My dog buries her face in it.

My car remembers her fierce way of plowing through.

My feet feel the crunch and my eyes squinch in the white.

My daughter from Denver wrote a text that told me that she woke up to white there on Sunday and some part of her expected the sound of my slippers on the landing and the proclamation that Santa had arrived during the night.

All is calm and all is bright.  Plans are thwarted, hustle cancelled and brought along with the snow is reminder of the great rhythm of the cosmos that rocks us yet and always.

I am the young snow-suited and snow-munching child in the midst of snow globe beauty. 

The world is mitten-licking good.

At twenty, my son has that sense of invulnerability that makes for good setting out and lumps in mother’s throats.  He is sure of himself and his ability to engage with life.  This is a good thing.

And yet, all of those who have borne babies know that confidence is not enough sometimes.  Saturday night, while biking home from work, Jamie was T-boned by a speeding car.  He and the good man who drove him home figure the car was going about 45 mph when it ran into him.

The car slowed, and then sped off, leaving my boy tangled in his mangled bike and thankfully thankfully thankfully alive.

A week ago, after badgering him every time I saw him about his helmet use (or blatant lack thereof) I bought him a face mask for winter biking.  BUT, the proviso was that if I bought the thing, he had to wear his helmet.

Finally, he complied.  That helmet saved his life.

After having the sorts of scans a person ought to post speeding car impact, it was determined that he had a slight concussion.  The relentless nausea of it all has subsided and he is now creaky, without his beloved bike, and certainly more aware that mortality is, even for twenty year olds.

Every day is a letting go.  We love our babies and launch them and then we pray that the precious wonder that walks in their being will be safe.  Sometimes the jarring truth of life’s fragile wonder is literally slammed into our awareness.  We turn and face the terror that is loving and the always real that is danger and we hit our knees and pray:  Oh God, not this son of mine, not this, not this.

Not this time.

Two weeks ago my phone rang at 10:40 on a Saturday night.

Dread was my first response as I reached for it, because kin of clergy know that calling late on a Saturday night is a possibly dangerous thing.

It was my sister, telling me that our mom had been rear-ended on the freeway and was in the emergency room in Cloquet.  She was on her way to the ER, was my sister, and she would let me know what was going on when she knew more.

The pacing and praying commenced.  An hour later, it was reported that mom was stable.  Assessments were being done, and later it became clear that her being alive was astounding.  Her car had rolled, the cocoon around her tiny body the only space not flattened, and her pelvis broken in three places.

By all accounts her recovery would mean weeks on her back and months learning to walk.

Well, the prognosticators didn’t know the grit of Barbara Fawcett Macaulay Forrest.  Four days after her accident she was using a walker and celebrating a shower.  Today, fourteen days after she found herself hanging upside down in the ditch, she is home.

What to say?  Prayer, Holy and human love, an athlete’s body and a strength of being conspired to knit my mother back together again.  The work is far from over, the pain very real, the necessity of support and holding constant.

And she is alive. 

Her brush with mortality was a foundation quake for me and for my kin.  My mother reigns rightly at the center of the heart that is our kinship being and for all the rolled eyeballs and teasing about her ways (she would be the first to point them out) she has loved us every day of our lives and taught us beauty, humility, generosity and dig-in-ability.

And all of those lessons hold us in our days.  I pray they hold her well with gentle grace as she re inhabits the life that is hers to unfold. 

 The foundation holds us yet. 

She is.

Sometimes I get so piled under the papers and tasks on my desk that the gift of being in quiet conversation with parishioners gets to feeling impossible.

Yesterday I shook off the administrative “shoulds” and spent time with beauty.

During the course of a few hours, I visited with two parishioners who have spent more than eight decades on this earth.  They were both engaging and engaged people who know how to speak gratitude and challenge and blessing.

I left so grateful for what they teach by their being.  In particular, I was moved by the love they each had for their respective partners.  One, for a wife who took up bike repair tools and powered a lawn mower even though she was a “little girl”.  The love she and her husband shared for over 50 years shines from him yet.  She is so very much alive in this world through the power of his heart.

The other had been blessed by the love of two good men:  one her high school sweetheart whom she married at eighteen and loved for over 40 years.  After his death she was surprised by a second love and married a man who was husband to her in ways powerful and good.  Her eyes sparkled with gratitude when she spoke of both of them.

And I celebrated and I mourned because I am one of those who has gone through the severing that is divorce and while I too can celebrate marriage relationship shared with two good men, the sharing is complicated and tinged always with grief.

I am moved by the courage and faith it takes to risk the thing that is love.  I am aware of wistful longing for a continuity and cohesion that is taken for granted by those who love long and I am aware too that while that is not my story, the one I live is gift and will shine from me when some fine pastor spends an hour with me three decades hence.

Love is a precious thing.  Companionship and constancy and a friend to grow old with are eye and heart shine. 

I was witness.  I am witness.

I had time apart.

I was in the thick of the north woods mucking around in ice-rimed mud, breathing in the crisp of the air and the blue of the sky and two grouse showed themselves in that terrifying wing-thrum they have.  They were vexed by our presence and glorious.

Later that day while in town I looked up and not ten feet above was a bald eagle.   I was blessed by winged power and amazing grace.

As dusk was falling and the lake called for attentive presence, I was lakeside when a whirr of wings drew my eyes to a lone tree.  There, in the skeleton of a foliage-naked perch was an owl.  She sat there, surveying the vast of the lake and the deepening of the night and I felt the vibrations of the Holy sing sing sing in my soul as stars came out to join the chorus of wonder.

We live in the midst of the Holy.  Every day, every moment this is so.  Poet Emily Dickinson says that “hope is the thing with feathers”, and so it is.  And, hope is the thing watchful and still and deep and taloned and vast in its sweep.

