Venturing from Thesis-Land – tales of a blizzard

Oh, yes… it’s been a while.
I am in the midst of writing my thesis – currently editing the second draft, and that’s been taking most of my time.  But, I figured why not take a moment to update this blog, since I really do not want to neglect it (perhaps I can manage to get up to one update a month? At least, to start….).
Among the things that have happened since my last update is some serious weather.  We had a blizzard – plus a few other snow storms (including one just this past week… I do wonder when spring will come…).
I am not sure I’d ever experienced a blizzard before.  I could remember one serious snow storm, but this was a new experience.  Where I live we ended up with 31.9 inches, over two days.
  I went for a few walks during this storm.  The worst of it hit overnight.  We started getting the snow on Friday, around 3:30 I decided I wanted to go for a walk in order to see how things were.  The snow was falling pretty strongly at this point, but there were a number of folks at the corner kitchen-bar, where I got some yummy food before returning home.
The next day I started by taking some pictures from inside, before heading out for a walk (once the storm had completely died down).

The next day, the same view

The snow really was interesting.  Because I live downtown the plows were going on the roads and sidewalks through the entire storm – so it led to a somewhat surreal reality of having roads that were fairly cleared, and then these huge snowbanks alongside the road.  Some of the sidewalks were plowed, others were not.  And because of the strong winds (interestingly enough, a huge part of what decides if a snow event is labeled a blizzard is the strength of the winds that accompany it), there were some areas where there was no snow at all!

Taken out the window – the day before there had been much more snow on the grass, but the wind kept picking it up, tossing it around.

Out around town, the snow had embedded itself into all sorts of spaces.  I loved the way that it stuck into the vines on the side of this building.

Piled up along the sidewalks, before the plow had come through.

The storm started on a Thursday night/Friday morning.  It died off by Saturday afternoon.  Come Sunday we had blue skies, and lots of snow on the ground.  This was taken out of the window of one of the places I work on Sunday.

I know that some are enjoying spring weather now, and it is hard to believe that this storm was over a month ago! However, I know that many of us are still getting hit with winter-storms (I guess they are, technically, now spring-storms… however, they seem to be awfully similar to the winter-storms).
Now I return to thesis land – this draft is due in a few weeks, and at that point perhaps I can (at least sort of) emerge from thesis-land again.

At some point I had something to say.

Christmas Day, 2012

So I’ve had all these “Brilliant!” blog ideas over the past month. I was going to write a very reflective, and perhaps entertaining, piece about Holiday traditions.

Lobster Man on Christmas Day, 2012

And then I was going to write about celebrating Christmas when I am not a Christian. I was going to ponder about snow-storms, and how different places I’ve lived have handled winter. I was going to share with you all a little about some of the theological texts I’ve been working with, and tell you some more about Sebastian Castellio.

Then I was going to write about finding the “muse” and inspiration. Oh! And I was going to do a post about Gluten-Free cookie making, complete with pictures. I was going to undertake an exploration around “light”, and write up some genealogically-related musings. There was, of course, going to be a write-up and review of the recent Les Miserables movie. Something about nature, something about resolutions.

It is completely and entirely possible one, or all, of these will appear as blog entries at some point. I feel no need to be restricted to the holiday season to reflect on the holidays. And many of these things are things which bounce around my head.
But, for now, I just do this short up-date, a dangling promise that something was once going to be written, reflections were going to be shared. But homework got in the way, then a strained back, then the COLD OF DOOM – as I am calling it – and now entering two weeks of an intensive class, while still working. So… you get me saying *hi* and a couple of pictures of this winter so far.

Winter Storm Euclid strikes Maine

A moments reflection

In response to the shooting in an elementary school in Connecticut this past week there has been a lot of conversation, argument, speculation, sadness, and anger.  I have opinions on issues like gun control, availability of mental-health care, the culture of violence, and other relevant issues.  But, that is not what I have been thinking about the most. Those are not the conversations I wish to engage in right now.  That isn’t where my heart, spirit, and thoughts have been.  I’ve been holding in my thoughts, in my heart, all those who have been affected by this.

My reflection….

