THE WEB OF EXCHANGE

I'm writing this blog as I have just been inspired by Facebook friend Trudy's blog today: layspeakingchick.blogspot.com, Deep Spirited Friends.

I first began to think deeply  about The Web of Exhange through the works of Charles Williams who was a friend of C. S. Lewis.  Williams used a term that was new to me: Coinherence. I found later that the Orthodox Church had long used a term for it: Perichoresis which is affirmed in the doctrine of The Trinity.  We have stated this in Creed: I believe in one God.  I believe in God who at the same time three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Bishop Ware: There is in God genuine diversity as well as true unity.  And not just unity but community.  Each one dwelling in the other two by virtue of an unceasing movement of mutual love.  And that is how the human web of exhange works.

"The final end of the spiritual Way is that we humans should also become part of this Trinitarian coinherence or perichoresis, being wholly taken up into the circle of live that exists within God."
--Bishop Kallistos Ware

"May they all be one: as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, so may they also be one in us. " 
--The Gospel of John 17-21

I must say, after a few months of some trepidation, the Facebook experience has been a revelation to me.  It is as has been variously described as a social revolution.  I have found it to be a genuine Web of Exchange. And truly I have found there "deep spirited friends" here.

People have said to me, I don't want to know every little thing people are doing!  And I certainly wouldn't want them to know what I'm doing every moment!  I was thinking, but isn't that how face to face friendships work?

I was cautious. I took the best advice and after signing up for Facebook, I spent time just reading what people wrote.  Saw what they were interested in, how they expressed themselves.  I found I could pretty well identify the less than helpful who used bad language, who posted suspect photographs, or were generally up to no good. But I found so many kindred spirits too.  Like striking gold.

I had formed friendships online first in alt. groups such as C. S. Lewis.  People that I still communicate with online.  The the Yahoo moderated groups came along and the spam was cut to almost zero.  Those groups have been wonderful.  Aldersgate a UMC group, Charles Williams, and sites like Goodreads.  And now, of course, Facebook. 

 New people come before me or family members flung far and wide on the globe that I haven't seen forever, and fill me with wonder at what they write, think about.  I hope I can do the same. And oh, what I've learned!  Not the least, the fabulous humor of family and friends in Maine, and Montana and North Carolina.  People who rescue dogs and horses and other animals.  People who care for the health of our planet from ocean to rain forest.  People who harbor, feed and cloth the homeless, or jobless. Authors, crafters, readers, artists, pastors, priests, teachers, breeders of horses, advocates for wild Mustangs and Burros, lovers of life from all walks of life.  All people with faces!  Daily I travel the web of exchange from Illinois, California, Texas, Arizona, Oregon, North Carolina, Colorado, Montana, Australia, South Africa, France, Florida, Kentucky, New York, Maryland, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Japan, Wisconsin. Not an exhaustive list; but those are the frequent electronic communicators.  And I adore them!  They are all deep spirited friends!

We pray and laugh together.  We support each other, cry with each other, rejoice with each other, share.  This must be an essential part of being human; to  love and care for people one has never met and who one is never likely to  meet.  Must it not? 

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

ALL THE PRETTY HORSES

Job 39:

¹⁹ “Have you given the horse strength?
      Have you clothed his neck with thunder?^[b]
 20 Can you frighten him like a locust?
      His majestic snorting strikes terror.
 ²¹ He paws in the valley, and rejoices in his strength;
      He gallops into the clash of arms.
 ²² He mocks at fear, and is not frightened;
      Nor does he turn back from the sword.
 ²³ The quiver rattles against him,
      The glittering spear and javelin.
 ²⁴ He devours the distance with fierceness and rage;
      Nor does he come to a halt because the trumpet has sounded.
 ²⁵ At the blast of the trumpet he says, ‘Aha!’
      He smells the battle from afar,
      The thunder of captains and shouting.

This is God's praise of the magnificent horse.  Our reality is vastly different.

I'll admit I have been more that a little fixated on horses.  If you see what I share on Facebook this is patently clear, and most probably has been annoying, to you.

 I rode horses as a kid.  And that was a long, long time ago.  But I never got over my fright, thrill and love of horses.  Champion and Blaze graced the field next to our house in Dansville, Pennsylvania.  We would lure them over to the fence with handfuls of grass and then try to jump up on their backs, hold on to their manes and ride a bit.  Blaze suffered this indignity briefly then headed to the orchard to scrape us off his back.  Farmer Fred used a team of Drafts to pull his hay wagon.  He let us ride on the wagon to pack down the hay.  These were mammoth horses, feet like dinner plates.  But lovely docile creatures who moved obediently to Farmer Fred's Gee! for go and Haw! for stop. I sometimes got to ride on trail horses.  More annoying to them than anything.  How I must have sawed on the reins in my utter lack of riding knowledge.  But I loved these creatures from the start.  Their eyes! How they look you over, nostrils twitching, warm muzzle. They relate and they know you before you even know a thing about yourself.

