave it all numbers of streets and avenues. I still don’t know the numbers, refusing to learn. It’s oppressive, like the Romans rolling into ancient Israel. But some of the original names have persisted like, “Bank Road” which is the road the savings bank is on. And there is a pond on Bank Road and the pond’s name is, you guessed it, Bank Road Pond. See, easy peasy.
But what is really interesting is that if a landmark somehow disappears as in the case of the Jesus Barn you still call that spot or even area the “Jesus Barn”. This is why outsider city people tend to look at us funny. Well, there are other reasons too I hear. Anyway, just thought I would bring this to you this Tuesday morn.
Maybe all us old timey Isand carpenters could get some kind of fancy grant to raise it, to reconstruct it again. You know I didn’t even write of the quality of the calligraphy. Someone really busted butt on that. Thank you, whoever you were. And thank you Jesus Barn in totality, teaching us that you are there just like Jesus even though we can’t always see you.
I got up is AM and was despairing over what oh what to write for the blog today. Now it is an hour and a half later and I have way too many ideas. One I will write about and the others will have to fend for themselves I’m afraid. If they can cling on to my flighty consciousness til tomorrow they have a good chance of being posted then.
Somehow, all the delightful people that come into my life leave their message, their scent, their essence behind and it clings to me and inspires me. Maybe I don’t discover it for a while. Maybe it takes something else to come along and catalyize it. And all of a sudden it is rampaging around in my consciousness like some love sick bull elephant.
Just to pick one of these love sick bull elephants, it was an idea that Catalina, our staff art historian, dropped off yesterday. She sent an article from the Guardian about the popularity of pilgrimage that is happening. The article went into the phenomenon globely, not just in any one spot. Well, we know that the Camino in Spain is growing in participants by leaps and bounds but others also. What is this craving when church attendance wanes. Are they related? I never put that together before. Here is the link if I can figure it out: Pilgrimage popularity
Is the trail the new church? I know that from my wanderings there are different sorts of ways to belief that exist, as one based on knowledge and one based on experience, say. My stay at the Catholic Church has been brief but what I appreciate most is the experiential quality of it. So much that I take in is gain by my physical doing. This is different from knowledge where I read and study and try and reach an understanding. I am so much of a kinesthetic learner maybe but I get so much more out of putting my whole body into something. Now that is just me but the trail has that aspect, you have to admit.
As one walks long enough and hard enough part of us actually becomes the trail. We sort of donate it. We give it away. We don’t need it any more. And that sudden empty space in us is where God moves into. It’s holy implant. He isn’t an idea any more. This is the trail, the new church.
Wow, and on a morning when I didn’t have any ideas. Bless you all as we get back to work on this Monday morn. Blue sky is appearing for our walk here at 0900. Thank you all for leaving your scent, love, Don Felipe.
For the first time this fall Raven Creek is running and there is some standing water in the south pasture. So if you are coming to walk wear your rubber boots. We saw some deer today but no Billy the Cougar. Catherine was here this afternoon and we slogged it through the rain, major fun. Man is it getting dark early.
Monday the 28th – 0900-1000
Tuesday the 29th – 1530-1630
Thursday the 1st – 0900-1000
Sunday the 4th – no walk
Monday the 5th – no walk
Tuesday the 6th – no walk
Thursday the 8th – 0900-1000
Sunday the 11th – 1600-1700
BUOY
ˈbo͞oē,boi/
noun
plural noun: buoys
1.
an anchored float serving as a navigation mark, to show reefs or other hazards, or for mooring.
synonyms: float, marker; More
bell buoy, nun buoy, sonobuoy
“a mooring buoy”
verb
3rd person present: buoys
1.
keep (someone or something) afloat.
“I let the water buoy up my weight”
cause to become cheerful or confident.
“the party was buoyed by an election victory”
synonyms: cheer, cheer up, hearten, rally, invigorate, uplift, lift, encourage, stimulate, inspirit; More
informalpep up, perk up, buck up
“the party was buoyed by an election victory”
antonyms: depress
cause (a price) to rise to or remain at a high level.
“the price is buoyed up by investors”
2.
mark with a buoy.
“a buoyed channel”
Origin
Middle English: probably from Middle Dutch boye, boeie, from a Germanic base meaning ‘signal.’
