There has been an ongoing “discussion” between LightHusband and I.

I maintain that words have precise meanings. That they should be used within those meanings. I love words and I love to use them properly and appropriately. I think that being able to communicate well and clearly is a fine art. I enjoy this.

LightHusband, on the other hand, likes to play fast and loose with his words. He throws them around willy-nilly. They fall from his mouth in a waterfall.

Here’s a current debate. We both love to use WeatherUnderground to look at the weather forecast. We look at the radar blast.

He is fond of saying, “Look! The radar says there’s not a cloud in the sky. But there’s clouds all over the place.” I respond with, “The radar measures precipitation, not clouds. Therefore, the clouds will not show on the radar blast. They’ll show up on the satellite scan.”

He waves me off with a sigh, “Oh! You’re always so precise.” I roll my eyes and think to myself, “Well, isn’t that the point?”

Overheard at my quilt bee on Monday morning, “I’m not on a diet. I’m done with it. I’m just focussing on drinking water and walking every day. I figure at age 45 it’s time for me to start liking myself and how I look.” I loved that.

This morning during a discussion of what clothes LightGirl has and what she needs to take to camp at her grandparents, she surprised me with this, “I don’t like to wear shorts, Mom. I have fat legs. Especially up here.” and she indicated her thighs. And my heart shriveled and died for her. “She’s only twelve,” I thought, “I’ve done my best, I don’t want her to have that voice in her head.” I wanted to weep. I hope it doesn’t take her til 45 to learn to love herself. How does our culture do this to our girls?

Yesterday LightHusband and I went to the grocery store around supper time. Well, it was before supper because we needed to get food for supper. We also needed milk and stuff. Like envelopes, because our envelopes are buried in his former office closet which is now a nuclear dump zone (but you didn’t hear it from me). Anyway ….. as we walked around the grocery store sort of aimlessly without a list because all we knew was we had to get dinner, I noticed that a grocery store is a leveler. Everyone who is there is on equal footing. Some people get expensive bread and some get cheap bread, but everybody has to go to the bread aisle. There isn’t a hoity-toity aisle and welfare aisle. The food and other goods are sorted by type and within type by price, so everyone has to mix together to go up and down all the aisles. It’s the one place (at least in my town) where everyone from all income levels from illegal immigrant on up to the mayor comes together. It’s kind of nice.

Quilting is more than a hobby for me. It has become part of my dreams. When I look at scenery, or paintings, or anything of beauty, I see quilts. I see color and fabric and ponder how to best use fabric to represent that. Perhaps some would say it is a sickness.

Saturday several women from my guild gathered together to sew quilts for our community service projects. We make quilts for babies at our local hospital who’s mothers have nothing, and for the local Medicare nursing home, for children taken from their parents under stressful circumstances and for soldiers in the amputee unit at Walter Reed Army hospital. I have custody of the community service fabric and with the help of a friend made up kits to sew on Saturday. I loved the design process. Some of the fabric was, well, ugly would be kind. But in the right setting, it became lovely. I’m learning to design outside my box. I love that.

This morning I went to a bee. A gathering of quilters to sit and sew for a couple of hours and chat about everything and nothing. The conversation wandered down many paths. At a certain point we had to inquire as to the whereabouts of our hostess’ husband because the conversation had wandered into a canyon where only the bravest man might dare to go. The group involved many different women from all walks and times of life. Most of us have known one another for a long time. There is something about holding fabric and thread that breaks down walls and allows talk to flow. The masks come off. Stories get told and the atmosphere is one of acceptance. Gifts and experiences are shared with little thought of rejection. I realized this morning that it is a true joy to me that I share in this art of my foremothers and in so doing, I am participating in this dance of relationships that women have shared throughout the ages. That quilting uses fabric, but it also weaves the fabric of society. That I could not do this alone, and that my life is so much richer for it.

I wish I could remember who said, “Those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it,” but I can’t. However, the world is learning this lesson this week as we watch Israel and Lebanon strafe each other with rocket fire, among other things.

Why, oh, why was it so important to bust Iraq back to it’s borders when it overran Kuwait, but we are not even looking at Israel’s gross misconduct in Lebanon? Lebanon, which I might add, is a Christian nation in the Middle East. It’s not important to me. But that seems to be important to the Right wing these days.

I haven’t been keeping up on events there. I can’t. It hurts too much. I have Lebanese friends from college. It was the flower of the Orient. Beirut was the Paris of Arabia. The people are warm and friendly.

We have such leverage with Israel and we choose to remain silent in the face of this atrocity. We could do so much with so little and yet we ignore the bully on the playground. Diplomacy and our aid money can be used without ever sending one soldier. We have a history of brokering peace. But Israel is counting on this administration’s ignorance and/or hubris to do nothing.

I try hard not to wax political here. I get my dander up sometimes and I don’t like to get the dander of others up. But this gets under my skin and I can’t let it go. My mother drew our attention to it. Here’s a link to the whole article, but this is the paragraph that caught my eye:

The intelligence reform act incorporated recommendations from the commission that studied the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; President Bush signed the bill in December. Supporters have argued the measure is necessary because terrorists could use vital records to steal identities, according to a Congressional Research Service report on the law.

You know, the critical word in that paragraph is the word “could.” Yes, the terrorists “could” do all sorts of evil things. But to date they have only done one. We have a lot of checks and balances built into our society and our culture that we have forgotten about. Our federal government (and for some reason the institutional church is playing along with it), is strumming the fear that we all have since 9/11 to institute all sorts of bad laws.

