Readings and Resources
Resource on Gratitude: Thanksgiving 2008
"Seasons of Grace the Life-Giving Practice of Gratitude" by Alan Jones, John O'Neil with Diana Landau
The Rev. Dr. Carol Hepokoski's "Notes From her MN Journal". From several different services:
Notes from my MN Journal October 2008 The Colors and Cultures of Rochester
Rochester has been looking quite beautiful colorful to me lately.
This is my third autumn here, and it seems to me that there is a particular richness in the colors of this particular autumn. Perhaps my perception has been helped by the gentleness of this season. Really, not until this past week did we get a sense of chill, of frost, of “time to put on gloves.” It’s been a slow and gentle season, with a progression of colors starting weeks ago; just recently we’ve gotten into the bright golds and yellows, the rich, deep ambers, the reds that hardly seem possible. Some days I wonder if there are digitally enhanced maybe.
Yesterday I walked from my house over to the Civic Center, wandered through the Women’s Expo...finally found my way to the Think Green Sustainability Fair. Up and down the aisles, booths offered ideas that sparked my imagination. Green growing plants on roofs, absorbing rainwater, reducing the runoff. I know some flat roofs that could use a good idea like that: wonder if it would work? I discovered there’s a web site that maps the native ecological communities of the Zumbro watershed. I picked up a reusable shopping bag in exchange for my photo on the web, holding a sign promising to use the bag for groceries. There was a solar powered car from Iowa State University. I got a free compact florescent lightbulb...saw hybrid cars...and all the while, there was music from the stage. When I got into conversations and introduced myself as the minister of the Unitarian Universalist congregation, I’d get a smile and the names of somebody they knew from here. We couldn’t resist an old oak rain barrel to catch the runoff from our steeply pitched garage--our first step towards our urban homestead.
Afterwards I walked down along the Zumbro River to the Indian grocery in the Soldier’s Field Plaza. I was looking for Diwali Lights. I searched the shelves: it didn’t look promising, and finally asked the proprietor. Yes, he had just received a shipment and begun to unpack them. From one of the boxes, he lifted out the clay lamps, looking especially pleased: these I recognized as the genuine clay pots. He pinged them, making sure they didn’t have cracks, and in-between other customers, he gave me instructions, supplying me with sesame oil and wicks. Would I also be interested in Diwali sweets? Who could resist? He was a bit curious about my interest in the lamps; I told him I would be using them at church. He smiled, pleased.
On the way home, I walked through the park, through a pile of crisp dry leaves, crunchy beneath my feet. I came across a maple tree with leaves tipped in pink, yellow swathed across the middle, and green at the base. I stood in wonder, drinking the color in through my eyes.
Rochester is a community of many colors, of many cultures. It is part of what makes living here so rich. At our community gatherings, in our workplaces, in the marketplaces, in our schools, and little by little, hopefully in our religious community...we are becoming colorful. That’s my dream in this season of change.
Notes from My Minnesota Journal
September 21, 2008 A TRIP TO IOWA
On my day off this past week, we headed south out of town on Highway 52. Our destination was Decorah, Iowa, and whatever other adventures we might find along the way. My husband, John, started off driving; Jonah, our college-age son, finished his morning coffee in the front seat. I sat in back, with Tor, our gently aging black poodle, who was excited to simply be along for the ride with his family.
As we approached Iowa, John, a geographer by training, invited us to see if we could visually detect just exactly where the boundary was between these two states. We were close; I had already glanced backwards and seen the sign that welcomed folks to Minnesota behind us. No Iowa sign was visible in front of us yet. We knew to watch the road for a change in surface. Jonah spotted a change in the shoulder ahead...and sure enough, that’s where the pavement changed too. The visible boundary on the landscape was a demarcation of responsibility for highway maintenance. I was hoping for some more natural definition of a change in territory.
Our first stop was the Seed Savers Exchange Heritage Farm, a few miles north of Decorah. The farm is the site of remarkable gardens, old flowers we hadn’t seen in a long time...or ever. Packets of seeds that proved too hard to resist: Black Velvet Nasturtium, Five Color Silverbeet Chard, Long Island Cheese Squash. I found a book in the gift shop to guide me further into the Abundantly Wild Edibles of the Upper Midwest.