I was thinking about the verb form of this word. This is what we do for each other as we walk. It fits perfectly. Felipe.x
Bucky the fish sitting in lounge chair watched Cancer Tretment Center the reality show.
The holiday has come and gone and it seems that somehow we all have accomplished a collective deep breath for the first time since the election. Don’t you think? I seemed like that happened and what a good thing.
Thursday morning we had a walk and Catherine y Dana showed up to participate. And you them they are always doing there best to be ambassadors of joy. They brought a batch of pumpkin muffins that they just made and a humming bird feeder for our kitchen window. We have a little pool going as to how long it will take to have them find it. Catherine said two weeks and I said a month.
These are Anna’s hummingbirds that winter over in the Northwest. A special thing really. I did a report on them a year ago or two years ago because there was some hanging around outside my hospital window. I will search and see what I learn. And will keep you up to date on the pool. When will they find us?
There is a big salt water fish tank in the waiting room here at the Treatment Center. One of the fish was lounging in big orange shell which was looking like a underwater wingback chair. Was he watching TV? Were we the show? Cancer Treatment Center the reality show, that’s us!
Off to lunch in a minute so I am going to wrap this up. The Apple Cup is being played right now. This is the big rivalry football game between the U of Washington and Washington State. Maybe I can figure out how to get the local radio station on this Ipad. I’m working it.
Steve’s Thanksgiving turkey offered up by the bounty of Mother Nature.
It is early here. I was up at 0500 with sleeplessnesss. Oh well. It gave me time to tidy up around the kitchen after a friend was over for dinner. That was Matt, my Marine Corps buddy who spent the late afternoon waiting for a deer with his name on it to show up. We are back to archery season here for deer. Then he stayed for cider and tapas and for dinner.
So Tuesday, speaking of archery I was giving a lesson to Catherine y Dana. We were out in the woods and they were shooting grouse, rabbit, deer and bear targets that I have set up in a hunting simulation. I think about it as my students trying to get their dinner. It’s very challenging because they have to contend with different sized targets at different distances and under different lighting conditions. Some of the targets are shot slightly up hill and some slighty up hill. They were grappling with that when some eastern gray squirrels showed up, real ones and not my funky targets. I had my bow and arrows with me, left handed bow as I have been trying to learn how to shoot left handed and I managed to harvest one of the furry rodents. That was a big confidence builder for me left handed. So, I cleaned it and marinated it in red wine and we had it the next night for tapas with Matt, remember Matt. I felt majorly happy about turning a gung-ho hunter on to the flavor of squirrel as he hasn’t had it before.
Well, hope I haven’t offended any of the city folks too badly with my hunting tales but it is life out here, slightly out of town in the fall of the year. We call it all Wild Kingdom and it calls to be participated in and not just observed. That’s my take.
So, because I was up so early I had time to catch up on my blog reading that I hadn’t done since Sunday. Terry Hershey’s “Sabbath Moments” had to be read. Good one about him regrouping after election time. Then Richard Rohr’s daily blog about contemplation and action. Man, I love these two guys. They are always urging me in the right direction. Below are two things from Richard this week that resonated with me and are about what I have been wrestling with lately on Phil’s Camino (not the film and not the physical trail but my personal inner Camino).
“Thus, the Perennial Tradition says that there is a capacity, a similarity, and a desire for divine reality inside all humans. What we seek is what we are, which is exactly why Jesus says that we will find it (see Matthew 7:7-8). The Perennial Tradition invariably concludes that you initially cannot see what you are looking for because what you are looking for is doing the looking. The seeker becomes the seen. God is never an object to be found or possessed as we find other objects, but the One who shares our own deepest subjectivity—or our “self.” Merely physical things can be known subject to object; spiritual knowing is to know things subject to subject, center to center (see 1 Corinthians 2:10-13). This is how the soul knows. Not surprisingly, the soul recognizes soul in whatever it sees: soil, waters, trees, animals, and fellow humans. Only such a depth of seeing can enter into a fruitful and mutual exchange with God. To objectify God in any way is not to know God.”