For all the people this season, a time of magic and wonder, who are mourning the loss of a child.
For all the people this season, a time of family and laughter, who are mourning the loss of a family member.
For all the people this season, a time of laughter and friends, who are mourning the loss of a friend.
For all the people this season, a time of traditions and cookies, who are mourning the loss of a sense of security.
For all the people this season, a time to reflect on Peace and Love, who are mourning.
For all the people,
In this season of darkness, may we remember light.
In this time of sadness, may we remember the laughter.
In the time of tears, may we remember the smiles.
May we draw together, to hold and support all those in need.

What are the chances?

Slim. Slim to none, really.
That is, the chances of me actually being able to write a blog entry this week (and perhaps next week as well). End of the semester crunch, with deadlines and way too much work! So, instead, I’ll post one of my cloud pictures – because I kinda wish I could be daydreaming and just watching the clouds right about now….
But, some of the posts I hope to be putting up in the next month include some GF Christmas Cookie ideas, reflections on creativity, traditions, change… have lots of ideas, just lacking a little in the time department!

The Stole on the Wall

I have a Stole hanging on the wall near my desk.

You know, one of those things that many ministers wear to show that they are, well, a minister?  It’s bright, and I think beautiful – hand-woven with various Christian symbols on it: a stylized cross, fish, wheat, bread, some that I don’t quite understand.  While I am not Christian (I’m Unitarian Universalist, of the non-Christian variety… more on that later, I’m sure), I love this Stole.  It’s beautiful, colorful and bright, and one of the few things I’ve ever won, you see.  My first year of Seminary (I am now completing my third, and final, year), there was a group of students who were fundraising for a mission trip to Guatemala.  One of their fundraisers was to raffle off a Stole, and i bought a few tickets, and was surprised to find myself winning.

One of the squares from the Stole

At that point I had plans of becoming a UU minister.  I’d entered the program under the MA program, with no intentions of ministry, but I quickly found myself being drawn to the idea of professional ministry, of getting a Masters of Divinity and embarking on the challenging feat of becoming ordained (oh, the many books to read, papers to write, classes to take and hoops to jump through!).  And so, as motivation, as a reminder of what I was doing this work for – to help me in those moments when I just wanted to chuck whatever book it was I was reading across the room – I hung the Stole near my desk, and there it has remained for the past three years.
But my plans have changed yet again (a somewhat longer story…) and I am not on the path for Ordained Ministry (that is, serving in the role of Minister (getting the Rev. before my name) as recognized by a religious body), at least, not at the moment.  I am going to be earning the MA, and moving on to other academic programs (in history).  But, I still keep that Stole hanging on my wall, and I still find myself looking to it when the reading (and writing) gets tough.

Why?

Well, I can’t be entirely sure, but I think some of it has to do with my understanding of the term “ministry”.  To me, there are Ministers, who are trained and educated in responsible ministry (there are, of course, those who claim minister title without the proper training, or whose education is only partial, but that’s another matter).  I see the friends and classmates of mine who are still on the path for professional, ordained, ministry, and I have moments of envy for the things that they are learning.  I’ve learned some, of course, but since I stepped off of the “M.Div” train, it’s much less intense, and I am not as steeped in the experiential learning that they are receiving.  I have spent time as a Youth Advisor, and as a Religious Educator, and sometimes I feel like I have enough of an education to see when people are just screwing things up, but not enough to claim authority to help them fix it… But that’s another matter as well.

So, Ministers have jumped through the hoops, done the spiritual exploring, the academic work, the work within their faith and denomination, put in the time, and earned their titles of Reverend. They are Ministers, and they go out to minister to the world through churches, missions, non-profits, chaplaincy and a number of other venues.  But then there are others, and this is the group I see myself in now.  We are ministering, without being Ministers.  The work I do now, working with children from a variety of backgrounds, helping with their homework, patiently explaining to them what “derogatory” means, and trying to teach them that hitting is not an appropriate response to, well, just about anything… that is ministry.  There may not be an overt spiritual/religious element to it – but the rules of my room are all about Respect (for yourself, for others, for the space) and, in my repeated conversations about just what it means to Respect (and explaining that no, it does not just mean to listen to me, though that is certainly a nice start), I feel like I am helping then in understanding a core value.  And so I minister in my daily life, just in a different way than the Ministers might do.

