[Prelude Music]

[We have two Prelude Music Options. There is the low-tear audio only option, and the high-tear video option]

[Low Tear Option: Top of the World by Patty Griffin]

[High Tear Option: Top of the World sung by the Dixie Chicks]

Thank you so much for that lovely music, Patty, and/or The Dixie Chicks.

Now we will have the children come forward as we light the Chalice

[Opening Words]
There is no time to wait. Let yourself be known, so that you can be loved. Let yourself soar and give your gifts freely to the world.

From The Dance of The Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd:

If someone should ask me, “What does the soul do?” I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates.

Now we will have our opening hymn. Please join me in singing, Many the Miles. The words are on your insert in your order of service. (If you don’t have an order of service, you can just click here.)

Thank you for that beautiful song, Sara.

Now is the time in our service when we share our Joys and Concerns. Please come up to the front if you would like to share.

[First person to share:]

Sappho, the ancient poetess is often depicted jumping off of a cliff. In reality she probably lived a long life. In this picture she is depicted on the cliff, despairing because she has put down her lyre.

That was beautiful music. I actually heard the first song on A Prairie Home Companion on Sunday. I was driving over to the nursing home where my Granddad is staying and even though I was late, I had to pause in the parking lot to hear the whole song. The music expressed so well the despairing? weird? numbness? I’ve been feeling? I’ve been unconsciously out of sorts and I don’t know exactly why.

Later this week I was shaken out of my self focus when a tragedy happened in my family. I have a deep sorrow to share. My cousin died this week. She was a year younger than me. She had 4 little girls. and a husband. and two parents still married to each other. and a brother. and a sister. And she must have had a deep sorrow, and pain, for she killed herself. I just can’t believe it. You just never know how people really feel on the inside. I would never have guessed it.

Lots of people will have their ideas about why… and some may be right, but none of us will ever really know for sure. I never ever had any idea that she was hurting. I would never have guessed it. She was always beautiful and had so much. Her brother killed himself about 11 years ago. That must have hurt her so much… I don’t know the kind of anguish her parents must be feeling and I hope I never do know. Please reach out your hearts to them.

I was crying and crying when I found out about my cousin. Because she is not in my life on a day to day basis, the grief comes and goes. My mom wisely told me to find happiness when I can find it and not hold on to the sorrow. My mom held me on the couch and she said a beautiful prayer for my cousin. She asked God to take her in his arms and comfort her, wash away her pain. She prayed a lovely long prayer.

I do have a few simple joys to share. I’m glad for little Henri the baby bird who arrived just in time to be a sweet little distraction from pain, and a reminder of life, who needed to be fed every half hour and liked to cuddle. I’m glad I got to hang out with my mom and have toast and jam and tea and read from On the Banks of Plum Creek by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I’m SOOO glad that I get to hang out with my dog P.J this summer. I’m glad for the crickets and the locusts. I’m glad for the trees and the big window through which I can see them.

Thank you for sharing. I light a candle for all the joys and concerns of those here today, those spoken and those unspoken. I light a candle for all the people hurting in the world, the ones receding into themselves, not reaching out, not sharing. I light a candle for all your hearts to remember that your kind words, your smile can make a difference. I light a candle so that you remember that when you are hurting, you can reach out. And when you are celebrating, we can celebrate together. I light a candle for all the joys and concerns today, those spoken and those that remain in our hearts.

[Meditation]

Please join us in our moving meditation which will be led by Karel. Please stand if your physical body and spirit allows, or join us in the movements from your chair.

[Announcements]

Some of your hearts have lost their songs. We’ve also found several clipped birds wings. If you have lost the song in your heart, please pick it up today. We need all hearts singing. Also, there are several bird wing repair kits on loan in the library, so please come by if you need one.

[Offertory]
This Sunday we have a special offering. We will be donating our offering to the world today. Please search your wallets, purses, back pockets, and sleeves for any spare talents, wisdom, and well wishes you have. Please don’t be stingy with your creativity, even if you are feeling like you don’t have enough. Every little bit you can share will make a bigger difference than you can ever imagine. Those little projects you’ve thought would be fun? That card you though you might send? Now is the time. Now we will pass the candlesticks. Please get off your bushels, put your candles on the candlesticks, and let your candlelight shine.

