March Transportation Change

This month wasn't perfect, but we did make an effort - riding the bus, riding my bike, combining trips, carpooling, staying in days, and thinking carefully about when we really need to drive.

I'm planing to continue carless days about once a week, and we dream about buying an electric car this fall.

From our walks

We've been exploring our neighborhood nature trail more, but I don't want the kids denuding it of all the tender spring plants. So as we walk, they only have permission to pick weeds - dandelions, grass, english ivy, etc. Carbon is determined to create a journal, so he went ahead and started one with his weed collection!

When You Reach Me

Miranda is a pretty ordinary girl growing up in a big city, struggling with friendships, helping her mother prepare to go on a game show, and afraid of the crazy man who hangs out on her corner.

But Miranda is getting notes from someone who seems to know what will happen in the future.

When You Reach Me is categorized as Young Adult, but I would give it to 9 year olds and up, especially girls. It is full of rich detail, realistic relationships and people, and a subtle mystery with a satisfying finish.

There are many respectful references to A Wrinkle in Time throughout When You Reach Me, making me want to read that again. It was read to me when I was Carbon's age, so perhaps we would enjoy it as a read aloud now.

Things pile up

How do things get so backed up? This week I've been inspired by the sunshine and I've tackled a bunch of big jobs: close to "detailing" my car, cleaning out the garage, and weeding my asparagus bed and my driveway. But whatever I do, stuff is piling up somewhere. If I clean in the front yard, laundry is piling up in the house; if I stay inside scrubbing floors the weeds are growing unchecked in the yard!

And then you get piles like these: (my mending basket and the library books that needed to be read and returned before they got anymore fines)





What's a woman to do? In a sense, we are all Sisyphus.

Real hardships

We just finished listening to On the Banks of Plum Creek, and I feel profoundly humbled by it. I'm sure she glossed over some bits - everyone is so darn good in these books and always happy and cheerful - but really the stuff they had to live through and they just kept going.

The kids love these books, just as I did as a child, but they don't really see the story the way I do now. It served as a starting point for some conversations about the abundance and materialism we live with, and some conversations about simplicity and charity and responsibility, but what seems to have struck them is the life and death drama of it all.

Hypatia is currently very upset about death. She has come to me crying, worried that I and her dad will die and leave her all alone. She is very angry that people die, and we are spending a lot of energy on helping her come to grips with this reality.

And then Carbon seems to feel like he's not good enough. He cried to me the other night, that he wished he could go back in time and change things, because he had been bad so many times and he couldn't stop thinking about them all. When I asked what he had done that was "bad", he cited a time he had made mud when he was supposed to be playing nicely in the yard. I comforted him and we talked about how it is normal human nature to feel regret, and that he really hadn't done anything so very bad.

It's a lot of emotion, seemingly triggered by one book.

bringing Jesus back in

This weekend a member of our Committee on Ministry (the committee at church that keeps its fingers on the pulse and monitors whether the congregation is fulfilling its mission) passed along to me a comment he had heard in one of his interviews, that this congregant appreciated that I had "brought Jesus back in" to our church conversation.

I've been turning that one over in my head for the last few days. In a lot of ways, that makes me uncomfortable. When I told my family, they (even the "relaxed Catholics" in the bunch) thought this was a pretty bad thing. Jesus is for the conservatives, and the rest of us will avoid talking about him, seems to be the general consensus.

But I actually have "brought Jesus back in", at first because I was convinced that the kids needed to at least know the story, and have a basic level of religious literacy so they could join in the general conversation. Last year during Christmas season, one of our younger kids asked me "what's up with that baby in a pile of straw?", and that got the whole ball rolling.

And I've come to see that there are actually three stories to tell about Jesus: the miraculous birth story (clearly mythological and pagan in origin as far as I'm concerned), his ministry and teachings, and the crucifixion/resurrection/subsequent religion (which is almost all stuff I disagree with). In our disagreement with some parts of these stories, UU's and liberals in general avoid the entire story. It's the baby out with the bathwater.

Why, exactly, are we so afraid to talk about Jesus? As UU Victoria Weinstein wrote:

But where was Jesus in our UU worship life? I had never once questioned his absence in my childhood church, but I now began to wonder. Since Jesus’ radical inclusivity, love of humanity, and passion for justice was so harmonious with all the “good news” I was hearing in our congregations, why did our ministers and congregants so assiduously avoid the Gospels? I found it comical on some Sundays, depressing other Sundays, and consistently baffling. I could not understand why UUs would allow the perversions of the Religious Right to define the word “Christian” (or “religious,” for that matter), why they would concede religious language to the conservatives, and why they would go out of their way to construct a religion intentionally bereft of theology.

Of course, Unitarian Universalism doesn't exist in a vacuum. We are surrounded by other religions and denominations, and our churches are full of large numbers of refugees who come to us with emotional and spiritual scars from their previous religious backgrounds, and all of this means that we have baggage - especially when it comes to Jesus. I understand the baggage - I haven't come through 32 years of living in American society without a bit of baggage of my own. But our children don't have the same baggage we do - and maybe, just maybe, if we give them a different story and "relationship" with Jesus, they could maybe never have some of that baggage.

Because, really, the man who preached love and compassion and justice for the poor was preaching many of the same things we try to preach now.



Note on comments: I love comments and I love the conversations the internet enables. But let's all keep it respectful, OK?

A "stay home" day

We are still trying to reduce our transportation footprint this month, carpooling with other folks going ot the same place, riding public transit more, or biking to work when I can. My other idea is to take any days that have nothing on the calendar, and declare them to be "locked in" days, meaning we are locked in at home and won't go anywhere in the car.

Unfortunately, we don't have many days where there is nothing on the calendar! So yesterday was the first time this month that we could try this. It was sunny yesterday, so we didn't end up feeling very locked in - in fact we went out for a 1 1/2 hour walk on the nature trail two blocks from our house.

A great day without any transportation.