Easter around the Workshop, 2023

Happy Easter!

Boat and Table drop-in workshop hospitality will be 12-2pm Wednesday 4/12 this week.

For the next two weeks, Wednesday 4/19 and 4/26, drop-in hours will be 5-7pm.

I’m working on a few items: a box with a stained glass cover, a toy/tool chest, and a mortise gauge. You can visit, watch, or ask about something you’d like to try wood-working wise.

I’ll also have a drop spindle and some wool on hand, so you could try hand-spinning.

The cherry tree out front is in full bloom, come see it!

Last week I staked my tent, so to speak, on Vashon Island for the three-days liturgy (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and the Great Vigil of Easter) and Easter Sunday.  It afforded me time to work in the office, visit with some church folks, read, walk…and make compost! 

I ran into an acquaintance at Vashon Co-Housing, who manages their neighborhood food waste compost facility. It was an admirable operation. They had four bins for building aerated static piles, with a blower system that ran every 30 minutes. Neighborhood children help collect the household buckets weekly, and a crew of teenagers join Mark to build piles and screen finished compost. They were short handed that day, so I count it a small grace to have walked by and been invited to help. I needed something to do, and compost making is high on my list of fun. …(yeah, I’m quirky.)

We built half of a new pile, and screened  and loaded 1500# of finished compost to be used on the landscaping. And we enjoyed one another’s company along the way. An Easter gift!

That night the church celebrated the Great Vigil of Easter by candlelight. A beautiful service, and afterward I went to bed late.

The sound of nothing, an aftershock of a dream, awakened me the night of Easter. Stillness, and I heard voices innumerable, frogs in the wetlands.

The words of the one of the eucharistic prayers were near in memory: 

…you alone are God, living and true, dwelling in light inaccessible, from before time and forever…

…countless throngs of angels stand before you…they offer you unceasing praise…

…joining with them, and giving voice to every creature under heaven…we sing

I woke from sleep amidst deep darkness and into the countless voices of creatures on earth filling the night with their vocal light, it sounded like audible light.

I preached on the spot about this for Easter. It seemed to offer words in accord with the experience of many: people shared their wonder at this nightly spring mystery, simply the frogs singing, appreciation of those neighbors and forbears who had the care and vision to conserve wetlands, “listening to the frogs singing in my heart,” looking for Jesus in unexpected places, and more.

That doesn’t give any kind of easy answer to the stark realities ecological fragmentation, or climate chaos disrupting reliable rhythms and patterns of nature, further disrupting human and all creatures’ ways of subsistence and dwelling.

But it does give a certain substance to hope, to stepping forward in faith, to expend effort in behalf of the earth and all its creatures singing from marshy redoubts of life, to take up the cross and the living tree by which to tend and keep the places we live, and learn to love.

Hope substantial enough for listening when you wake in the night to frogs’ spring singing.