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.

What works for me… that traditional focus on the breathing… neither stopping it nor making it go, neither striving to deepen nor inhibiting that effort when it wants to happen. Counting breaths, breathing exercises– all these things are distractions from my distressingly automatic thinking, also potentially helpful ways to play with the breath and learn how many different things it can do–but after all that, from the recurring experience of seeing how much I need God’s ongoing help, last night I had to go back to just sitting, letting thoughts & breaths do as they would.

Focusing is interesting stuff, but I would recommend that the best way to approach worship is simply to keep doing it, and to do it more than one hour a week, as did early Friends. My wife gave some vocal ministry a few weeks ago concerning how we don’t teach a technique, we simply trust the spirit to guide us as in whatever manner we need to be guided at the time, and I have found that to be true.

I would suggest this, however. If you are feeling that worship seems inaccessible to you, just stay with that feeling for as long as it lasts. Don’t be too anxious to get away from it. That very sense of inaccessibility may itself be the key to entry.

Our language includes multiple spirits: school spirit, patriotic spirit, the spirit of fun. I even understand Santa Claus as a spirit.

In order to be clear about what spirit we are acknowledging or invoking, I’m most comfortable if folks would modify or articulate it somehow. “The Holy Spirit” works for me. As long as we’re coming out of a mostly Christian culture, we might as well draw on the best of its traditions.

I’m curious about this statement. I find myself in the group that is uncomfortable with the word “God” and more comfortable with “Spirit”. For a while I’ve been trying to figure out what about the word bothers me. This passage helped at least a little. I think I am most uncomfortable with the notion of “A” God, and not a “transcendent and immanent” God. I am slightly more comfortable (though not completely) with the notion of a spirit that surrounds us at all times. I don’t identify with a singular being located in some far off place, no matter how loving He/She/It is.

I am most curious about your thought that there are multiple spirits that one could identify with or(hence?) give authority to. Do you speak of a god-like and a devil-like spirit, or more than two? My thoughts on this have always considered only a lone “spirit” that unites/surrounds us all.

-EMT