Soon, we were on the road again. Decorah, and the Vesterheim Norwegian-American museum would be a story all to its self and I won’t tell that one today. What did capture my imagination was a book at the Museum about The Scandinavian Troll: its Life and History. It seems that the most feared and powerful trolls of Norway dwell in the mountains...these dangerous creatures of the imagination are deemed responsible for rocks that come tumbling down mountainsides, crushing farms and the people who live there. Trolls dwell other places as well...they disguise themselves as bowing evergreens, rotting tree trunks, small hills of earth...and sometimes as human beings; legend has it that a tail on a human form is a sure sign of a troll in disguise. What interested me the most about the story of these trolls was this reading of natural forms...it was news to me that the landscape in Norway was so fully inhabited by dangerous, tricky creatures.
After Decorah, we decided to travel further southward, across a ridge top road, in the direction of the Mississippi River. The Effigy Mounds were calling us. These land forms are small mounds--some circular, some linear, and some in animal form--full of mystery, setting us to wonder.
We parked our car at the entrance to the Sny Magill Mound Group of the Effigy Mounds National Monument. We walked in, under the high canopy of trees growing on a rarely flooded plain. In the distance we could see the gentle undulations of earthen mounds, stretching out by the side of the river. The oldest of the mounds date back 2500 years. This is the largest group of ancient mounds found in one location in North America, over a hundred of them at this spot. Most of the mounds we saw were rounded, perhaps four feet high, between 10 and 20 feet in diameter, stretched out along this land by the water. There were larger, long narrow “linear” forms, as well as bear and bird shaped forms...the bird shaped mounds had outstretched wings.
Most of the mounds here were used for humans burials, and cremations. Others held objects suggesting ceremonial purposes. The peoples who made these mounds..the Woodland Indians, ancestors to the Oneota people...were gatherers of food, hunters of animals. They moved with the seasons, following their sources of life.
We walked quietly under the trees. I couldn’t help but wonder what this place meant to the people who built these mounds. Here they buried their dead, returned humans to the earth. The mounds mark human life and death on the landscape...not unlike our present day graveyards, with their monuments of marble and stone. In the end, we return to the earth.
After awhile, we walked back to our car...and soon we were following the Mississippi. We crisscrossed the River as the sun was setting. The Harvest Moon played hide-and-seek behind the hills and bluffs of the Wisconsin coulee country, and we headed back to our Minnesota home.
Notes From My Minnesota Journal
Winter Solstice 2007 On the Treadmill at the Y
It’s been over thirty years now since I first moved to Minnesota. The first winters--in the 1970s--were cold ones, especially up north where I lived without running water. But I was young and it was a novelty. It was always easy for me to appreciate the the beauty of a Minnesota winter landscape, but, I never really adjusted to the cold.
So, we’ve been back now for a year and a half. Last winter was my first in Rochester...and it was eerily warm. This winter is more like it. It feels more like I imagine a “normal” Rochester winter should feel....even through in this time of global warming I know there’s no such thing as “normal.” “Normal” is shifting. Maybe that intensifies the sense of comfort that I get from the familiar cold of this winter season.
Nevertheless, when it turned bitter a couple weeks ago, I decided it was time to join the gym. I’ve never joined a gym before. Walking...my favorite way of exercise...is ok when it’s in the thirties, tolerable in the twenties...but when it gets windy or icy or drops way cold, then I need a new way to “groove my body” 3 times a day.
And so it was that I found myself over at the Y this winter solstice. On a treadmill. And as I walked along, I thought about my younger self--that back-to-the-land, hearty young woman who carried wood and water, and skied--I thought about her and wondered what she’d make of me. In her wildest dreams, I don’t think she could ever have imagined that she’d be me--nearing 60--and exercising on a treadmill at the Y on a winter solstice, listening on some strange devise--an mp3--that she borrowed from her college age son. Looking out the window at winter, walking along at a brisk pace as Bob Dylan sings “Everybody must get stoned.” Not in her wildest dreams could she have imagined this.
Priorities and opportunities and dreams change as the years go by. When the thermometer rises above freezing, I still like to take to the streets for a walk. The feel of freshness, cool against my cheeks. A whiff of manure mixes with the sweet smoky smell of apple wood in fireplaces, reminding me we live on an urban island. This time of year, lights twinkle in the early darkness...most of the deer I see are white wooden skeletons of little lights, manufactured in China.
There’s a constant shwish...shwish...of cars...a child’s voice...candles decorating the windows...ice-y patches where my foot slips. Mostly though, most of us are insulated from the cold. We experience the weather mostly as inconvenient...we can’t get to where we want to be as quickly as we expect...and for the most part, as long as we’re prudent, and the infrastructure works, mostly we can keep ourselves out of the danger zone.
