Singing Along the Journey

[caption id="attachment_273" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Real exhaustion with an embarassing hat"][/caption] Well, I made it....I think. Today was the last day of Music and Social Justice.  Everyone gave their presentations -- thought provoking, informative, and well crafted, each and everyone. And, I, I have reached the point of complete and total exhaustion.  (No one does exhaustion like my beagle, Gracie, shown to the right.) With any luck, I will have some time to unpack some of the amazing things that I have heard, learned, and felt during the past week. But now,  really folks, all I can do is go to bed.  I have to sing tomorrow. I do want to…

Well, today is Day 4 of the Music and Social Justice Marathon, and I will admit that I am more than a little tired.  Add the fact that, a class that goes until 9 pm and then has a 30 minute commute attached to it takes me way past my normal "kennel-in" time to the intensity of the emotions that arise as we listen to the subject matter in the course, and I am just wiped out. As we were listening and pondering last night, first the Ralph Vaughn Williams Dona Nobis Pacem  (the  majority of the text by Walt Whitma) -and then Benjamin Britten's  War Requiem, I again pondered the pain and suffering that humanity…

In case I haven't made this completely clear, my original academic training is as an historian--specifically a specialist in Middle Eastern History and Archaeology.  But all in all, you can just call me a history junky. If it happened BEFORE I was born, I'm probably interested... When I started my undergraduate work, I was convinced that I would specialize in the Tudor-Stuart period. In my first Tudor history class, we of course studied the Medieval antecedents to the Tudor period, and I became fascinated.  My undergraduate studies then focused on Medieval church figures, in particular the Apocolyptics, Joachim of Fiore and St. Catherine of Siena.  A seed was planted, however.…

One thing I didn't mention when I was writing here about my licensing service, was, well, what it was like to tell other people about it, both before and after the event.  It took me a few tries to refine my answer to the question, "Great....what does that mean?" -- a question that I got not only from non-Calvary members, but also from a lot of Calvary congregants as well.  But I didn't really have an answer to the follow-on question:  "Great...so now, what will you do?" The answer, for me, was and still is in many ways simply this:  I will do what I have done; I will continue…

Yes, I will admit it.  I can change my mind.  And I find out that I can, when enlivened, inspired, and amazed,  sit through a class in a bunker basement room on a beautiful summer day and be glad that I chose to be in that room instead of sailing on the Chesapeake (which was, by the way, my other choice). And no, I am not writing this simply because our instructor read my blog the day BEFORE class and saw my reservations about an all-day class.  There were so many insights and inspirations yesterday that I want to think about and write about, but what is most on my…

Yes, it is very early now, but we have a big day ahead of us at our house.  So I knew that if I didn't stop and write now, Day 5 would be well, an oops. The funny thing is that, yesterday, while walking around the neighborhood doing errands, I had fabulous things to say which of course now escape me completely.  I should know by now that Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings about the walking medition are true, and I should therefore remember to carry a notebook. Of course, perhaps with an IPod playing Spanish lessons in your ear as you walk  it truly doesn't count. So, as I pack…