Joseph was going to prepare an altar, but at the last minute couldn’t do it. Four of us were there, cleaning and preparing the patio for the dinner and ceremony to come, and wow: right away, we pivoted in place and cooperatively figured out how to do a small altar with items on it to a suitable scale (i.e., tiny flowers).

Here it is!

You can’t tell from this angle, but our makeshift altar slants down to the left . . . but not enuf for anything to slide off.

And here’s the context: with the new yurt, the old barn (now called Moloch, since in contrast to the pristine yurt, it has a newly menacing presence), and various junky old garden beds and other weird stuff (like why the fig branches in the white bucket??).

The dinner itself featured a first, in all the years of doing Community Dinners: three seafood dishes, all of them wonderful, and one of them, Jeff’s, totally spectacular!

We asked people to please try to be on time, 7:00 PM, so that we can eat first and begin the ceremony at 8:00 PM. 

At 8:00 PM we circled up near the little altar and Mariella, a good friend and neighbor, whom I had invited to “call in the directions,” did so, something she had never done before. First, we all faced East, then South, then West, then North, then Above, and finally Below — while she intoned the special qualities of each.

Then, in response to an email I had sent out to the Dinner List, I had invited folks to meditate on what felt full in their lives right now, at the fullness of the summer sun, what in their lives made them feel grateful. This they did, almost everyone, many more than I expected, and the atmosphere during that circle was centered, meditative, and full of careful listening.

I loved young Rebecca’s story especially. She felt grateful for her body, the fullness within her physical body, and its communion with the body of earth.

Afterwards, we each lit the next person’s candle, and thanked, as a group, the six directions for joining us.

And the piece de resistance? A gorgeous croscosmia, flare into bloom that very day. Every year I forget about these seemingly fragile, but hardy perennials, and wonder what that plants those are (in several gardens now), with those kind of stalks — until one of them gifts us with the fullness of its sun-time glory!

 

This is the first of two posts for today. . . . Meanwhile, the tornado warning has just sounded, so I’ll be with others in the basement for awhile.

. . .

30 minutes later. Back upstairs, tornado few miles north of here, moving east fast. Big wind and rain here for a short while. Yurt survived. But that big bucket of fig sticks tipped, as did the front porch begonia.