“Evolutionary thinking is actually contemplative thinking because it leaves the full field of the future in God’s hands and agrees to humbly hold the present with what it only tentatively knows for sure. Evolutionary thinking agrees to both knowing and not knowing, at the same time. To stay on the ride, to trust the trajectory, to know it is moving, and moving somewhere always better, is just another way to describe faith. We are all in evolution all the time, it seems to me. It is the best, the truest, way to think.” —Richard Rohr, “Evolutionary Thinking”
Yea, do it all royally with the turkey, dressing and cranberries, oh and not to forget the all-important gravy. Maybe keep talk of politics to a minimum but try to find some common ground always with your meal mates. Love you, Felipe of the North.
Hi. Sitting in front of a window getting my dose of chemicals and watching a storm blow in. It was a beautiful morning and traffic was light, my blood pressure was low but now it looks threatening, the weather that is. I’m just kind of cruising along here. I have a couple of hours now after lunch. I will give you an update and maybe work on my Don Quoxite book. Maybe we will talk about that too.
Bill my Cancer Commando buddy and I were talking recently and he was expressing his feeling about his cancer, how he was fighting it tooth and nail. He really hates it and is totally all out fighting it. And he reads my blog and he wonders what I am up to. He has a hard time relating to my approach. The only thing I can think of to say to him is that I am trying to learn something. Is that what you are doing Felipe?
What are you doing exactly Felipe? I have always had trouble with the concept of “battling” or “fighting” cancer. It never seemed to fit my perception of the situation. Maybe looking at it as if cancer were pirates boarding their vessel is helpful to some, it doesn’t fit with me. I am more at home looking at it as part of me that is off kilter. Believe me I am thinking and thinking about this. In that light, yes, I am trying to learn something.
My fighting is more involved with working on myself and my relationship with others and with God. It is more about making me stronger or more integrated than repelling invaders. Somehow this fits my personality better or fits with what I can do with the tools in my tool kit perhaps.
I had a meeting to be with Sister Joyce recently and she was talking about the difference between reacting and responding. It was about the answer that one gives to a change. Are we reacting from a highly emotional place? Or are we moved to respond to the change in a different way, perhaps a more constructive way. Maybe one blends into the other over time.
Anyway, the stuff I grapple with day to day. Somehow, I am more apt to ask “why are you here?” to my cancer than “why me?”. I am always looking for the message that I should be receiving. I have fullly accepted the “why me” part. Maybe this all comes from dealing with it for so long now. Anyway, maybe this is helpful for someone out there. It is alternate way to look at things.
In Don Quixote I am on page 308 out of 940. I just renewed it for another month and the librarian said that I could do that again. Grueling journey, this book, similar to my 909 laps on Phil’s Camino.
I will blog tomorrow from home, We Never Close! Hope your turkey day is coming together, hot gravy loves, Felipe.
This is going to be a very short post. It’s late and I am about out of gas. My buddy Steve from Oregon sent a pic of a turkey he just harvested down there. Nice job buddy! Those oldtime Pilgrims would have been proud, yes?
Yea, somehow it was a restless night for me. For whatever reason for that I am in pretty good shape and bound and determined to make the best of this beautiful day. The Super Moon is in it’s third quarter and it is up in a blue sky here this morning. I have a walk in one hour from now so we have a time limit today.
Yesterday afternoon we had the most delightful walk. Catherine was here. Barbara was here with a new friend. Always good for the mix to have new blood. We had some amazing tapas and we watched Phil’s Camino with Spanish wine in hand afterward.
When you get a chance go to philscamino website and click on the “STORE”. The long awaited DVD is there for sale as well as other cool items. Everything there comes from folks involved with the movie project in one way one another.
Yup, the work week is starting out. I have two jobs to get expedited so I can start on them. Work between Thansgiving and New Year’s can be dicey with folks having their minds on the holidays and family. So, getting these two started is important and that should carry me through.
Catherine and I had a great tailgate session after church yesterday and talked of starting a new little bible study group. Maybe the Bible for Caminoheads, something like that. I get so much out of my men’s bible group that I have been attending weekly for twelve years. Yea, we recently tried the figure out how long I have been with them and came up with twelve when I thought it was more like ten. Must be having fun!
OK, need to go and get ready for my walk. Maybe see the cougar that has been around the neighborhood lately. We nick named him Billy. We have two trail cameras up outside and we need to check those, we may have a pic of the elusive guy. That would be major fun as sightings are frequent but actual images are few and far between.
