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  • Home and Heart

    winter-solstice-08cbe2.jpg1  bar steep rise 30.42  WSW0   windchill 1  Winter

    Waxing Crescent of the Wolf Moon

    Oh, man.  To get the trash out I had to blow the snow.  Underneath the snow is ice.  The snowblower with its knobby tires spun out and the only reason I stayed on my feet was the firm grip I had on the snowblower.  Never before had taking out the trash had a hint of danger to it.  Tonight it did.  After the snowblower and I went slip sliding away, I still had to roll both the trash containers down the long slope of our driveway.  Risky business.  Made it ok.

    In doing research for Homecomer I looked back over many of my sermons for Groveland and noticed that I’ve written several that deal with home as an idea.  Home has a certain poignancy for me, since my estrangement from my father and his subsequent marriage to a woman who made the problem worse.  The town and the house where I grew up seem faraway to me, as if the warm and comfortable feelings associated with home got eaten away by the acids of my family quarrel.

    The rightness or wrongness of it all has long been moot, yet the hollowness with which I’m left when it comes to home and nuclear family must have lead me to consider this theme.  It is a rich concept, one with so many layers and metaphorical possibilities that I have not tired of it.

    Perhaps out of this search of mine for home I’ll  find ideas useful to others.  The current environmental crisis both has its roots in and is made more intractable by our American sense of mobility, of looking over the next horizon for a new frontier.  This makes it hard to learn about the home that greets us each evening.  Well, more on that in Homecomer.

    The cold has come again and that will make the sleeping even better.


  • An Old Political Junkie

    Made more phone calls.  Liked it not at all, but I agreed to do them.  Now I find out they won’t need me to make calls on November 4th.  Darn.

    An old political junkie like me has more information available than I can possibly digest.  The internet brings more and more and more, at finer and finer levels of detail.  When I have the time, I love to read the data, down to the precinct level if I can find it.  Other folks like baseball stats, for me it’s election numbers, political analysis.

    Political analysis brought my dad and I close together when I was young.  We would sit up late watching conventions and election returns.  Political analysis pushed my dad and I far apart when I was 19.  Opposition to the Vietnam War and long hair  did not sit well with him.

    Tired.