[Sermon]

We are so pleased to have His Holiness The Dalai Lama the 14th with us today to talk about Inner Peace and World Peace. Click here to listen to the sermon.

Thank you so much, your Holiness. That reminds me of what one of our recent speakers, John Lennon, was saying. Our happiness and inner peace are inextricably linked to world peace and happiness for everyone.

[Sing A Hymn]

Now we are honored and thrilled to have John back with us and joined by Yoko to sing Give Peace a Chance. Please join in on the chorus with us. “All we are saying is give peace a chance.”

[Closing Words]

From Dido’s song Life for Rent:

I’ve always thought
that I would love to live by the sea
To travel the world alone
and live my life more simply
I have no idea what’s happened to that dream
Cos there’s really nothing left here to stop me…

While my heart is a shield and I won’t let it down
While I am so afraid to fail so I won’t even try
Well how can I say I’m alive

From The Dance of The Dissident Daughter by Sue Monk Kidd:

Our lives are meant to unfold, to evolve, and that’s good. The only wrong thing, perhaps, is permanently hesitating on the verge of courage, which would prevent this process from taking place…

If someone should ask me, “What does the soul do?” I would say, It does two things. It loves. And it creates.

[Postlude]

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don’t dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be…

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

This would be a pretty quote to illustrate.

My answer begins with who you should marry:

I think it makes sense to marry someone you are crazy about, someone who lights up your life and twinkles your toes, and is a decent person who treats people kindly, who is willing to work on a relationship, and who has goals that are compatible with yours.

So, if things aren’t going well and you think maybe you want out, should you call it quits? I have three answers for you:

1. YES

I think that if people are in abusive relationships, they ought to get divorced RIGHT AWAY! Don’t try and fix it! Get thee out!  The hard part is, what is abusive? That can be a trickier to answer than you would think when you are in a relationship and much easier to see when you finally get out.

If someone hits you, sexually abuses anyone, or in any other way degrades your soul, then I would JUST LEAVE (make you sure you research how to do it safely if you are worried about the other person hurting you- make your safety your highest priority.)

2. MAYBE

I just read on the Divorce Busting site that 1/3 of the marriages ending in divorce are abusive. That means 2/3’s aren’t.
If you are not in an abusive marriage, and you never felt twinkly about the person you are with, and you don’t have kids, I just don’t know. My only advice is that you do everything you can to improve the relationship and even if you decide not to try and keep your marriage alive, at least do everything in your power to be a true friend to the person you married.

I think that if you do decide to get divorced even after you make every effort to improve your relationship, the thing that will comfort you is that you have a healthy relationship of some kind and that you treated and continue to treat the other person very well. (And who knows, you might find that you can create a very satisfying relationship with the person you are with after all.)

3.Do Your Best To Save Your Marriage

If you once felt twinkly about your partner, if the person just annoys the hell out of you, you have lost interest in them, if you feel repeatedly rejected because they have lost interest in you, if you no longer find sex satisfying or any other host of problems- but they are not abusive, and especially if you have kids,

Then I would say do EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING in your power to make it work.

I’m thinking about this right now because I stumbled across the site: Divorce Busting and while I am very, very glad that divorce exists for anyone in abusive relationships, and I HIGHLY recommend high tailing it out of there (you can be so much happier when you are with someone who treats you well, you won’t even believe it), there are many people whose families are torn asunder who probably could have mended things if they had just known how. That is really tragic.

I really wish some of my friends, and my friend’s parents had access to this information back in the day.
Especially interesting articles from the site:

1.  The Walk Away Wife Syndrome
2. Hopefully Ever After 
3. He Must Be Teething

To listen, go to Your Strongest Self, click on “video and audio clips,” then choose “Do you still think you’re a caterpillar?”