This time of year it's big Thoroughbred racing season.  Stakes races, and the much vaunted Triple Crown.  All eyes are on very pricey baby horses having the life run out of them, some literally, to pay their freight.  Most of the attention of owners and bettors is on 3 year-olds.

These young horses are high strung bred, frightened, their schooling or training not yet done.  They have just the fabulous innate desire to run, run, run.  That is what the entire racing industry banks on.  And run them they do.  They are shipped from state to state, country to country.  They spend little time cavorting around in grassy fields just being horses.  Most of their young  lives they are as prisoners in stall cells.  They are given a variety of drugs. Drugs to stop bleeding from burst pulmonary cells caused by too great physical effort in horses too young.  Steroids, if the horse's people can get away with it.  A variety of this or that ---caine to dull pain.  Many suffer bone chips, cracks and fractures in the leg bones, brain hemorrhage.  Euthanasia. The list is too long to go on.

35,000 or more horses are born every year in this country.  12-14 Thoroughbreds make it to the Derby.  Those and other Stakes runners are a relatively small percentage of all the horses born in a year.  The U.S. is the most horse populated country in the world. Overpopulated.  Horses that don't make it are sold and sold again.  Or auctioned, or sent to slaughter.  American horse meat can and is shipped out of the country to be eaten by humans in countries where human consumption of horse meat is legal.  I ate some unknowingly in France in the 60s.

Then the God awful rodeos which still practice 'horse tripping where the horse's legs are roped and it is pulled to the ground to roars of the delighted crowd.  Bucking bronco riding where the horse is whipped into a frenzy by sharp spurs digging the animal shoulder to haunch. Or horses used in bullfighting who are gored or worse.

This done to an animal whose only fault in life is to do the bidding of its two legged master. 

There are fabulous rescue efforts going on out there, however.  Deborah Kingcade at The Emerald City Thoroughbred Project, Jim Gath of The Tierra Madre Horse Sanctuary in Arizona. He writes a fabulous blog about his horses you shouldn't miss.  Old Friends, Akindale Thoroughbred Rescue.   Some  money is being sent to rescue from major race tracks now. The best owners and training operations contribute a bit also.  A little and never enough.

Look at my picture above again.  This is how horses are to live.  To walk by the still waters and lie down in green pastures.  The picture is of Estes Park trail horses.  Their vacation over, they will be loaded up and taken there from their Boulder Free Space pasture to toil all summer hauling around tourists. 

We are charged to be stewards of the earth and its creatures.  Humankind was charged with naming them all in Scripture.  We had better pay attention to that charge sent from the very person of God.

The Lone Watcher at the edge of the Open Space, Boulder, CO

HARDWIRED

HARDWIRED

For the electronically challenged:  join the group.

hard-wire (härd w r )

tr.v. hard-wired, hard-wir·ing, hard-wires

1. To connect (electronic components, for example) by electrical wires or cables.

2. To implement (a capability) through logic circuitry that is permanently connected within a computer and therefore not subject to change by programming.

3. To determine or put into effect by physiological or neurological mechanisms; make automatic or innate: "It may be that certain orders of anxiety are hard-wired in us" (Armand Schwerner).

There is this cleaving thing going on. (Gen 2:24).

Don and I will be married 42 years this summer.  Believe me, that is a miracle.  You probably couldn't find two different marriage partners in a dream.  

When I first visited Don's home and saw his room, I could probably have run.  He was building stereos from kits they had back then.  Wires and unidentifiable electronic parts everywhere littered the room. Dust was two inches thick beneath- his mother had been warned not to touch anything.  A half glass of orange juice on the dressers about all I recognized, and a vitamin pill his mother had left there.  Several, as a matter of fact. They had been there for years, no doubt about it.

I was on the market for a stereo.  Someone told me he had a friend who built them and would probably sell one cheap.  So, that was the beginning.  The stereo was great.  And the guy who sold it to me was just offbeat enough to be really interesting in the inimitable 60s kind of way.

We did have important things in common:  Music, Methodist Church, German ancestors (me, Plat Deutsch, he, Haut Deutsch his parents reminded me often. We both have a fair amount of intelligence though of completely different stripes.  Me, the arts, language and literature, education.  He, math, science, and no love lost for formal education. (My parents, both teachers from generations of teachers, reminded me often that he had not finished college and to get a degree he would have to attend night school.) Our relationship with each others' parents is another story entirely, and one that can hardly be told with any great degree of charity.  We'll leave it at that.

So hardwired we are after 42 years of marriage.  I like simplicity: if the darn thing works, that's all I care about.  This goes for anything, but especially electronic gadgets from appliances to electronic tech stuff.  See, I told you.  Stuff is what I call these things that hang out in every room of my house.  Stuff.  I either don't know what they are called, or I just don't give a tinker's damn what they are called.

