The Summer Day and time for a break

My friends, the time has come for Lori and I to take a break. We've been going flat out since General Convention last July, with fall classes, two EfM groups, Thanksgiving and Christmas, Yule Log hunt, confirmation class, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.

We've been visited by the Presiding Bishop and the Diocesan Bishop. We've had four blizzards since the Fourth Sunday of Advent, and we've hosted the Parish Tea and the Pentecost Picnic. We've had more special Sundays than I can count. We've also had 10 funerals at St. Paul's since the beginning of the year.

It is definitely time for a break. Time to reconnect with family and friends far away.

That also means I will step back a bit from this blog. Not completely, but this blog can use a rest, too. I will post from time-to-time as events and the Spirit move, but not every day. So please check back, and we will pick up the pace again in July.

For now, let me leave you with a favorite poem by -- who else? -- Mary Oliver. I've used it before but it is well worth repeating. Enjoy your summer...

The Summer Day

By Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down,
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

Painting of Evening Glow at Mono Lake, Calif., by Chiuri Obata (1885-1975)

First Year Teacher to His Students

The end of the school year is upon us. Graduations are here for some, and for others comes a much needed summer break from school. May the warmth of summer bring you many blessings and adventures. Here is a poem sent the other day by our friend Karen in Tennessee:

First Year Teacher to His Students

by Gary J. Whitehead

Go now into summer, into the backs of cars,
into the black maws of your own changing,
onto the boardwalks of a thousand splinters,
onto the beaches of a hundred fond memories
in wait, where the sea in all its indefatigability
stammers at the invitation. Go to your vacation,

to the late morning cool of your basement rooms,
the honeysuckle evening of the first kiss, the first
dip and pivot, swivel and twist. Go to where
the clipper ships sail far upriver, where the salmon
swim in the clean, cool pools just to spawn.
Wake to what the spider unspools into a silver

dawn dripping with light. Sleep in sleeping bags,
sleep in sand, sleep at someone else's house
in a land you've never been, where the dreamers
dream in a language you only half understand.
Slip beneath the sheets, slide toward the plate,
swing beneath the bandstand where the secret

things await. Be glad, or be sad if you want,
but be, and be a part of all that marches past
like a parade, and wade through it or swim in it
or dive in it with your eyes open and your mind
open to wind, rain, long days of sun and longer
nights of city lights mixing on wet streets like paint.

Stay up so late that you forget day-of-the-week,
week-of-the-month, month-of-the-year of what
might be the best summer, the summer
best remembered by the scar, or by the taste
you'll never now forget of someone's lips,
and the trips you took—there, there, there,

where snow still slept atop some alpine peak,
or where the moon rose so low you could see
its tranquil seas...and all your life it'll be like
some familiar body that stayed with you one night,
one summer, one year, when you were young,
and how everywhere you walked, it followed.