March 15th, 2013
by James Lasdun
It isn’t me, he’d say,
stepping out of a landscape
that offered, he’d thought, the backdrop
to a plausible existence
until he entered it; it’s just not me,
he’d murmur, walking away.
It’s not quite me, he’d explain,
apologetic but firm,
leaving some job they’d found him.
They found him others: he’d go,
smiling his smile, putting
his best foot forward, till again
he’d find himself reluctantly concluding
that this, too, wasn’t him.
He wanted to get married, make a home,
unfold a life among his neighbors’ lives,
branching and blossoming like a tree,
but when it came to it, it isn’t me
was all he seemed to learn
from all his diligent forays outward.
And why it should be so hard
for someone not so different from themselves,
to find what they’d found, barely even seeking;
what gift he’d not been given, what forlorn
charm of his they’d had the luck to lack,
puzzled them—though not unduly:
they lived inside their lives so fully
they couldn’t, in the end, believe in him,
except as some half-legendary figure
destined, or doomed, to carry on his back
the weight of their own all-but-weightless, stray
doubts and discomforts. Only sometimes,
alone in offices or living rooms,
they’d hear that phrase again: it isn’t me,
and wonder, briefly, what they were, and where,
and feel the strangeness of being there.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on March 10, 2013
March 12th, 2013
Squeezebox is a place for our Song Leaders, as well as congregants, to learn the songs we sing at St. Lydia’s.
At Saint Lydia’s our prayers begin and end with a song that the song-leader chooses from a list of options. Below, you’ll find links to recordings of those songs made by our own Heather Young, who sang them to us all the way from her new home in Seattle. (Thank you, Heather!!!) Note that some of the recordings include helpful notes for performance.
Because the prayers at Saint Lydia’s take place when we are all sitting around small tables, the song leader can’t rely on visual cues to let the rest of the congregation know when to listen, when to begin, and when to end. That means, as you practice these songs, it will be useful to think about how to use your breath and note lengths to guide the congregation. Heather has given useful tips in this regard.
Shine On Me
A tune that Emily learned from her pastor, Dr. Brad Braxton, and she’s shared it with the congregation at St. Lydia’s. The piece was recorded in the late 1920’s by Blues and Gospel performer Blind Willie Johnson. You can listen to a snippet of his recording here.
I Will Guide Thee
Rachel brought us this piece, often sung by her friends the Peter and Mary Alice Amidon, folk singers in Vermont. You can hear Peter’s choral arrangement of this piece here. The song is a variation on an 1873 hymn called “Precious Promise”
I Must Tell Jesus
Emily brought us this hymn from her time at The Riverside Church, where it was sung as an anthem. It’s a variation on a hymn of the same name written by Elisha A. Hoffman in 1893.
All Shall Be Well
Emily wrote this setting of Julian of Norwich’s famous text, “All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”
What We Need Is Here
This piece was written by students in the Episcopal/Lutheran student group at MIT, and taught to us by their priest, Amy McCreath.
Tar a Thighearna
A piece by our friend, Ruth Cunningham. It’s published in the volume, Music By Heart. The piece is a simple, beautiful melody, which encourages improvisation from the congregation. We sing it during prayer at St. Lydia’s, and on Good Friday.
Come, Bring Your Burdens to God
A lovely song from Kenya taught to us by our musicians in residence, Paul Vasile. Paul always reminds us that the line, “Jesus will never say no,” does not imply that all our prayers will be answers, but simply that Jesus will never say to to carrying our burdens with us.
My Soul Waits
A beautiful song by our own Debbie Holloway. It’s singing suggests the rhythm of breath and is not only great as a prayer song but as an introduction to meditation and contemplation.
Fear Not the Pain
A stanza of What You Cannot Hold, from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 4, set to music by Rachel Pollak Kroh.
Don’t Be Afraid
By John Bell
March 8th, 2013
by Brenda Shaughnessy
I am dreaming of a house just like this one
but larger and opener to the trees, nighter
than day and higher than noon, and you,
visiting, knocking to get in, hoping for icy
milk or hot tea or whatever it is you like.
