Forest Preservation!

I have mentioned a forest project here, and there is a meeting tonight via Zoom. So sorry for last minute notice, but I just received the email. Please come if you are interested. Here is a copy of the email:

Dear Whatcom County friends,
You are invited to an information session covering the upcoming “Upper Rutsatz” timber sale, as well as a Whatcom CRF chapter meeting, on November 16th at 6 PM. 
https://wwu-edu.zoom.us/j/92767096595

Meeting ID: 927 6709 6595
One tap mobile
+12532158782,,92767096595# US (Tacoma)
+16699006833,,92767096595# US (San Jose)

6-6:30: The info. session will provide an overview of the campaign to stop Upper Rutsatz from getting clearcut. PLEASE INVITE ANYONE WHO YOU THINK IS INTERESTED IN LEARNING MORE!

6:30-7:30: CRF Whatcom Chapter will meet to discuss a community outreach plan. By then we will have materials ready to begin spreading in the community. Please review the notes from the last meeting below. If you signed up for a task and have any questions about it, please email me and we can figure out what needs to happen.
 A big action step that would be great to complete before the November 16 meeting is a handbill/flyer geared towards neighbors and mountain bikers. Jenny (or anyone else) are you willing to work on this still if I provide you with text?
I look forward to seeing y’all on the 16th!

Peace, Brel

A Reading from Class 11/2/21

It was requested that I share here a reading from class today, from the work of Padraig O Tuama on prayer. Here it is!

Prayer is …Prayer is a small fire lit to keep cold hands warm. Prayer is a practice that flourishes both with faith and doubt. Prayer is asking, and prayer is sitting. Prayer is the breath. Prayer is not an answer, always, because not all questions can be answered. (p. xi)No prayer is perfect. There is no system of prayer that is the best. … Henri Nouwen said that the only way to pray is to pray; the only way to try is to try. So the only way to pray well is to pray regularly enough that it becomes a practice of encounter. (p. xii)We turn to prayer in days of joy, and days where our world shows – again – that it is wrapped in the circle of conflict. We turn to form, we turn to old words because sometimes it is old words that hold the deepest comfort and the deepest challenge. … in a time of trauma, God is given a name by the traumatized. In a time of joy, God is named by the joy of our hearts. In a time of confession, God is named as light. In a time of rest, God is the soft dark that enfolds us. (p. xix)Prayer, like poetry – like breath, like our own names – has a fundamental rhythm in our bodies. It changes, it adapts, … it sings, it swears, it is syncopated by the rhythm under the rhythm, the love underneath the love, the rhyme underneath the rhyme, the name underneath the name, the welcome underneath the welcome, the prayer beneath the prayer. (p. xx)The world is big, and wide, and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable and full of meaning. Oremus*. Let us pray. (p. xx)So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars. Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies. Let us listen to the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears. Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness that surround us. Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug. Let’s lick the earth from our fingers. Let us look up and out and around. The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked, and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning. Oremus. Let us pray.  ― Pádraig Ó Tuama, Irish Poet and Theologian

Photo by Brooke Lewis on Pexels.com