But it isn’t in the chaos of my days with the kids that I am looking at the Stole.  I am still in seminary, so more likely it’s as I’m at the point of wanting to strangle my thesis into shape (because, pacifism seems to not stretch to dealing with my written works).  My thesis is a pretty straightforward history thesis.  There’s this guy that few have heard of (Sebastian Castellio… don’t worry, you’ll hear more about him in other posts, I’m sure), who stood up in the mid 1500s for religious tolerance, at a time when it wasn’t the safest or most popular move to make.  And I’m writing about him, his life, his arguments for tolerance, the influence he had on future generations, despite the more powerful individuals doing what they could to discredit his name (aligning him with the devil, and the like).  I have this thing for underdogs…..

But as I am writing this, knowing that it is entirely possible that it will be read by my advisor and reader, and perhaps a friend or two and then live the rest of its life on a shelf, or in a box, I find myself thinking to my ministry.  See, I know that ministry will forever be a part of my life (it always has been and I see no reason for that to suddenly change), and I am in a constant time of trying to understand just what it looks like.  Will I do interfaith work? Will I work with youth?  I know that I want to teach, to work with educating others, and that is the professional path I am embarking on, but I find myself drawn to the spiritual.  I love to craft worship services, to sit down and really think about how I can make the time that one spends in worship to be really special, to mean something, to do something.  I love to write (and deliver) sermons, sharing my thoughts and reflections in a way that hopefully makes someone think, or connect with something in a way they had not before.  And in all my writing I find myself wanting to do this.  And so I sit with Castellio, and his arguments, and his underdog life, and I want to do more with it.  I want to take his words, take the experiences he had, the life he lived, and make it something that transcends the realm of “history thesis.”  I want people (outside of specialized academic and religious circles) to know who he was, and to see the things that I see within his works. Getting this out of the academic world, helping people understand the richness I see within history – how our lives can be enriched if we would just, to use the cliché, just learn from the past!

And I think that is why I keep looking to the Stole – because while that particular dream, of “big M” Ministry, has shifted, there is still a clear thread of ministry within me.  I know that the path to Ministry is complicated, and winding.  We use the language of a “calling”, and struggle with what the “call” may be.  And so while, for now, my “call” is not ordination, it doesn’t hurt to be reminded that I still have a “call” to ministry… and I certainly still have a calling that is there to be followed and pursued.  So even when I move, when I am no longer in Seminary, I plan to continue to keep the Stole on my wall, a clear reminder of the importance to pay attention to those callings, to take the risks that are inherent in them, to find my ministry in whatever I may be doing, and to be willing to go with the flow – to change and adapt as life shifts and changes.
It’s a convoluted symbol, to be sure.  But, what isn’t?  Do others have things like that?  Relics of past parts of your life that hold some sort of meaning (deep or shallow, straightforward or convoluted) that you hang onto for some sort of reminder?

For the Love of Writing

Yes… I may be in the midst of applying to grad programs (for Fall 2013), gearing up for a cross-country move (Summer 2013), and completing a Masters Thesis so I can graduate from my current grad program (June 2013!)  Also, I am working about 20 hours a week at a job I love, and trying to maintain something resembling a social life. Not to mention this poor, neglected blog.

So, what did I decide to do in November?  I go and join National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo).  I had already decided that I was going to run the Young Writers Program Version at work, so figured why not.  I could set the goal of 50,000 words for myself and try my hand at fiction writing again.  It has been a number of years since I’ve done any real fiction writing, and perhaps over a year since I’ve really done ANY.  I started to really write when I was in middle school, scribbling away in notebooks throughout the summer, and since I’ve had a computer I’ve typed them up – giving me files and files of fiction from different stages of my life.  Through high school and college I started to create a folder per year, in which I could store all the new writings in some sort of semi-organized fashion.  2009′s folder had very few documents in it – some which were copied from earlier years.  2010 had even less, and 2011 did not have a folder at all.  There was a time when writing stories served as my life-blood.  I could not imagine life without it, and I found my writing time to be refreshing, energizing, and just plain fun.  I thought perhaps I was replacing that with other kinds of writing: personal reflections,  newsletter articles, sermons and homilies.  And, certainly, my creativity comes into some of that work, but it wasn’t the same, no matter how much I tried to convince myself it was.

The thing is, I had not even realized how much fiction writing really meant to me.  Not until I actually started to write.