For each night is a long drink in a short glass.
A drink of blacksound water, such a rush
and fall of lonesome no form can contain it.
And if it isn’t night yet, though I seem to
recall that it is, then it is not for everyone.
Did you receive my invitation? It is not
for everyone. Please come to my house
lit by leaf light. It’s like a book with bright
pages filled with flocks and glens and groves
and overlooked by Pan, that seductive satyr
in whom the fish is also cooked. A book that
took too long to read but minutes to unread—
that is—to forget. Strange are the pages
thus. Nothing but the hope of company.
I made too much pie in expectation. I was
hoping to sit with you in a tree house in a
nightgown in a real way. Did you receive
my invitation? Written in haste, before
leaf blinked out, before the idea fully formed.
An idea like a storm cloud that does not spill
or arrive but moves silently in a direction.
Like a dark book in a long life with a vague
hope in a wood house with an open door.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on February 24, 2013
March 8th, 2013
by Hannah Gamble
It had a secret name
which in later years came to mean
I will continue to stand here.
It had a food mouth
and a shrieking mouth.
Popular wisdom indicated
that Its hands could heat stones
and that a man could cook
meat on those stones.
That being said,
It had a poverty hand
and a riches hand.
They were
the same hand.
A little ways above the hands
the mouths spoke together
but for two
different reasons,
like the music was behaving
but the orchestra was broken.
*
Even in less
benevolent moments,
It was known to use Its own
body as a tent and as the gifts
inside of the tent.
Early people said It had a mother hand
and a father hand, and that together
they made a clapping sound.
Its hands delivered the children
from madness.
The hands saw the riverbank sliding
into the river
to make
a more shallow river.
They scooped the mud up.
The hands were giving thanks.
*
The hands smelled like exodus.
The hands were the law.
One hand grew older, and the other
hand younger.
They said, fairly often,
We’d like to try that again.
Both were restless
and wanted rest.
One hand said, I will go where you go,
while the other hand continued
on alone.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on March 4, 2013
March 6th, 2013
Read Emily’s latest sermon, “The Mercy of Clementine,” and re-live your Middle School nightmares. Fun, right? Part of our exploration of the Gospel of Luke.
February 28th, 2013
The St. Lydia’s Enough for Everyone Garden, at 346 Bergen Street in Brooklyn, is an experiment in radical generosity, where growing and eating fresh, healthy food becomes a possibility for everyone. This is our second season, and we invite you to participate! We are building the garden together, so if you are interested in volunteering or just learning more about our garden or A Small Green Patch, the larger Greenthumb Community Garden we are one part of, email us at rachel@stlydias.org. You can see more photos of our first work day on March 3, 2013, here!
Sweet grow light set-up
Our first seedlings! (Butterfly weed)
Seeds and books (and our christmas cactus, in bloom in the background!)This post is all about news regarding our brand new 2013 season of the St. Lydia’s Enough for Everyone Garden. All are welcome to participate! If you are interested in getting involved and doing some gardening this year, please email Rachel at rachel@stlydias.org.
Some news about the space
First off, some good news. Our tenancy at 346 Bergen has, from the beginning of this project, been temporary. The lot we use, as well as the one on the west side of the space, is owned by the city and has Greenthumb Community Garden status. But the middle lot is privately owned, and the owner has always planned to build on all three lots. He has generously allowed us to use it until he secures the permits and financing he needs to build. We’ve heard from him that the earliest he’ll begin building is August or September of this year, and we have decided to go ahead with our growing season full-steam, with the understanding that even if we have to leave in the late summer, our work will have been well worth the effort for even a truncated season’s worth of fun and fresh produce. Hurray! He’ll give us 30 days notice if he needs us to vacate, and we will decide then what the best way forward will be should that happen.
