Spent a good part of the most recent Saturday in Philadelphia, starting with a ride on the SEPTA train from Norristown into Jefferson Station. First time for that. We got a different perspective than the usual route of driving the Schuylkill Expressway. I’m glad we were on the train.

Along the way, we made stops at, among other places, Conshohocken, Spring Mill, Manayunk, Wissahickon, Allegheny, and Temple University. Jefferson Station is the stop you want if you’re heading to the PA Convention Center, which was our destination for the annual PHS (Philadelphia Horticultural Society) flower show, billed as the world’s largest indoor show.

The show is an annual March tradition and offers up something for everyone- serious gardeners, the eco-aware, families with children, or folks who just need to see something that’s pleasing to the eye. This year’s theme was The Wonders of Water. 

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It was a busy day, a bit too crowded for my liking, and the vendors started getting on my nerves. Still, not a bad way to spend a few hours on a Saturday.

We walked to the Comcast Center and had some lunch. It wasn’t very busy there, and it was difficult not to look up.

It’s March 1. Local weather forecasts predict a wild and woolly stretch over the next 36 hours or so- rain,  gale force winds, snow. Sounds like March is coming in like a lion this time around.

Let’s get started.

Cold brew. Two words whose mere mention probably raise my serotonin levels. Every day begins with a 16oz Tervis tumbler of this nectar of the gods.

I’ve been using the Toddy system for a while now. Haven’t invested in a scale, so I’ve probably never had the proper amount of beans. I max out a Cuisinart Automatic Burr Mill (18 cups x 2, medium grind) to use for each batch. My roast of choice depends on what’s on sale at the store- 8 O’clock Central Highlands, Starbucks House Blend, Gevalia French Roast.

I follow the directions of starting with one cup of filtered water, then add the first batch of freshly ground beans, then 3 more cups of filtered water, followed by the second 18- cup batch of beans. Then I wait five minutes to add the last 3 cups of filtered water. In that intervening five minutes I clean up the grinder, put that away, get out the plastic wrap and a rubber band. By that time, I’m ready to add the water, making sure all the grounds are wet before covering the container with the plastic wrap and securing with the rubber band.

Steep time varies, depending on when the batch is made. If it’s made first thing in the morning, I’ll let it sit all day and empty into the decanter before I go to bed. If it’s made later in the day, I let it steep overnight and empty it first thing in the morning. Always a minimum of 12 hours steep time, often longer than that. And it stays on the kitchen table or the counter for the duration. I don’t refrigerate while it’s steeping.

I love this system and would never use anything else. My only gripe is that sometimes it drains too slowly. Filter life varies for me. If I get consecutive batches that take forever to empty, then I break out a new filter.

The 56oz decanter of concentrated goodness lasts me about a week.

 

Seventeen lives, just like that.

And round ‘n’ round we go. Loved ones as collateral damage, the tragically unfortunate consequence of political inertia.

And people who are beyond angry, again. Tired of the same pictures, the same dead-in-the-eyes animal with “issues,” the same story line, the same inaction, the same tired rhetoric from Republicans who avoid uttering “gun control” the way people avoid a plague.

It’s never the right time, let’s not jump to conclusions, let’s get all the facts, please offer prayers for the families… We could do the interviews ourselves now.

How about we stop this insane bullshit and ask ourselves why this only happens here in the U.S. with such mind-numbing frequency. Stop using mental illness as your whipping boy, stop hiding behind your precious 2nd Amendment rights, dispense with your wild west fantasies and paranoia, and just admit there are too many guns.

Gun kits are not quite as accessible as model airplane kits. And don’t go on about how you’ll never stop the bad guys from getting guns. Lame excuse.

Look around. Why only here? Why only here?!

Hmmm… It’s a mystery. 

Wayne LaPierre and the rest of the NRA talking heads can take a long walk off a short pier.

How often does it seem like we’re waiting for our lives to begin, as if whatever is going on at the moment is warm-up, prologue, or somehow doesn’t count? I’m 64 years old and I believe I have operated under this illusion for… most of my life.

Well, I believe this is the case at least in terms of vocation. I am not currently- nor have ever been- engaged in work that I have dreamed of doing. I’ve found work, but it is not my life’s work. Maybe most folks don’t get to do their life’s work, whatever that might be. Or maybe they’re doing it but just don’t realize it.

If one’s life’s work is closely tied to financial reward, then I have definitely not found my niche. If it has more to do with feeling like a contribution is being made to society’s or individuals’ well-being, then maybe.

I guess the sweet spot is enjoying what you do and getting paid a living wage to do it. I might have half of that equation correct.

Anyway, what’s happening at this very moment isn’t prologue. It’s your life. And the clock is ticking.

So Trump wants a parade. A military parade, like North Korea or Russia. To show the world our might, to send a message to all that we are… what? Not to be messed with? Or that our priorities are way out of whack, that we are “led” by an insatiable egotist?

Sometimes I don’t think we give the world enough credit. Are other nations really that impressed with the missiles rolling by and the goose-stepping troops looking all serious and menacing? Or are they just thinking “Someone’s got a bad case of penis envy”?

Donald Trump is a flaming man-child, in a calculating and nefarious sort of way. Our very own despot-in-training.

So how long do we put up with the spin artists, excuse makers, sycophants, the yes-men and women who are going to defend our so-called President NO MATTER WHAT HE SAYS OR DOES?