And it surprises sometimes, this thing called hope.

There is a yellow on the tree outside my office window that greets me each day.

Through the fall I have watched it burst into color and now the rain (will it EVER end?) and the wind are dispersing the color to a carpet around its base.

There is melancholy in this falling. I’m aware of the power of season and cycle as I bear witness to the tree and its release of leaves.

At this time of year it calls my heart to pay attention to the witness we call All Saint’s Day.

On Sunday the 1st of November we will welcome into the consciousness of our communal hearts the twenty of our church folk who have died in the past year.

Through the naming and the seeing of their faces projected on the screen and through the ingathering of their people joining us in this ritual of thanksgiving, we remember.  We give thanks and we laugh and we hear the echo of their voices and feel the power of their spirits and we mark the changing of the season that is life.

Their witness and teaching create a colorful carpet around us and while we mourn the change in relationship since their release of earthly being, we give thanks for the color and presence that blesses us yet.

We are all falling into the cycle and power and release that is living.

Sometimes we even stop to remember our being in the midst of it.

I met Leah 25 years ago today.

In a hospital room in Stevens Point, WI I learned what wonder was. 

Wonder was struggling out of the fog of an emergency Cesarian section and being fearful about asking after the health of the child who had been constant companion for ten months and being answered by the handing into my arms a bundle capped by blond fluff and eyes bespeaking a soul old and fine.  Her eyes found mine  and there was an “of course” as we took each other in, as if to say we had been destined to learn love and life one from the other.  Of course.  Of course.

Wonder. 

She is far from my arms on this day, making and learning her life.  It aches, this not holding her on this day of remembering and celebrating.

But the world holds her.  She is, and she is so fine, and of course she will venture and learn and explore while her mother marks the day remembering.  Remembering the communion of soul-meet.  Remembering the advent of wonder.

Key Minnesota statistics around on the status of children:

• 11.4% of children under 18 years old are living in poverty in Minnesota.
• For families the poverty rate is 6.2% and for families with children under 18 years, the poverty rate is 9.8%, and for families with children under 5 years the rate increases to 12.7%.
• In Minnesota there are 78,629 children living without health insurance (6.3% of children in the state).
• There are 108,098 children not enrolled in school in Minnesota between the ages of 3 and 17.
• The median household income is $72,008, and 12.5% of children are living in households with Supplemental Security Income (SSI), cash public assistance income, or Food Stamp benefits.

The above statistics landed in my email in box courtesy of the Children’s Interfaith Advocacy Network.

Artist Kathe Kollwitz has an incredibly powerful work in which a mother is depicted in a fiercely sheltering embrace of her children.  It is entitled “Seed Corn Must not be Ground”.  It speaks volumes.  As do the above statistics.

I just can’t figure it.  I can’t understand that any sort of rationale could be shared that would legitimate our grinding of the seed corn that is our children.  They are the crop of the future.   They are our hope and our legacy and, increasingly, our witness to our values.

Clearly we value armaments and strip malls and stadiums more than we value the seed corn.  Clearly we have deafened our ears and hearts to the teachings of Jesus which are so very clear about our need to care for the “least of these”.

I don’t much want to hear arguments from politicians about whose failed policies created a reality in which so many of our children live without basic human necessities.  I don’t much want to endure any longer the finger pointing and posturing because clearly, the only place the finger can point with unerring accuracy is at ourselves.

We are a part of the problem.  And, thank God, we are a part of the solution. 

Let us put down the shields we hide behind as we play the partisan blame game.  Let us instead wrap ourselves in the awareness that whilst the battle for blame goes on, our children are being ground.

Check out the Children’s Interfaith Advocacy Network.  Organize a group in your church.  Raise your voice and your awareness.

Seed corn must not be ground.

Living in the city is hard for me.

So, I bought a scooter.  A Barbie pink one.  It is a 50 cc which means I can go up to 45 mph, it gets 80 – 100 miles per gallon, and it has made me giddy.

Now upon waking, one of my first thoughts is whether or not it’s a “scooter day”.  Now, I plot out routes across town that are back road beautiful.  Now, I am delighted to run errands and tend to tasks that require travel because I get to feel the wind in my face and I love it.

I was twelve or so when I first got bit by the mini bike bug.  A friend had one and I remember loving the adventure of putting along trails with it.  I have toyed for years with the temptation to get a motorcycle, but as a mom and as an ever-aging woman-aware-of-vulnerability I wasn’t too keen on high speed and long distance power.

But scooters, well, that’s a whole different thing.  They began appearing before my eyes everywhere and each time I saw one my heart did a lurchy kind of call out to it and when I had run out of the necessary restraints that kept me from plunking down my money for such a one-person toy, I entered a store and there is was:  not the classy red that I had thought to call my own, but a shocking pink one that was priced to sell (imagine, pink as a hard color to move off the floor!).

Fall is fabulous on a scooter.  The smells and the warmth of the sun, the quality of light and the right-in-your-face beauty of flowers and trees and children waiting for school busses is breathed right in. 

I’m in it:  life and living.

Yesterday’s text from Ephesians had to do with joining together to create hymns and songs of gratitude.  Making celebration in concert with all that is is spiritual bread for the journey that is life.

This morning is the first of my 52nd year of life.  Involved in the oh so vital decision- making about getting out of bed for that first cup of coffee, I received a sung gift.  A loon flew over my urban house.   The first call I heard seemed like it couldn’t be:  the singing out of my favorite bird, a spirit animal I have long associated with a father who died way too early and suddenly fourteen years ago.  Loons live on the lake at my cabin and in the north land that still is home place and in the midst of not being there, an emissary appeared.

Four times it called out.  In its song was life and remembrance and proclamation and the weaving of the shine that is creation. 

Happy birthday to me.