almost fall

The past couple of days have that slight chill and certain specific smell that is always the froeshowdow of fall. And how I am looking forward to it. Enough of all this sweat and salt and frenzy and squinting.

this moist and grey makes me ache for the East coast....for my dead nanny's and my ageing poppys. How I miss all of them. I have been such and absent grand-daughter.

What a wierd summer it has been. like some kind of wierd isolation....too much time to sit and think. think think think in circles and circles and circles. Last night I decided - at least in one area of my life - to stop the thinking and "set my face like flint". The decision: The move into the Catholic Worker house in October. It is done. I will go. Time to set the fear aside..and just do it.

I have been more fearful about life this past month than any other time I can remember. Not a surface fear but a much deeper more subtle fear. I think it's all this impending change. But somehow - sitting in the coffee shop last night - I remembered all the things I had forgotten - some of the reasons I ever thought about it in the first place....all of the great things that can come of a life altering move like this. And I finally feel a little more hope than dread. I look forward with hope to this new life.

I'm praying for a courage I have not known yet. I feel so much like Gideon....testing God at every turn - not believing I am who He says I am...feeling the least of my clan/tribe/family and the most powerless and vulnerable - wondering how God can ask anything of a whimpy dweeb like me. But I think God is nutbar in that way. He seems to always asks the whimpy dweebs to do things that require uncommon courage. and I'm too tired to fight this anymore. This whimpy dweeb gives up. Off to Close Ave I go. I wish i was stronger. I really do.

Brother Roger died on Tuesday night at the hands of a crazed woman. He died during a prayer service in the church in Taize. I keep having images of his white Robe stained with so much blood...and the brothers havong to carry him out. It has been so so hard to process. But tragically enough - the event has brought a certain kind of clarity to me. About the fact that Peace is beautiful and worth every kind of sacrafice - even in the face of unimaginable pain and sadness....and I want ot be a part of a movemet towards that. In some way.