The big clue about what I was in for in this marriage.  I was in the hospital in labor.  They hooked me up to a Hewlett Packard fetal monitor.  Don has done the research, knew the specs for this machine backwards and forwards.  Well into my Pitocen induced labor I had a mammoth breathtaking contraction. D looked at the monitor screen at the peaks and valleys of pain pictured there and said, oh that wasn't so bad.  Machines are sacrosanct, you see, in D's world. The nurse came in and saw that I was doing that Lamaze stage four breathing and said, Oh dear! The monitor has slipped.  We're not getting an accurate reading! So much for the god blessed machine you fool, I yelled at the baby's father in my pain glazed state. If he hadn't looked so ridiculous in his rumpled green surgical cap with the strings hanging down, I might have murdered him on the spot.

Stereo systems were installed in our apartment and then the ramshackle house we bought where everything, and I mean everything, had to be done.  It was really a knockdown candidate.  First things first, D set to installing stereo equipment, as he began a rebuild that went on for decades on the dump we had purchased. Saving grace?  It had a fireplace and it came with an acre and a half of land.  Farm girl here saw only the land.  Lord, was I blind.

I must say the place is lovely, though needing upgrades in almost every room. But NOT the electronics!  Big screen TV, three computers, all connected to Apple for films, family picture shows.  Surround sound system and at least 5 speakers in the greatroom.

Oh, the Rogers organ that came with the marriage debt and all.  It has been chopped and merged with a draw knob organ D got for free from a college looking to replace it with an Allen.  An ALLEN!, D. sniffs. Chop off the donation organ, graft it onto the original Rodgers, all meticulously done and filling the small den. Now the Rogers is a three manual, draw knob, digitalized by Ahlborn instruments with 95 equivalent ranks that literally could blow the roof off the house.  Speakers are everywhere badly cohabitating with the decor- from a four foot cabinet which just barely passes for a credenza, speakers in every corner, in the ceiling and wires everywhere  scandalously undressed in full view.  A veritable booby trap of black snakes.  Walk through at your own risk! The thing puts out a cathedral of sound. I pass the plate at dinner parties.  Babies cry.

All this, I have ceased complaining about. The angst hurts me and doesn't touch the intended recipient one whit.

D has a condition I call "The Navaho Syndrome".  The Navahos left small flaws or openings in their woven rugs to let out the evil spirits that may reside there.  That's Don. Navaho undone places in every project he's ever done.  And there are many.  A piece of missing molding here, a hole in the wall where the saw missed 15 years ago, a boat unsold in the back yard when the new one was delivered and now monopolizes all other projects needing to be done.  Lights in the backyard with bulbs burned out, lighting wires needing replacement, mail all over my dining room table.

But new hardwood floors, gorgeous radiator covers, and every tech item a person could want and then some.  Thousands of downloaded albums play on surround sound while all the family pictures scroll by on the big screen.

Adolf, we call our German-made dishwasher,  needs an engineer to operate. Oh yeah. Every object D owns has a name; they are family members as far as D is concerned.  D is an aerospace engineer.  Everything we buy has to be complicated enough to fly. The little toaster oven I wanted came home the most ridiculously technologically complicated and model made. Turned out to need a two week training course to operate.  

When I mention the Navahos all over the house, the good projects (of which admittedly there are quite a few) are loudly enumerated.  Whether 30 years or more back. And loudly, believe me.  Red splotches all over his neck mean take cover.

In truth, along with finishing his degree, sharing all duties involved in having a new baby, Don literally built this house. Except for the shell of the upstairs addition and the greatroom.  And having paid 50 thousand for the house in 1975, having only enough money to eat tuna noodle casserole,  it is worth over, well, a lot more.  So just shut up and maybe he'll go first.  On second thought, I'd have to deal with the remains of a thousand projects, AND the Navahos.

Gardening, painting, original needlework, church, reading, writing, philosophy, animal and human rights.  A neat house. Clean up, and throw out junk at every opportunity.  Oh, I forgot to mention a big item. I've always had my own back account.  That's me.

Electronics, boats, cars, guns, music and many gadgets on which to listen to it, tools for every possible eventuality from tile cutters, to nailers, to socket sets that can be used in every country on the globe and all ancillary equipment for same. Projects begun, Navaho totems included, and always more projects.  Forget about the junk, keep all of it- you may need it in 50 years.  He has old pants up in his closet with a paint color on them we used in 1975.  But babies and animals love him to pieces. That's Don. 

He's conservative; I'm a liberal.  Hawk and dove. Amazingly we are friends,  good friends. It's a hardwire situation, this marriage.  It's a certain unexpectedly comfortable order that is innate, hardwired in.  A bit of a miracle, really.