"The birds of the air have nests"

This morning Sarah and I sat out in our side yard to read the daily office. Nearby is our propane tank which fuels our gas range. There is a lid that covers the dial, and under the lid a Carolina wren built a cozy nest where she is raising her wee family of two nestlings.

Nearby, our cockatiel Mikki can see her from the morning room window. He is her D.E.W. (Distant Early Warning) system. When he perceives trouble, he screams, "HAWK!" (hawk being Mikki's generalized or specific cry of trouble abroad) and Mother Wren knows to wait quietly for the "all clear" so that she does not betray her presence with any movement.

It's amazing that she has nested in a place that is both secure and dangerous. She's sitting on a world of danger should the gas leak, or somehow something should cause the tank to explode. She's also in the safest nesting place in the neighborhood because of the sturdy lid, and her friend, Mikki.

A little over a month ago, my husband was downsized from his job. No cockatiel warned him that it was coming. One day he went into work, and at three o'clock in the afternoon he was unemployed. They could not afford him any more. It has been an amazing month in so many ways. As he has trusted the Lord to provide, so our heavenly Father has done just that. There is no job on the horizon that we can see (although we hope for what we do not see), and because we have the ability to reason, in some ways we are worse off than the wren. We are sitting on top of a propane tank, but under the protection of our Lord Jesus who cares for us even more than He does for the wren.

This is a learning, and stretching time.

Susan Price

Singing to Baby

Elea has grown to about 11 lbs. She's two months old now. She's also starting to "talk": cooing, gooing, and such.

And (as you can see in the picture) smiling!

The spiritual reflection I want to add to this personal sharing is that we don't always need to add spiritual reflections to our personal lives. We all, I know, are interested in making the personal spiritual, and the spiritual personal. We are interested in realizing that it is already so.

A baby is as spiritual as a seagull, a seagull as spiritual as an angel, an angel as spiritual as a rock. And rocks, especially stones thrown into ponds, rocks are very spiritual. God unify our lives.

One more personal thing to share. A draft of a poem I've written called "Singing to Baby." I mean for it to be fun, serious, and perhaps spiritual:
.
..........Out of the nursery, sailboat, horse, or cradle,
..........Daddy’s chest
............................rocks baby best.

..........Mommy watches us waltz
............................................the blue sea carpet
.....................to flop on the sunset quilt.

..........I hold her little body close
..............................and sing Italian opera.

..........See the twinkle twinkle mobile sky.

..........Elea roars like a redface seagull
.........................................I sing a loud loud lullaby.

--Paul Corrigan

Skype

I just finished a good dialogue with Dr. Cotton and Mrs. Cotton using Skype. If you don't know (I just learned about it), Skype is a free online (video)phone service. Mark and Dr. Cotton sent out a few feeler emails about this a number of weeks ago, so we thought we ought to run an experiment: it was successful: fun, easy to do, edifying. The sound quality was great. We talked for about forty minutes, about school, spirituality, poetry. We shared a book recommendation or two. Talked about our families a bit.

Skype also facilitates conference calls, so the ultimate goal is to hold (occasional? regular?) community prayer meetings (lectio divina). We think that this resource may be important for the "non-geographical" part of our community. Please download it and experiment some. If you have the equipment (the minimum is a speaker and microphone, which are often built into computers), the process is very simple. Go to Skype.com. On the first page there is a button that says "download." I found that it practically set itself up from there. If you need help, though, I'm sure Mark would love to talk you through it.

You'll need to create a user name. That's how you contact people. If you're ready to give it a try, send one of us who've already done it an email and we'll set up an appointment to test it.

--Paul Corrigan