(What does this have to do with Women’s History Month??? Ummm… trusting yourself is very good for women? ?? I’m not sure, but I hope this story inspires you. :)

Here are my edited comments about Research on Female Preferences in Men over at, (yipes!) Feminist Critics:

My experiences:
Whenever I’ve heard a guy say, “Women say they want nice guys, but they don’t really.” or something like that, and the guy saying that is implying that he is nice, but women don’t like him, he never actually is nice. I’ve never heard an actual nice guy say that. I wonder what the men who say that think of as “nice.”

(Maybe they mean superficially polite, begrudgingly following the cultural rules and miffed that she still won’t sleep with him? I don’t know, this is pure conjecture.)

Personally, I do like manly men. (If we are defining “manly” as “probably having a lot of testosterone.”) I once heard a show about the effects of testosterone on mens voices: makes them kind of gruff and deep, and noted that my three favorite boyfriends had voices like that. All of my boyfriends have been athletic, but I don’t think they were all especially “manly.”  Two of my “manly” boyfriends were also popular and confident, which I liked. I don’t know if that has anything to do with testoterone…

So, although I do like manly men, I also like and have dated just regular men. Therefore, the differentiating factor for me is not “manliness.”  I look for niceness, (ie: grounded, at least somewhat emotionally intelligent, kind even to people who won’t benefit him), physical attraction (which I guess must be chemical and has been quite varied for me) and of course, shared humor, interests, values, etc..

What about YOU gentle reader? What do you like?

One night a week at a track club: I like running every now and then- I especially like running fast and this track work out is dedicated to speed work.

Dancing: My favorite dance company in my town has moved closer to where I live and I want to take their classes. I’m a little nervous about facing fat prejudice. I love dancing and I have a natural aptitude for it. I hope I’ll be welcomed and not judged even though I bet I’ll have more fat on my body then other people in the class will.

*If you’ve ever faced prejudice, how do you deal with it? Do you call people on it? Do you ignore it and try to prove them wrong through your actions? Do you ignore it? There is so much fat prejudice in our society. I’m worried that it is especially bad in dance classes. Oh well. I gotta dance. I’m going anyway.

**By the way, if you love dancing and are fat, (ie: you have more fat on your body than you feel is socially acceptable) and are afraid to face the fat prejudice, I recommend salsa dancing and swing dancing. There are people of all different shapes there and people mostly just want a good dance partner. A fat safe place.

Wilderness training: I love camping and I haven’t gone camping in about 5 years now. Unheard of! I got a notice in my email for a ten week wilderness training course put on by the Sierra Club. Ten weeks of training and four camping trips to practice our skills! This class is what got the rat park ball rolling.

Writing group: I write almost every day. I have weird mixed feelings about going to a writing group.

*Fantasy: I imagine reading something and everyone exclaiming about how great it is. Afterwards, people come up to me and say that I should be in their smaller writing group, I should publish a book, they know a magazine editor- I should submit an article.

**What I don’t really want is any negative critique. I’m not sure why I’m less open to suggestion about my writing. I think I know when my writing is crappy or blah. What will be useful for me is having a regular time to meet with people every month and preparing writing to be read in public.

Music: I feel almost opposite about music as I do about writing. I don’t want an open mike night to perform at. I want a jam session and I’m open to LOTS of feedback.

2/25/08 Update: I have been taking the Wilderness course and I have been enjoying my time off. I’m blossoming out of the cage office and in my enriched natural environment. I’m glad I found this post which reminds me of so to add in some of the other activities I was excited about as well. Wishing you the oomph to change any cage like situations and get thee some more park like situations.

How has your holiday vacation been? (I hope you’ve had some holiday vacation!)

I’ve been thinking about the coming year. What I think I should be doing is looking for a JOB or some way to make money, but what I’ve been doing is planning my fun. I had a dirth* of fun last year and I think my neural connections have withered away from sitting in a dark secluded giant box with very boring tasks to do. Sounds like a lab rat.

*I know it’s “dearth” in the dictionary, but that looks like it sounds like someone is saying “dearest” after sucking on ice too long, and I’m leading a spelling revolution.

Martha Beck wrote about experiments done on rats and how there are some fundamental flaws in most of the research. You see, most of the research was done on rats in very boring environments. The results totally change when they place the rats in more life like enriched environments which she calls “rat parks”.