My workout on the treadmill slows down as the Eagles sing Desperado. The guy on the TV show catches one last fish from the summer blue lake...and I look out at a snow covered park, bare trees reaching up through a soft fog, and I know deep within just how lucky I am to be back at home in Winter, Minnesota.
They say that the veil is thinnest between the worlds this time of year...between the worlds of the living and of the dead. It seems that way right now, as the green of summer thins into pale yellow, as leaves dry into brown, and in their wake, the sky appears between the branches. It is easier to see through the woods as the trees become skeletal, and the light shines through.
I found my way out to Chester Woods yesterday. Many of you have asked in the past year if I’d been there yet. Now I know why you encouraged me to go. There are woods along the hillsides, remnant communities of native prairie, there’s a lake...Chester Woods Park is a piece of wild, just 7 miles east of Rochester, restored and shaped by human need and intention. The lake was formed by a dam, there at the headwaters of Bear Creek...did I see this was constructed to help with flood control somehow? At any rate, in the late afternoon light of November, colors, like magic, found their way to the surface, and the landscape came alive.
We walked the trail through the woods along the edge of the lake. Oaks sheltered us, light reflected off the lake, streaming up the hillside, catching leaves in the under story, turning them near translucent: pale green, orange-pink, yellow-gold. Human voices carried easily through this pared down landscape. Raspberry leaves curled burgundy and green along the stem. We could see two fisherman out in a canoe. From far off, a gunshot reminded us it’s hunting season. Two large flocks of noisy, chattering birds made their way southward. The bronzed leaves of a young oak shone in the waning light.
In the distance, above the lake, along the top of a gentle hillside, the last rays of the afternoon sun set the prairie grasses glowing. We came across a stand of sumac: high on bare stems, deep red clusters of berries curved every-which-way to the sun. Nearby, rambunctious children scrambled noisily through the playground, laughing as they ran. Elsewhere, a large family picnic turned to a game of soccer...grown ups and children chasing the ball together.
On the other side of the park, there is a prairie in the process of restoration. Bluestems, prairie dropseed ...everywhere we walk along the grasses, there are seeds, the remains of summer life, transformed for a journey into winter. Some catch a ride, tangling in the dog’s hair; and some, like the milkweed, become airborne. Life spews this abundance in a dying time of year...such an abundance...hope manages to survive and life goes on. Overhead a flock of Silver Lake geese wing their way home.
They say the veil between life and death is thin this time of year. And so it is our time to remember those who have gone on before us, crossing over, yet with us still, in memory and in hope.
Notes from My Minnesota Journal
October 2006 Autumn Milkweed
I had it in my mind that the leaves would be at their peak of color round about the middle of October, and that this would be the time to do a service celebrating the autumnal season...I hadn’t calculated in the drought factor, with the leaves drying early and falling. I didn’t know this past week would feel more like winter. But I’ve come to think that what we have now is the deeper reality of this season...the alternating currents of sun and cold, a taste of winter, the collapsing vegetation, folding in on its deeper green self...the softness of brown, taupe, faded gold. A bright harvest of pumpkins at the farmer’s market. Indeed, this is the season of dying and seeds.
I’ve followed this dying and seeding on the hillside above the minister’s parking spot here at the church. Many days, I pull in, turn off the engine and sit a moment, taking in this spot, feeling like I must be the luckiest minister in the world, that I’ve come to the right place. It’s a changing landscape on that hillside, the purple coneflowers have dried, become dark cones on sticks. Amidst the brown offering of seeds, there are occasional dots of tiny asters, white and lavender. Underneath, a carpet of green and moss. The breeze stirs the tall grass, with its bleached white flags. Some days they wave and swirl, dance, as if one organism. In these moments before the hillside, I pray with my eyes. The rightness of being here sinks itself into my bones.
And now, there is a milkweed pod right there, in front of the nose of my car. I didn’t really know about milkweed before. At first, in my ignorance, I was a bit annoyed that this weed that popped up in my field of vision. Then I began to notice the pods, the seed pods, fleshly green things--posing, arabesque fashion, around the stalk. And then--one day--there it was--a pod cracked open, with an uncountable number of white fluffy seeds spilling forth, letting loose. Clinging and blowing.
