“The voice of God is not in the great wind, and not in the giant produce from the biggest supermarkets. It’s in the undersized, end-of-the-season cucumber, the microbes that soften it, and in the small acts of love that we share.”

This, I think is one of the best statements on this I have seen. I’m so glad to have followed you home here.

Thanks for dropping by! Just yesterday our weather started to turn cold. There’s now snow in the mountain passes that we can’t expect to melt off until spring. Ski areas are opening.

My yearly meeting, North Pacific, is also all unprogrammed. Another YM, Northwest, covers much of the same geographical area with an evangelical style, pastored congregations and programmed worship. Freedom Friends Church in Salem, Oregon (about 40 miles from my home) is independent, pastored and welcoming to folks with many lifestyles.

Thanksgiving Day is indeed next week. It’s a semi-secular holiday that I can actually get behind and experience inwardly. Potluck dinner at our house with an open invitation. It includes you, too! Write for more info.

I’m thankful today for a visit from our older son. He and his friend have crossed the Cascades to see my wife and I.

Drop back by anytime. I can’t promise much activity on the blog, but it’s always open.

Have come to you through the comments section on the prayer post at Can You Believe? And I have popped over to your wife’s site and ordered a couple of her books.

Aren’t we fortunate to live in a time when we can find people with common interests a world away yet we don’t have to leave our desk and chair? I also popped over and had a look at your Quaker Meeting House - all painted in Quaker grey I note.

I live in Melbourne, Australia. Friends are not numerous here - a thousand or so in the whole nation if we are grouped together. I belong to Eastern Suburbs Local Meeting in Melbourne which is part of Victoria Regional Meeting. Our Meetings step up from Local to Regional to Australian Yearly Meeting. Our tradition in Friends follows more the British pattern of unprogrammed Meeting for Worship.

I am retired. I have a variety of blogs on various issues and interests and you can find them all linked at this site: www.brigidwalsh.webs.com

Hope all is well with you. Our weather in Melbourne can be quite changeable - but to-day (and the weather pattern for the coming week) seems to indicate we, at last, are moving towards summer. Our summers are warm to hot and dry. Our winters are cold (in some places with snow) and wet.

I think that you are moving towards Thanksgiving in the next week - so I do hope it is a happy, thoughtful time for you and yours.

Blessings and bliss
Brigid

Some of the plants are turning a bit yellow, indicating that it will be time to harvest them in a week or three. So far as I know, no one has dug up any samples yet.

Check back toward the end of this month. You could come down the valley for a visit. I’ll save a few potatoes for you.

Your gardenless neighbor down south,

Doug (in and about Springfield, OR)

Girding one’s loins refers to tucking in that which might either present a vulnerability to an enemy or that which get, shall we say, caught up in the machinery.

I enjoy seeing the two statements about “covenants” clearly set in the context of Enlightenment thinking.

I am not sure whether John Woolman was pre-Enlightenment or post-Enlightenment or whether he just bypassed the Enlightenment entirely.