Ninety-nine percent of our population is honest. We are hard-working. We love our neighbors, we love our country. Yes, there are a few bad apples amongst us. There are in any population. So what? So we come together and look out for one another. The protection against bad apples is not more laws that restrict the freedoms of us honest people. The way to protect ourselves is to know each other. It’s to smile at one another on the street. To talk and laugh together. Greet one another. Hold each other up. Be gracious and kind and understand that while we all have faults, we all want what’s best for our children and our grandchildren. Laws do not change hearts or morality, people do. The government doesn’t know best and we’ve forgotten that. It’s time to remember that we do know better and we know how to take care of ourselves and each other. Let’s get together and do it!

I soldiered on yesterday evening. Doing my daily battle with my mortal enemy, the weeds! I am becoming triumphant; taking back more and more ground. I enjoy this battle. It is far more satisying than housework because once done, it largely stays done. I have to return and pick a few strays that pop up here and there, but as I come and go from the house, I can see tangible evidence of the work I have done. For the most part the work remains and does not get undone as so much of my other work does.

Part of my garden is centered around a large flat rock. The LightChildren used to use this rock as a battle station, or a lookout point in their many games. Now it is (or used to be before it was overrun with weeds) a focal point in my garden).

Yesterday evening as I clipped away the leggy yarrow and dug up the insolent weeds, I came across a miracle next to the rock. I had seen it there and wondered what this plant with the strange small red flowers was. I knew I would get to it soon. Yesterday I did. They were not flowers at all, but the beginnings of blackberries. Somehow I have a blackberry plant in the midst of my flower garden! How wonderful. If I had weeded earlier in the summer I would have pulled it up in woeful ignorance.

I’ll have just enough blackberries to have some for breakfast one morning. Lovely!

The sun is down and the day is almost done. My ennui is lighter now. I spent the day with a friend, talking quilts and pulling weeds. Full spectrum sunlight and doing battle against my mortal enemies is always good medicine for the soul. Not to mention all the little bugs I saw scurrying away as I uncovered them.

Today is the first anniversary of this blog. Happy day to it. Or to me. Or both of us. I thought I’d be happier today, but I’m sort of tired. It’s been a long hard week or two. Falling over the edge of the cliff in January is taking a long time to get back from. I’m doing better now on many days. But today is not one of them. Today I feel the Balroc coming closer.

I drove out to the back of beyond yesterday. Two friends and I joined a Community Sponsored Agriculture farm. We each bought shares and take turns driving to pick up our shares. Yesterday was my turn. It takes about three hours for the round trip. Three hours of guilt and whine-free listening to my music and thinking my thoughts … uninterrupted by anyone. Other than my own other thoughts.

I found another favorite song part yesterday. It’s this: the tom-toms in Burning Down the House by Talking Heads. It was their breakthrough song and album in about 1983. But I’d been listening to them since the late 1970’s. What I like about the tom-toms is that those drums are deceptively simple and almost totally arrythmic. Very cool …

I’m struggling with LightGirl these days. This does not reduce the issues with the Balroc. She is growing up. It’s a good thing. Independence is good. The process of achieving it is painful for all concerned. I keep reminding myself that if the butterfly does not struggle to remove itself from the chrysalis, it will not develop wings.

Beautiful weather today. I keep watching the birds on the roof across way. Hoping that they will lift my spirits to match the weather. I think I’ll go sew or design something instead. Happy blog birthday to me.

We took the LightChildren to see Cars this evening. It is a really good movie about hubris and the need for community. I really recommend seeing it. It’s worth the price of admission for the cow tipping scene alone. There is fodder for laughter for children and adults.

Pixar did the animation, so it was flawless. I won’t ruin it and tell you about all the little extras they threw in, but when you go, watch the screen carefully. It has a lot of texture.

Being Pixar, they threw a short feature in at the beginning called One Man Band. This short, of course, had nothing to do with the main feature. It was about a one man band in an empty town square playing for no one with an empty cup in front of him. It seemed as tho the poor one man band was to go hungry that evening, when along came a tiny little girl with a single gold coin. She stopped at the fountain in the middle of the square and knelt to make a wish. Just as she was about to throw her coin into the fountain, the one man band began to play his very best, brightest tune and smiled in her direction. The little girl looked over at him and then walked toward him. She reached out and began to drop her single sparkly coin in his cup,

When another one man band began to play on the other side of the square; a plaintive love song on violin and harpsichord. The little girl turned her head and began to listen to the other one man band. Pretty soon she walked over to him and reached out to put her coin in his cup and just as she was about to let it drop,

The first one man band struck up again louder and brighter and using more instruments,

To be met with the second more plaintive and wistful and more strings,

And back and forth until it became more about the contest than about winning the coin until at last the two were in head to head battle in the middle of the square in front of the fountain and the little girl stumbled and the coin fell through a grate into the gutter; lost to all.

Now this all happened in less than 5 minutes. But it made me think of the church (as in the Church, as in the body of Christ worldwide.) Not everyone, not all Christians. But a large portion of Christians and certainly some churches are doing battle with the wrong things. They/We have entered into a contest with other churches and are trying to win the wrong prize. As a result, the true harvest is slipping through our fingers and falling down the drain.

Brother Maynard has an excellent post today on children taking communion. He gives his own brief history with communion, which I, for obvious reasons, do not share. He ends with a beautiful description of their reasoning for including children in communion at their church, which I do share. It’s really lovely … enjoy your read.