Henry David Thoreau put it this way in his journal during the fall of 1851:
Densely packed in a little oblong chest armed with soft downy prickles and lined with a smooth silky lining, lie some one or two hundreds such pear-shaped seeds....which have derived their nutriment through a band of extremely fine silken threads attached by their extremities to the core. At length, when the seeds are matured and cease to require nourishment from the parent plant, being weaned, and the pod with dryness and frost bursts, the extremities of the silken threads detach themselves from the core, and from being the conduits of nutriment to the seed become the buoyant balloon which....bear the seeds to new and distant fields. (...the seeds of the milkweed would be borne many hundred miles, and those which were ripened in New England might plant themselves in Pennsylvania.....) I am interested in the fate or success of every such venture which the autumn sends forth.
For me, this autumn, there are entirely too many possibilities in which I am interested. Too many seeds...somedays I want to hurry up and plant the dream of seeds...other days I think the wiser of it...knowing with Henry David that “it is only when a strong wind is blowing that (the seeds) are loosened from their pods.”
It’s like this with seeds...that many more are produced, flying into the air, falling to the ground...many more than can ever take hold. And the other thing is that these seeds, these possibilities, are not all going to become actualized...and not anytime soon. It will be next spring...after the icy cold, before we will see the first signs of growth, and then, only those who can recognize the tender seedlings will know. There is much to learn and there is patient waiting involved between now and then.
But these seeds are actual now...part of the process...bursting forth from a dying plant, escaping into the future, beyond our reach, beyond our abilities. Sometimes, the thing to do is just to sit and take in the stunning beauty of it all.
Notes From My Minnesota Journal October2006 Winter Comes in on the Wind
This is my first autumn in Rochester. There have been some beautiful days, when golden leaves fall like glitter in the sunlight, when the red-orange maple fill my eyes with pleasure. And there has been an occasional day, when soft warmth envelopes us, and it is all we can do to keep ourselves from surrendering to the day.
This week I traveled to southwestern Minnesota, for a meeting of Unitarian Universalist ministers. About thirty of us gathered from the Prairie Star District: Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakota’s and a bit more. We came together for meetings, worship, collegial support and friendship. And to learn about Unitarian Universalist devotional practices...practices I might call spiritual nurturance and spiritual discipline.
We met 30 miles off of Intersate 90, northwest of Windom, at a retreat center in the middle of farmland. The hills there roll softly, a patchwork of fields, earth, prairie and weeds. A field of tan corn, tassels directed by wind. A field of fallen stalks. A stripe of green next to the dirt road, cattails in the ditch...then a wild patch of prairie. It’s beautiful, hugely open to the sky. Cattle gather in ravines; trees gather around farmsteads and crop-up in river valleys. On the first morning, outside my window, there were sheep grazing on the hillside; the next day, there was 2 inches of snow.
The snow came riding in on the wind, of course. Change blows in, stormy. Windy sun, gray clouds, sun, dark white clouds, blowing snow that bites into us and earth...clouds, sun, snow, clouds, ice-y sleet? Sun follows ten minutes later. I watch mostly through windows, my eyes rest on a distance tree. It changes with the day...a brown silhouette, then glistening green, then soft pink, changing all day long.
It seemed to me, and I’m sure this can’t be right, but it seemed to me, that the wind picked up and threw winter into my face every time I stepped outside. Once, I climbed the hill and just at that moment, it started to snow pellets of ice, the chill dropping far too low for my thin gloves. I know this taste of Minnesota winter we get in October...it doesn’t last long, but it’s nothing to fool with...you know it could be worse...you know it will be worse. Nothing to do, but be humbled by it, and know you will find its beauty later.
The last morning we were there, black birds came flying in...hundreds of them, in bands, swooping down, flying so low over the open field I thought they were tumbling leaves...then arcing, banking, wave after wave...determined travelers, carried on a cold wind.
I drove home, pushed by that same wind, glancing though the rows of corn still standing. In other fields,
the wind sculpts miniature snow drifts against each tiny stubble of corn.
The land eases as I near Rochester. The colors grow soft. It’s not so wide-open-flat here--trees cluster and shelter--the wind slowed by hills and the buildings of human habitation.
We’re all travelers, carried along on the winds of change.
It’s good to be here with you.
It was the last day of June and we’re on the final stretch of the trip from New York. Leaving Chicago in the morning, we take back roads across the Wisconsin countryside. Through the contoured farmland, past a black Amish buggy, over the rolling hills. We slow down for small towns, an ice cream cone, curves in the road. And then, descending through the wooded coulee country, we know we’re getting close. Finally we see it: the late afternoon sun lights up the Mississippi--the blazing border of our new life.
We’re coming home.
We’re coming home.
