One of the women on the pilgrimage (we are in Scotland visiting prayed-in places) sent me an email before we left.

Shy, she is, and deep and fine.  She wanted to know if she should act on this for-her wild notion that she ought bring a small tambourine along on the trip.  Did I think that was a good idea?

Of course I shared my enthusiasm for the idea.  And, I was delighted this pilgrimage felt like a place for tambourines and shaking and new things.

She broke it out last night.  During worship we sang a Celtic “Alleluia” in a fine 6/8 that was crying out for a tambourine.  It was perfection.  She waited for the beat to sound in her bones and when she knew it in that place she made the noise given her to share.

We often are unsure about what to pack for the journey.  We put in the trieds and trues and usuals and then, just sometimes then, we are swept into a new way of imagining our selves and our way of being in community.

Tambourines come out, shaking their proclamation that the dance of our lives is accompanied by voice and instrument and heart and wild and sweet and lilt and the community of life kin join with us and we are sung anew.

So we travel; sometimes with a tambourine.

There is a lot of it, this ache called “woe”.

Hearts broken, bruised, confused and searching.  There is a huge lonely that goes with the sense of woe when the world feels too much and resources too small.

Sometimes people in a world of woe find themselves at church.  It is a safe place for the hurt to be spoken and the lonely to be stilled for a time.  There are no more answers to be had, perhaps, in such a place.  But there is this thing called sanctuary where communion with God is sought and the people of God are leaned into and woe is not a solitary lonely.

My father, who was a man acquainted with woe and a minister of the gospel, said that he prepared his sermons for the one person in the sanctuary who dragged themselves to church on Sunday because they had nowhere else to go.

And so it is with every-day worship that is church.  Every day, not just Sundays, we exist for those who drag themselves to church because there is nowhere else to go.

We know woe; in ourselves and in others and we exist as community in Christ to vanquish for a time the sense that woe is forever.

We’re there when woe is.

In a prairie sanctuary, my nephew Bud and his now-wife Tara brought together their hearts, lives, families, hopes and sacred primal beauty.

Their wedding was held in the rolling beauty of rural Wisconsin.  They made a weekend of it, with camping on site, bocce ball and beanbag challenges, trampolines and fire circles, and love love love love love.

They both wore the color of passion and life: red.  Their words one to the other were full of respect and wonder about the gifts they had found in the other and the ways they trusted that they would grow and unfold in grace and truth in the power of such love.  

Following the service we adjourned to tables set under a big top and dragged out into the September sun; we were family joined into the larger heart family that beat to the love of Tara and Bud.

We caught the beat.  As the sun set and the stars and moon took over the sky scape, the dancing began.  Full-bodied romping was shared by children and elders and who knew who your partner was when all present felt the bond of partnering with the witness to love.

I sat in the shiver of the fall evening with my 82-year-old mother.  We watched the fireworks and the launching of floating lanterns and I thought to myself that while we celebrate with Bud and Tara the gift of their love, we are welcomed by them to celebrate the gift of the reminder shared through them:  a reminder that love is red and hopeful and full-bodied dance-worthy and fireworks-sparkly and communal to its very core.

It was a marvelous night for a moon dance.

One of the Joseph Campbell quotes I love shares that life is not about finding happiness;  it is about finding and making meaning.

I am feeling meaning in these days.  I am blessed with work that engages, challenges, humbles and stretches me.  I am blessed with partner and children who love me, laugh with me, share pain with me, and grow with me.  There are more books to read than I have time, sunlight to savor, and hungers to notice and sometimes tend.

Happiness is often my companion, and I welcome her.  But she is not the reason for my being.   Muddle and layers and wince and delight and wonder walk with me in these days; a meaning making sort of meander.

And it is good.

Seven church women went on a Boundary Waters Canoe Area pilgrimage. We range in age from 51 – 72. Some had never been to the northern place of mythical and real power. Some had been in the wilderness years ago but with aging and knee surgeries and the constant lap of “I can’t do it” self talk washing over consciousness, saying “yes” to the challenge took courage.

