A week before Christmas, Scot and Linda hosted a festive community supper to celebrate this thin and holy time of year.  We feasted, exchanged gifts, acted out a wacky rendition of “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and listened delightedly to Linda’s fanciful and entrancing telling of the tale of Louhi, the mischievous witch of North Farm who stole the sun and moon (and eventually returned them).  Before telling the tale, Linda explained for the children, and the grown ups, the phenomenon of the solstice, drawing out the waves of light and darkness moving in their circle dance.  This is a wide season, a long threshold, as the light and dark perform their incremental, stately, and endless exchange.

It's a warm and snowless Advent here on the small mountain where we live. In another year, I would write about it--the mist laying softly around the gray trees, the loamy smell of the leaves heaped over the trails and forest floor, the thunk, thunk of the red-bellied woodpecker coming muffled in the wet air. The fact is, though, that for the past month I have been immersed in a different world.

In the first days of November I traveled to Greensboro, NC,  to help out during the birth of our fifth grandchild, the third in that family. I was there primarily to give a hand with the children, getting them to school (4th grade and pre-K); and with meals and household chores. Our son is a first-year teacher in a middle school in Winston-Salem, a 45-minute commute. Hired just in September, he was not eligible for leave.

We had our second annual Rolling Ridge "All Saints Eve/Halloween-Day of the Dead-All Souls celebration" on October 31, 2015. The day went like this. We gathered Saturday afternoon for a time of preparation. Last year this included the making of sugar skulls and lacey cutouts; or this year, we made creatures from the gifts of the forest: persimmons, twigs, tupelo leaves. Next we dressed the altar with pictures of loved ones passed on, things they loved and held, and their favorite treats. We spent a little time telling stories, sharing bittersweet memories. Then we put on our wild selves dressed in all manner of costumes and processed from house to house. At each house there were treats for the children and much laughter and the taking of pictures. It ended with a party by the altar featuring a smorgasbord of dishes relished by the honored dead.

The gift of autumn has arrived at Rolling Ridge in all its green and auburn and gold and blue-sky splendor. Into the midst of this, just as the forest was beginning to paint itself in new hues and the air to sharpen, came the retreat, "Between the Body and the Breathing Earth."

On the morning of the autumnal equinox we awoke to mist. It curled around the sunchokes and blackberries in the garden and floated amid the forest oaks and maples. In the early twilight, the mist hung like a gray gauze curtain over the lingering dark. It was not soundless, but deeply quiet. As the sun rose over the ridge there appeared in the grasses of the sheep field and in the tufts clustering at the base of the fruit trees ethereal, small dwellings, woven of pale silk. They dotted the landscape: delicate diminutive domes, cloud castles.

On Saturday of the Labor Day weekend, many friends of Rolling Ridge came together to help us haul and split wood for the winter, clean and re-organize the Retreat House, fix the spring, and tend the garden. This is an annual, joyful event, filled to the brim with good work, good food, and laughter. At 1 pm we paused for a festive potluck lunch, before which this grace was offered:

In her introductory paragraph to the September issue of the Friends of Silence Letter, (this month, appropriately, on the theme of work) Linda quoted Wendell Berry:

"Good work is a way of living...it is unifying and healing...It defines us as we are: not too good to work with our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone."

We celebrated Luke's birthday at community supper this week, which inspired me to write this short reflection:

Happy birthday, we say, knowing full well that each one of us is born into a world that is basically a crap shoot. Our day, at any moment, could be pleasant or terrifying; thrilling or sickening; serene or numbingly disheartening, or everything and anything in between. Around and within us whirl a mass of events, possibilities, images, newscasts, voices that refuse to coalesce into any descriptor at all, much less a word as wispy as "happy". "How are you today?" asks the man at the checkout, and we really don't know where to begin.

In all this, what makes sense? What would be a gift? What small, glimmering box could we cradle thankfully in the palm of our hand?

Annually the residential Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community and the Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Board comes together for a time of building relationships, connecting, looking down the path ahead, and fun. This was the opening reflection for our weekend:

I am writing this on the eve of the Rolling Ridge residential community and board retreat. We are mid-month, the night of what some would call a new moon and others the dark of the moon.

After a soaked summer, we've made it to the middle of August. The greens in the forest are tinting toward dark jade. Here and there, leaves are kissed with russet and gold. The light is beginning to slant. Walking home from community supper, we remark at the lengthening shadows, the nearness of nightfall. Soon we'll have to remember to bring flashlights.

It has been a watery summer, rain in many moods appearing on nearly 30 of the last 40 days. We have had almost 15 inches in the last several weeks, more than we usually get in a whole summer. It drizzles, showers, spits, pours, storms; it comes capriciously in fits and starts, or thunderously in colossal downpours. Our roads are rutted, leaves mounded and cast aside by careless torrents. Our streams and rivulets gush; the waterfalls cascade and splash; wading pools on Krishna Brook and Rocky Branch are thigh high.

On a night two weeks ago, 15 women walked single file through the woods singing softly on their way from the Retreat House to the Meditation Shelter. The clouds played tag with the waxing moon, but still it shone like silver through the dark trees. As the group approached the Shelter, they saw candlelight glowing through the windows and heard the pensive cadence of a Native American flute. At the door, each was asked, "Are you willing to enter the door that leads to the realm of heart and soul and mystery?"