My initial plan was not to “win” Nano… 50,000 words is a rather lot, especially when juggling the things that I am juggling.  I just thought it would be nice to try my hand at writing again.  Figured that I’d consider myself a winner if I managed 20,000.. or even 10,000.  The point was, I wanted to write.
When the writing first started to dwindle it was painful – like any sort of mourning process, I felt a loss.  I may even have gone through the famous Kübler-Ross five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.  No… there is no maybe, I did go through those stages, in my own way. But now I had little recollection of how hard it was when I found I could not write as I once did.  So, blissfully unaware (you’ve got to love when your memory lets you forget just how painful some things have been) of what it was like when I felt I “couldn’t” write, I embarked on this plan to start writing, even just a little bit.

What I failed to factor into this plan to leisurely allow myself to ease back into writing fiction was the fact that I can, at times, get highly competitive.  Even if it is just with myself.  I have had moments where I set out to prove something, just because someone seems to indicate that it can’t be done.  Competitive, stubborn, determined…

I started slowly, the first two weeks writing just a little bit here and there.  And the story, to be perfectly honest, sucked.  It was boring, it was slow, it had no direction.  I had not planned anything out, just sat down and started to write.  Never before had I managed to completely shut off that inner editor and write, what Anne Lamott calls the “shitty first draft” (which is not to say that everything I have ever written has been spectacular I just never kept going with it when I realized just how horrible it might be, and would try to go back and revise and revise and fix things to get it better).  But, the monstrosity that I was plugging away on, it was definitely not something I would want to share.  Ever.  I was trying to write my way to a story, and to characters, and that was painfully clear as I worked.

But then, around day 19, something happened.  I jumped ahead in the story, and found myself writing a scene where things actually were happening.  Slowly the characters started to take form.  I began to see the threads of an actual story, and my characters gained dimension and depth.  No, it is still not anywhere near ready to be seen by anyone other than myself.  There’s a lot of work to be done before I can think about doing anything with it – it needs to have a lot cut out, and there is rearranging that needs to be done.  Things need to be rewritten, and there are a few serious continuity issues.  But… I did it.  I wrote a 50,000 word story in less than a month.

And now I am back to feeling that urge to write.  I am putting aside time every day to write, and it feels good to do so – and I find myself during the day thinking about the stories I’m working on (because as soon as I won Nano I wanted to start working on another story!)  I feel different, writing fiction every day.  I can’t quite quantify it, but I know this is a good thing.  And it makes me wonder what would happen if I started back into those other things that I used to do that fed me so much, things that I have let fall by the wayside as I got bogged down in things like work and bills.  Like dancing, or playing my cello.  But I think I’d better take it a bit at a time, December I’ll work on writing daily, and updating my blog.. uhm.. at least a few times.  Then I can start adding more in.

I think it’s good to get the reminder sometimes, that we need to take the time to do those things which nourish us, which feed our souls and give us a chance to rest and relax.  I’ve never been able to meditate, but I think that writing can serve that for me.  It is a time when I can let go of pressures, stresses, and worries.  It’s a time when I can delve into a world of my own creation, and explore things, create things.  I love it, and wonder how I had managed to not have this kind of writing for the past few years of my life.  It is, has been, a part of my life-blood.
Oh.. and I can get as melodramatic, sappy, and silly, as I like without anyone calling me on it – because no one will see it unless I let them

A Day on the Water

It’s my goal to make sure that I have some mellow days, days where I don’t do work (school-work or paid-work).  Since I work 6 days a week in paid jobs at this point (and am in my final year in an MA program that includes writing a Thesis), Saturday’s are the day to rest.

This post has taken me far to long to get even this far (it has been far too long since I used this site!) so instead of the writing I was going to do, I’ll just share some pictures.  I went out (thanks to a Living Social Deal!) on a “Fall Foliage Cruise” with Casco Bay Lines, to Bailey Island.  It was pretty, and I got to enjoy a day with a friend.  More words will come – when my brain isn’t fried.  But I was totally going to reflect of the refreshing nature of being on the water, my connection to it, all that cool stuff.  But, for now… pictures!

Saw an Eagle on the way back – was hard to get a good picture, but pretty cool!

Portland Head Light.

Got to see a few leaves, liked this one resting on a rock on the beach.Were a lot of shells on the beach – found this cool shell of shells

This is the boat we took over.

Some of the water, as we came back the wind had started to pick up, which was awesome – I loved the rolling ride.