January planning meeting summary
We had a little planning meeting with some of the folks at St. Lydia’s who are interested in participating in the gardent this year, and I want to give a little summary of what we talked about. We discussed what we liked about the garden last year, and most of our comments were about the pleasure we all took in being able to work together outside. We liked that we got to learn from the other groups at Small Green Patch, and that it was easy to get to know each other while working alongside each other in the garden. And we all loved having fresh produce to share and eat.
The thing we hit on as being important to think more about this year is how to have an outward focus. We decided that our strategy will be to build relationships with people in the neighborhood that will be based in mutual learning in the garden, with a special focus on people who may not otherwise have access to land or fresh produce. We know it will take time to build these relationships, and we hope that the Season of Listening will help us start to make connections. But we want to make sure as we proceed that the garden continues to be a way for us to share all that we’ve been given with others, and to make connections and do healing work in the community and the world (and not just a way for us to hoard heirloom tomatoes for dinner church).
Speaking of tomatoes
Based on what folks mentioned at the January meeting about things they are interested in growing this year, we’ve made a growing plan for what we hope to plant this year. It is by no means complete or concrete, so if you have things you’d like to add, you are welcome to! If you are going to grow something, let us know what you are planning to do so that we make sure to save space in the garden for it. Eric and I bought some seeds at the coop, and ordered some more from Johnny’s, and we even set up some shelves with fluorescent lights to grow some seedlings in our apartment (the seedlings we tried to start last year were a sad affair, begun too late and raised on the weak light we get from our windows, so we decided to invest in some tools to have a better shot at it this year). If you are interested in starting seedlings in your home, we encourage you to do so! It is more fun than you can believe. We have learned some things, and we are interested in hearing from you about your experience, so let’s all share our seedling knowledge. We got The New Seed-Starter’s Handbook by Nancy Bubel and have been finding it very helpful. We also also got this Seedling Grower Kit from Johnny’s that includes five trays and a bag of their special potting soil medium. It is on sale right now for $31 and we found it to be a good deal. This weekend we started tomatoes and some flowers and parsley, and you can see in the attached photos that we already have our first teeny sprouts! So exciting.
Schedule for Gardening
This Saturday, March 2: we are going to begin this weekend by buying some more soil from home depot and filling out the beds that weren’t quite full last year. We’ll also be planting some early crops like greens, radishes, peas and okra so if you are interested in coming on Saturday to help, let me know! We’ll be hauling soil in the morning starting at 10, and working in the garden after about 1 PM. The other groups from the garden will also probably be working this weekend, so it should be a fun time to come out and see everyone and hear about plans for the new season.
Sunday, April 14–Season Opening Party: A Small Green Patch will have a party to celebrate the beginning of the new season and invite the public to visit the garden. Hopefully it will be starting to warm up, and we will be invited to bring drinks and snacks to share, so save the date!
An open question about volunteer days
When we had our meeting in January, we talked about having Sunday be our volunteer day again this year, as it was towards the end of last season. However, since then I have had to move the time slot for the Fresh Direct order up to 2 PM on Sundays, so it will be tough for me to get there in time orient volunteers or spend much time in the garden on Sundays. For the time being, Eric and I will be working on (some) Saturdays, but that doesn’t mean that Sunday can’t still be the St. Lydia’s open volunteer time. So I want to ask you to help us think through this.
Goals
Our goal is to have a consistent time during the week when we can have the garden be open to the public. This is important for us, because we want to make sure the garden has an outward focus in relationship to the community. It is also important because part of our committment to A Small Green Patch is to help host some of the required 20 hours a week to maintain our Green Thumb status.
Different kinds of garden time
Last year we discovered that there were two kinds of time we spend in the garden. The first kind happens when there is a big project to do, and we schedule a work day to all be there together and do what needs doing. Last year there was a lot of this time–clearing the lots, spreading soil and mulch, building beds etc. This year there will be less, but there will still be some–filling the beds with extra soil this weekend, planting seeds and seedlings, and spreading new mulch when we get some. The other kind of time is the regular weekly slot of open volunteer hours, where we open the garden to the public and do regular maintanence like watering, weeding and harvest produce.
