Surfacing

There's a woman in the Meeting whose son is on the whole a pretty good kid, but he's a little hyper and rambunctious.  She normally tolerates his antics with a long-suffering patience, but the other day he said something rude which caused her to round on him with a steady gaze.  "Does what you just said add to the Light in the world?" she asked quietly.  Chastened, her son grudgingly admitted that it did not.

I mention this story by way of explaining my silence in this space of late: I had nothing to say that would have added Light to the world.  This is not to say that I've been mired in ennui for the past three months (or indeed, that what I typically have to blog about adds any Light to the world, but that's neither here nor there).  It's just that between starting a new job full-time, being invited to serve on the board of directors of a nonprofit organization, resigning from the political campaign I was working on, being nominated to serve on a committee of the Meeting, wrestling with a virus a couple of times, resigning from the aforementioned nonprofit board, becoming increasingly disenchanted with the Meeting at the same time that I'm becoming more involved with it, possibly finding a new Meeting -- more on that later --  and traveling hither and yon to bellow out shape notes . . . I haven't had the requisite oomph to do any blogging.  Nor even, if truth be told, to read others' blogs, with a couple of exceptions.

So what's been occupying my time, besides work and colonial-era choral singing?  Well, I recently finished Reza Aslan's excellent examination of Islam, No God But God.  I'm almost finished with Leif Enger's remarkable Peace Like a River, which I recommend to anyone who likes coming-of-age tales, earthy spirituality, and what Amazon's editorial reviewer aptly calls "poetic, verbal stoicism of the  northern Great Plains."  Waiting for me on the nightstand are Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White, Orhan Pamuk's Snow, Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner, Mark Helprin's The Pacific and Other Stories, Paul Auster's Oracle Night, and Flo Morse's The Shakers and the World's People, which I picked up in Northampton a couple of months ago.   At the rate  I've been reading, I should be through all these by about the time Chelsea Clinton is ready to run for president.

I've been a music-downloading fool recently, having discovered the Eels, Sufjan Stevens, and Matisyahu on EMusic.  I've also become quite fond of downloading the weekly podcasts of Speaking of Faith, since it comes on at 7:00 a.m. on Sundays, and that's just a wee bit early for me to stir myself from bed on what is ostensibly the day of rest. 

I also confess to watching an unhealthy amount of television.  I try not to miss Globe Trekker, No Reservations, History Detectives, South Park, Battlestar Galactica, and reruns of Futurama on Adult Swim, and this is when I'm not agonizing over how close I'm getting to the final episode of the first and only season of Firefly, which Meerkat was kind enough to buy for me on DVD one of these times when I was under the weather.  Oh, and I've been spending a lot of time on Flickr, uploading my own pictures and ogling those from my friends.  And lest anyone think that all of these sedentary activities have atrophied any muscle tissue I might have once possessed into swiss cheese, I've also been walking all over downtown and trying to do yoga on a daily basis, in addition to doing sitting meditation with a friend once a week.  Not that I'm ready to join the U.S.  Olympic triathlon team or anything, but still.

Hmm.   All of the above pursuits paint perhaps too wholesome, dare I say boring, a picture of me.  I mean, there's also the binge drinking, the obsessive prOn-surfing, the late-night games of Russian roulette, and the picking fights with strangers in line at the Whole Foods, but it's getting late, so I think all that can wait for another post.

Comments

[Amy]

For a minute I was thinking, "Damn, that's a lot!". Then I remember how I'm taking classes and performing and running the store and sewing and reading and watching "Lost" and also lamenting the small number of Firefly episodes and camping and, hey! - I'd better remember to hang out with my boyfriend too!

I just read "A Sweetness in the Belly", a fictional story of an English woman raised in a Moroccan Sufi shrine who takes a pilgrimage to Ethiopia and then becomes a refugee in England. You or K might enjoy it for some "lighter" reading.

[Kev]

Are you kidding? You do more than just about anyone I know. I get exhausted just thinking about what your schedule must be like. The thing I've always admired about you, though, is that you seem to spend the majority of your time doing stuff that you enjoy and that fulfills you, rather than working in a job you hate or something like that.

Thanks for letting me know about the book. It sounds like something I'd really like.

[Amy]

Oh, I had the job-I-hate down pat for awhile. Now I need to make up for all the wasted time!