Home to MInnesota, to a new southeast Minnesota home. Me, to serve the first church west of the Mississippi served by an ordained woman minister way back in the 19th century. John, to once again be in the homeland of his music, his stories, his heart.
Home to a new house we’d seen only a few times. A house that had grown in our imagination,changed shape and size so that we are curious: what does that house really look like? Home to a new life, a life where there are already friends, family, colleagues, and a religious community, waiting for us. How did we get so lucky?
We travel north through the wetlands along the river now gray green in the late afternoon light. A passing train stirs up a cloud of May flies. Across the Mississippi, two soft bluffs frame the setting sun. Clouds turn smoky gray, blue, pink...their underside outlined with a brilliant white line. Streaks of purple swirl in the sky.
Looks like paradise to me.
An hour later, through the twilight, we glimpse Rochester, off in a distance. To my eyes, the city appears as a glowing orb, pulsating almost as if with an extra-terrestrial light.
A humming city, alive on the prairie.
A good sign.
A very good sign indeed.
From January 6, 2008 Service titled Earth is Our Homeland presented by the Rev. Dr. Carol Hepokoski:
Poem from Regina Cary Lapoint. It comes from an Advent Meditation manual entitled The Waters of Life, published by the Universalist Church of America, Dept. of Publications in Boston, in 1953. She prefaces the poem with these words:
Today I should like to share with you a poem I once wrote to my children.
What I Would Tell You
Rest on the curve of Life, my dear ones,
my darlings,
Know its great telling.
Soft is the down of the wild goose feather,
Deep is the hue of the rolling mid-ocean,
Sweet is the odor of pine on the mountain-
side,
Tender the eyes of the children of God.
Joy without measure is yours, little travelers:
Taste it and see it and smell it and hear it.
Music there is which speaks the life rhythm,
Painting there is which tells the mind’s
secret,
Writing there is which gives friendship and
knowing,
Love there is which is balm to all sorrow.
It is all yours, my dears, take it and use it.
Make your lives precious and rich with its beauty.
Our Universalist Church
by William Wallace Rose
UNIVERSALISM preaches optimism to man, seeks to make religion as believable as science, as vital as the day’s work, as intimate as home, and as inspiring as love, because—
UNIVERSALISM believes in the goodness of God, not his anger and hate; believes in man’s possible growth in Godlikeness, and offers as the goal of all his strivings the restoration of the whole human family to happiness and holiness at last. Because of this faith—
UNIVERSALISM puts reason above authority; makes the test of religion a living experience, not a dead theology, and offers no magic or “gimmick” for salvation, because—
UNIVERSALISM refuses to concede that man’s inability to save himself is such that only God’s grace operating through the rites and sacraments of a church can save him. This stand we take because—
UNIVERSALISM holds that each must work out his own salvation and atone for his sins, by bringing his whole life into harmony with God’s eternal and righteous purposes. And that this road man must walk for himself. Because these truths seem self-evident—
UNIVERSALSIM asks its followers to live right and do good, because it is right to live right and good to do good, and not through fear of future punishment or hope of future reward!
The Reading Our Universalist Church was adapted from William Wallace Rose. It first appeared in February 1956 in The Universalist Messenger, the official publication of the Illinois Universalist Convention and the Mid-West Universalist Conference.
From the January 13 service titled UU African American Religious Thought by The Rev. Dr. Carol Hepokoski:
DEFINITION of RELIGION from Professor Gordon Kaufman
Cited by Anthony Pinn in On Becoming Humanist: A Personal Journey http://huumanists.org/rh/pinn2.html
That which “helps humans find orientation (or direction) for life in the world, together with motivation for living and acting in accordance with this orientation.”
Basic Humanist Principles
From Anthony Pinn in The African American Religious Experience in America
1. Critique of claims of the transcendent and the supernatural.
2. Reliance on human creativity and ingenuity.
3. Recognition of human responsibility.
4. Measured realism.
5. Suspicion concerning the existence of God.
1. Critique of claims of the transcendent and the supernatural.
2. Reliance on human creativity and ingenuity.
3. Recognition of human responsibility.
4. Measured realism.
5. Suspicion concerning the existence of God.
Resources on Ethical/Spiritual Wills from Feb. 24 service
Ethical Wills: Putting your Values on Paper. Barry K. Baines, M.D. Perseus Publishing. 2002.
Women's Lives, Women's Legacies: Passing Your Beliefs and Blessings to Future Generations. Rachael Freed. Fairview Press. 2003.
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