Since Eric and I are doing most of the organizing for the larger structural aspects of the garden, we will schedule the work days when we are available, on Saturdays throughout the season. But for the second kind of time, we need to work together to help come up with a good system for scheduling open volunteer time at the garden. So give some thought to what kind of time you’ll want to spend, and which days you are most likely to want to spend in the garden. Its worked well in the past to have Sunday be the day, so that volunteers can harvest during their time in the garden and then bring produce to dinner church. But there are lots of possibilities, it could be on Saturdays, or on a weekday, so think it over and let me know what your thoughts are.
OK folks, that was a big information download, thanks for sticking with us. We look forward to another great season of the St. Lydia’s Enough for Everyone Garden!
Blessings on the blossoms,
Blessings on the roots,
Blessings on the leaf and stem,
Blessings on the fruits!
February 22nd, 2013
by Robinson Jeffers
Mountains, a moment’s earth-waves rising and hollowing; the earth too’s an ephemerid; the stars—
Short-lived as grass the stars quicken in the nebula and dry in their summer, they spiral
Blind up space, scattered black seeds of a future; nothing lives long, the whole sky’s
Recurrences tick the seconds of the hours of the ages of the gulf before birth, and the gulf
After death is like dated: to labor eighty years in a notch of eternity is nothing too tiresome,
Enormous repose after, enormous repose before, the flash of activity.
Surely you never have dreamed the incredible depths were prologue and epilogue merely
To the surface play in the sun, the instant of life, what is called life? I fancy
That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence;
Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says “Ah!” but the treasure’s the essence:
Before the man spoke it was there, and after he has spoken he gathers it, inexhaustible treasure.
–Read at St. Lydia’s on February 17,2013
February 22nd, 2013
Burke Gerstenschlager, one our Table Leaders at St. Lydia’s, preached this sermon on Luke 12:13-34 at Dinner Church on February 17. Burke is a book editor in religion and philosophy.
February 19th, 2013
Deacons and Song Leaders! Here’s the Script for Lent 2013 , so you can look it over at home!
February 15th, 2013
by Michael Palmer
The voice, because of its austerity, will often cause dust to rise.
The voice, because of its austerity, will sometimes attempt the representation of dust.
Someone will say, I can’t breathe—as if choking on dust.
The voice ages with the body.
It will say, I was shaped by light escaping from a keyhole.
Or, I am the shape of that light.
It will say, For the body to breathe, a layer must be peeled away.
It will say, What follows is a picture of how things are for me now.
It will say, The rose is red, twice two is four—as if another were present.
The dust rises in spirals.
It will say, The distance from Cairo to anywhere is not that great.
As if one had altered the adjustment of a microscope.
Or examined its working parts.
Possibly an instrument covered with dust and forgotten on a shelf.
Beside a hatbox and a pair of weathered boots.
The voice will expand to fill a given space.
As if to say, This space is not immeasurable.
This space is not immeasurable.
When held before your eyes.
And which voice is it says (or claims to say), Last night I dreamt of walls and courses of brick, last night I dreamt of limbs.
As you dream—always unwillingly—of a writing not visible and voices muffled by walls.
As if the question: lovers, prisoners, visitors.
The voice, as an act of discipline or play, will imitate other voices.
This is what I am doing now.
This is what I’m doing now.
The clock behind my back, its Fusée mechanism.
Voice one recognizes from years before.
Beneath water, hidden by a spark.
Here at the heart of winter, or let’s say spring.
Voice with a history before its eyes.
With a blue dot before its eyes.
History of dust before its eyes.
It will say, as if remembering, The letter S stands for a slow match burning.
On the table before me.
No numbers on this watch.
And I live in a red house that once was brown.
A paper house, sort of falling down.
Such is the history of this house.
It looks like this.
Looks just like this.
We think to say in some language.