The results of my year and a half long experiment in an impoverished rat cage environment? This usually quick witted girl has gotten a little slower, I talk slower, I move slower, I don’t smile as much. The world seems grayer. I feel like I’m coming out of seclusion and I’ve started to plan all the fun things I’m going to do. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for them, tomorrow I’ll tell you what I have up my sleeve so far.

Just messin’ about the other night.

Game: one person is the interviewer, one is the interviewee, no pre-planning.

Result: 5 minutes of radio listening- frequent channel changes.

I hope you enjoy it! We did! :)

Oh bummer… the file is too big. Ok, instead, I’ve attached a picture of our cat visitor. S/he came back tonight! SUCH a cutie and SUCH a softie.

Here is her (slightly tongue in cheek at the end) letter she suggests I send:

Dr. Pat Patruchia xxxx
I came to you on xxx-xx-xx date and explained clearly that I needed my bite repaired. You should have explained to me that this was not your specialty and referred me to a bite specialist. But you didn’t; you told me that you could do this.

After spending 6 hours and $3000. in your office, not only is my bite problem not fixed but 2 other crowned teeth in my mouth that were previously fine are sensitive and often experiencing pain.

All I am asking is that you refund the $3000. I do not want to sue you but if I have to, I will. If I must pursue legal action it will be for more than this – it will also include the cost of repairing the other crowns, it will include my time, and it will include the cost of emotional damage to me, my mother, and my children and grandchildren down to the fourth generation.

Please respond within one week or I’ll be seeing you in court.

She has also consulted her dentist who thinks I did not get good treatment. (Yes, I got a recommendation to go to this dentist, but who really knows with dentists!)

My mom hopes I’m not mad at her for obsessing about my teeth. I’m not mad. She tells me that my great-grandma obsessed about my grandma’s teeth, who got unsuccessful caps on her previously beautiful front teeth, my grandma obsessed about my mom’s teeth- making her display her teeth as she told strangers how well her overbite had been fixed, and now my mom is obsessing about my teeth. I’m not mad, I’m glad she cares.

Teeth are so personal. They are so omnipresent in our consciousness when they are uncomfortable. The ironic thing is that I was blessed with really great teeth! They were white, they were cavity free, they were straight enough, but a series of small mistakes by dentists along the way has led to a situation like a bad hair cut where the hairdresser keeps cutting a little more off to even up the now way too short bangs, (or “fringe” for all my British readers (I like to pretend I have British readers).)

So pretty front teeth (I don’t want you to picture me all scraggly toothed) that don’t quite touch in the back, which is rather aggravating, especially after just spending $3000. Let us pray to the tooth fairy for pain free teeth that can chew, and a husband with Canadian citizenship.

Republicans:

John McCain- he knows what he’s doing and he is a good person with a solidly ethical record. If I wasn’t so set on voting for a Democrat, I might vote for him, which I could do in good conscious. I so hope he is the Republican nominee.

Huckabee- I’m guessing he wouldn’t make the best president because I doubt his policies would be effective and his social conservatism scares me, but I think he has the heart of a populist and is actually for the people which is a massive improvement over Bush.

I have to give a shout out to Mitt Romney. I don’t want him to be president, but I do think he is a nice person, and he is so good looking. ;)

Democrats:

Hillary Clinton- I trust her abilities. I think she can handle whatever comes along and she has a looonnnggg track record of very ethical, good hearted public service. She’s the smart kid in the room.

Obama- I was so set on Hillary that I finally had to look at Obama’s website to see what his take on the issues are. … Looks good, but lacks experience. I don’t know. With the troubled world right now, I still trust Hillary more in the seat of power, but I think it would be awesome if he was vice-president.

John Edwards is currently making me cry with his after caucus speech.  To be fair, I haven’t looked at Edwards’ policies.  For me, it is so exciting to think of having a woman or an African American man being president that I haven’t felt motivated to look into his policies, but I will. I’ll vote for who I believe will be the best president.

A change is gonna come and it is soo time for it. I’ll leave you with John Edward’s words: “Enough is enough. We are better than this.”

Damn straight.