This is remarkable, in a tragic sort of way. The whole bunch of them have drunk the kool-aid. They must be exhausted. I wonder if they hate themselves sometimes. Whatever it takes to stay in the driver’s seat, though. Right?

What, if anything, does it say about us as a nation that the stock market is soaring while much of everything else seems to be headed for the dumpster?

Can we learn to believe in God?

This was the question asked on the Op-Ed page of a recent edition of the NY Times. I didn’t read the article. The question itself was enough to get me pondering my own response.

Short answer? Sure, we can learn to believe in God the same way we can gain strength by subjecting our muscles to repeated exertion, or our brains to recalling letters of the alphabet. This is what regular worship and Sunday School can accomplish.

But is this the goal? Is this what we should want? Because it starts sounding an awful lot like rote memory, like what can happen when we say or hear something often enough- we just might start internalizing it, believing it. Not necessarily because it’s true in some absolute or cosmic way, but because it’s what we’ve come to know and grown familiar with. We’ve invested time and energy, after all.  And people in positions of authority are telling me it’s true, so it must mean something.

Learning to believe in God sounds somehow suspect to me. It infers too much process and a level of discipline that leaves no room for pure revelation. One could argue that revelation is the fruit of discipline, but that starts sounding like works righteousness to me- like you have to put in your time before you gain access to the really important information.

I betray my own misgivings. I envision belief in God as something more mysterious, ethereal, personal, and spiritual than simple muscle memory or extended periods of time with like-minded people, the product of some sort of not-so-benign group think that helps us get through the day.

No doubt we come to faith by different means. We profess belief in God in a kairos moment of clarity or surrender. Or maybe we say we believe when we’re really not sure.

Faith is neither rational nor logical. Faith is living without all the answers, including never knowing with certainty that there is a God in heaven who loves us.

This cold snap has me thinking about an impromptu weekend camping trip we put together at the close of one January term in college. For whatever reason, six or seven of us thought it would be a good idea to head to St. Croix State Forest, on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin, for a couple nights of camping and… whatever else ended up happening- walking, a little sledding, comraderie, time away before the Spring semester started.

We left our dorm in southern Minnesota, picked up a friend in the Twin Cities, and eventually headed up I-35 toward our destination. There was a bit of snow falling along the way, temps were in the low to mid 30s.

We set up camp in the middle of a pine grove, got a fire going, and eventually retired that first night- most of us to tents and sleeping bags, one of us to a hammock hung between two trees.

The next day was bright and sunny, so we got out and did some exploring. Someone had brought along a couple of those plastic toboggans, so we found some hills to slide on. We were having ourselves a good old time.

This was long before the days of cell phones and weather apps, but we knew the recent storminess was being followed by a batch of cold air. And the second night ended up being a lot different than the first. Most of us got up around midnight to stoke and stand around the fire, and we never moved very far from it. The sides of us facing the fire were toasty, but our backsides were freezing. The choice of placing the camp in a pine grove was fortuitous, since we had a built-in supply of dry wood.  Well, that and one of the moms pretty much emptied her refrigerator for us, so we had food enough to keep us going.

I don’t remember much about that wait for the sun to come up, other than it was a really long night. We got out of there sometime the next morning and stopped at the first Perkins we came to for multiple pots of coffee and a delicious hot breakfast.

Turns out the temp had dropped to -46 that second night. No wonder we were  

No Darwin Award, though. And no frostbite, no lingering affects, other than the sensory memory of that experience every time the mercury plummets toward negative numbers.

Fodder for a good story.

On occasion, I recall the trip made to Israel a few years ago.

Somewhat disappointingly, I didn’t have any real moments of revelation or epiphanies while I was there (not sure what I was expecting, though). It was more the collective experience- the air travel, the first glimpse of the Temple Mount from our “home base” at St. Peter in Gallicantu; the culture shock (though not as shocking as one might imagine), the real-time experience of Jerusalem and the road trip through much of the country- from Beersheba, Mitzpe Ramon and Sde Boker in the Negev Desert to the foothills of Mt. Hermon and the border with Lebanon; from the city of Akko, along the Mediterranean Sea, to disputed territory in the Golan Heights, little more than a stone’s throw from Syria.

While there was much more to see (we didn’t get to visit Bethany or Bethlehem, among other places), we did see and experience the desert south, the fertile Hula Valley, the Dead Sea, Masada, En Gedi, Qumran, the Sea of Galilee, Nazareth, Cana, Mt. Arbel, Mt. Tabor, one source of the Jordan River at Banyas Springs, Capernaum, Tiberias, Tabgha, and of course Jerusalem (Old and New)- Yad Vashem, open air markets, haggling with a merchant in the Old City, the Kidron Valley, Mount of Olives, Mt. Zion, Garden of Gethsemane, the Temple Mount.

And the food- ah, the falafel and hummus and tabouleh and shawarma and Turkish coffee and… pizza?

There were check points in the West Bank. There were teenagers in military garb carrying automatic weapons, practically rubbing shoulders with tourists and schoolchildren. There were reminders throughout of this uneasy co-existence of Jew and Christian and Muslim. Yet it seemed, at least on the surface, that most of the time folks were just trying to get through the day– go to school, make a living, worship their God.

Jerusalem is a vibrant and noisy place. We had only begun to plumb the depths of its historical and Biblical significance when it was time to head home.