We loaded ourselves into three canoes. All that we needed for subsistence was packed into packs and over the waters we went to make camp and life together. The learning and growing and celebrations began even before the first paddle as each woman came to claim her desire to face fear and self imposed limitations.

Each woman portaged a canoe. Each woman “took the back”. Each woman gained a greater sense of her own ability to shoulder and carry and trust and laugh.

We are changed.

Isn’t that the way? We focus so often on limitations that are flat-out fiction and while we while away our days in the small of our scope, the loons are singing, the water dancing and the embrace of God inviting always always always to the celebration of our power and being.

Strong women we are, newly awakened and canoe-throwing fine.

Bats make me nuts.  I know, God created them and they eat mosquitoes and they are worthy of respect and appreciation and they scare me near nuts.

I was on a solo visit to the cabin recently and deeply asleep when a scratchy sort of not-quite-right noise awakened me.  We have had problems with squirrels in the past, so I thought fierce and quick thoughts/prayers about my fervent desire that squirrels not share my bedchamber with me. 

I fumbled for the light, turned it on and swoop, over my head was nightmare on wings (for me).  In a low-ceilingned and small room was a bat, confused and scared and I went about nuts.

I ushered it out to the main room and slammed the door.  I put towels on the floor to block any possible entry and assured myself that the problem would keep until the light of day and turned off the light and darned if that bat didn’t reappear in the dark.  Twice. 

I bailed out and slept in the bunk house.  But that bat is with me yet. 

Shadows are.

Anyone who has gone through divorce knows that the soul-rent of it all will never be fully mended.  Places of vulnerability are pushed into harsh of day, and everything taken as given is suddenly up for grabs.  Place and people become overlaid with supposed judgement, memory, loss, and a sense that reclamation may perhaps never be.  And it never is, at least in the uncomplicated ways of the past.

Healing, when it happens, is amazing grace.

I have been held by a powerful force throughout my life: a  rollicking group of college friends with whom I made music and kin and life.

One of “our” babies got married last month, and I was asked to officiate.  The clan gathered, including my three children, my husband, and folk who had known me as the wife of a beloved other.  I was anxious, and worried, and hope filled.  After setting out on my own, after long spans of silence filled with my own imaginings of outcast status, we gathered.

And we laughed.  And we sang.  And we danced.  And we loved.

Watching my children cavort in the power of the zany love was like being able to watch my own heart as it was lapping up the grace.

You can be home again;  Home in the company of people who are walking stories of your unfolding: college exploits, new babies, trips taken, harmonies shared, and love alive and real in the not-yet to come.

Home is good.

It is a time of transitions. 

Entering homes where graduation parties are being given for babies soon to launch into lives sans parental oversight moves me.  Walls are given over to shrines following the lives of the graduates.  They shine from the arms of their parents as babies and then suddenly they are gowned and capped and surrounded at grad parties by the people who have prayed and loved and blessed them into launch-able state.  The tenderness of it all is exquisite.

I sat with friends today.  They are much in love and he is nearing death and we spoke of it; the time approaching when clasped hands by day and warm of flesh at night will be no more.  I scarce can take it in, the raw grief and tenderness of this time.  How to say thank you:  for love, for friendship, for life, for wonder at this thing called living?

After renting out my cabin for nearly two years, I walked through it today as the renter is leaving.  I will sleep there, held by those log walls and the whisper of decades of family holding, on Thursday night.  I can feel my body moving toward being in contact once again with that space, that air, that cocoon of sanctuary and I am wonderfulled.  Relationship with place matters.  The walls that held my childhood summers, my father’s living and my children’s play will again be place of soul nestle.  Reunion is sweet.

Life goes so quickly.  Always it is changing, transitioning and unfolding and I pray blessing over graduates and their families and I pray blessing over Candace and Loren and I pray blessing over the wood and stone and heart that is sacred space and I pray awareness, please, for the amazing grace that is life.