May's issue of Friends Journal is blessed with a bountiful harvest of essays and articles on the subjects of food and farming—including several online-exclusive features. Pull up a chair and dig in!
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Communicating Quaker experience in order to connect and deepen spiritual lives. Home of videos and the Quakers Today podcast (quakerstoday.org).
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🧵1/4 This is a shout out to the North Carolina Friends Disaster Service! You taught me about solidarity, service and rolling up our sleeves to help, person to person, in the face of disaster. These days while cleaning up from the #alluvioneemiliaromagna I'm wearing your cap!
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Friends who have eating disorders need a combination of meeting support and professional medical care. Care and Counsel committee members can offer spiritual and social connection to complement therapy for Quakers with eating disorders.
From : "EQAT member Dana Robinson...wants employees to understand the activists’ reasons for protesting. Demonstrators intended to highlight the contrast between business as usual and a different way of approaching investing to curb climate change.”
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On Wednesday, April 19, around 100 climate crisis demonstrators blocked four driveways at the Vanguard investment firm’s headquarters to protest the company’s continued fossil fuel holdings. Police arrested 16 people, including 11 members of @EQAT. friendsjournal.org/climate-activi
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Quaker meetings often use communal meals such as potlucks to strengthen ties among Friends, but those events can land differently for Friends with eating disorders, many of whom do not publicly discuss their conditions. How can we address their concerns?
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"When I came out, close friends of mine heard about my coming out and they demonized it," Justimore Musombi recalled in this 2014 interview. His family in Kenya went so far as to perform a ceremony expelling him from their community.
Bethan is eight; Margaret Crompton is ten times older ("but not," she jokes, "ten times wiser"). Together, they read Room for More, the story of two Australian wombats who open up their burrow to other nearby animals when bushfires reach their territory.
Mr. Pottle rescues objects from the local dump and reconditions them. The town's children take to his beaming presence and the genuine patience he devotes not only to damaged books, tools, and appliances, but to the people who need them in their lives.
As the leaders of say further down this thread, "Queerphobia and transphobia impact and harm precious people that both we and God call our beloveds."
Honoring that of God in everyone means rejecting hate and oppression in all its forms, against any of us.
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Today is International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia, a worldwide observance highlighting how the rights, well-being, and lives of LGBTQIA+ people continue to be at risk in so many places. (1/7)
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ALT
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"drawn by liquid chemistry
redolence of home
I made my way to you
like a salmon to natal streams
but did not find you"
—from "Pilgrimage" by Tricia Gates Brown
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"We were leaning over a truck bed talking to each other, catching up, and [Bobby] said to me, 'You ought to buy the farmhouse.' I laughed at him and answered, 'Yeah, let me write you a check.' He said, 'Really, I think we can work something out.'”
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Hey, who’s been sharing copies of our mailing list roster? 😉
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I've come across A LOT of good 17th- and 18th-century Quaker names over the past 3.5 years, as I've worked on my thesis. Now that my thesis is done and submission is near, it's time to share the more than 90 wildest early Quaker names I've found (in alphabetical order):
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Mary Beth Owens’s illustrations in The Man Who Saved Books are energetic. Her children, whether on bicycles or on foot, radiate action; Mr. Pottle, whether working in his workshop or striding about his “dump,” exhibits a can-do air in motion and in rest.
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"Raising sheep is the most maddening, heartbreaking, frustrating, and difficult endeavor I have ever been engaged in," Allen Cochran writes, who tends close to 250 lambs each summer, after the birthing season. "It is also the most rewarding."
"It is at this time, right around Mother’s Day, that my neighbor and I also plant victory gardens… in celebration of our winding paths as women. [We] plant different seasonal vegetables and share what grows between us throughout the summer."
In a North Carolina county where one in five children experience food insecurity, Celo Friends Meeting sees its food ministry as a responsibility of being a part of their community.
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Thao Lam's The Line in the Sand is a playful and provocative book that will fit well in Quaker homes and First-day schools, says former elementary school librarian Ann Birch.
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Celo Community in Yancey County, North Carolina, was founded in the 1930s as an experiment in cooperative living and right relationship with the land. In its early years, members were recruited heavily from Quaker networks and conscientious objector camps.
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"Over the decade that I have been a Friend, I have been in so many different states of being … but I was being as good a Friend as I knew how to be or was able to be, and being there as my authentic self was what I had to offer to God at that point."
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Fanciful creatures, endowed with human and animal characteristics, frolic in beach sand. Suddenly, two of them notice a line apparently separating them into distinct groups, and they consider how to react.
To live in a community of loving friends is a great blessing, which is well worth the effort. In Chris Van Dusen's picture book Big Truck, Little Island (), resourceful children show how it’s done.
"The phone rings. My son wants to borrow the truck.
He’s just back from fly-fishing. Two avocados
run five dollars and fifty cents. He hooked
a fourteen-inch native rainbow trout."
—from "From the checkout line in the supermarket" by Molly O'Dell
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"Urban farming is sacrament. It is a statement of belonging and trust, an alignment with our life-giving home on earth. And by gathering together in this shared love[,] we can more easily recognize our common bonds and feel our love for each other."
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Based on a true event that happened on Vinalhaven Island off the coast of Maine, Chris Van Dusen's Big Truck, Little Island () has a big message about the effectiveness of common sense, friendship, and cooperation.
On Wednesday, April 19, around 100 climate crisis demonstrators blocked four driveways at the Vanguard investment firm’s headquarters to protest the company’s continued fossil fuel holdings. Police arrested 16 people, including 11 members of .
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When Pamela Haines & her partner bought a house in West Philly in the late 1970s, neighbors said there was no point trying to plant anything out front. The kids who used the street as a playground would just destroy it, they said. She went ahead anyway.
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Cook what makes you feel good.
Many prayers for many layers.
Acknowledge your privilege.
Plant a victory garden.
Share your recipe and bounty.
Nap. Rest. Repeat.
Luli is a young girl attending a daycare program for children whose parents are in an English as a second language class. Since the children have no common language, they play alone in silence—until Luli comes up with a solution.
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On Wednesday, April 19, around 100 climate crisis demonstrators blocked four driveways at the Vanguard investment firm’s headquarters in Malvern, Pa., to protest the company’s continued fossil fuel holdings.
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"In the spring, the rhubarb plant in our garden explodes. It bursts through with thick magenta stalks and massive green leaves.… When it’s time, I harvest its stalks and host a neighborhood happy hour where strawberry rhubarb pie is the main event."
"I am especially happy that Luli and the Language of Tea demonstrates a child solving the problem rather than just going along with a solution imposed by an adult. This shows children that they can solve a problem with the aid of the adults around them."
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"...A cardinal
once, in a dewy rosebush out the window
of the breakfast nook, flame-red, when I was seven,
set all her form alight, and, 'Oh, come look,'
she whispered...."
—from "This in Remembrance" by Donald Mace Williams
When you're at a family dinner, knowing those string beans were soaked with pork fat, the ham was tortured, & the mashed potatoes are gooey with gravy that has bits of meat bubbling atop, how does one say, "I’ll just have some macaroni and cheese, please?"
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To craft Itzel and the Ocelot's culturally rich story of discovery and belonging, Rachel Katstaller draws upon her childhood in El Salvador as readers follow the adventures of young Itzel, who resides with her grandmother at the edge of a jungle.
"I grew up on soul food & multigenerational eating habits," writes Deborah B. Ramsey. "Eating was truly a spiritual & social event." For the last 25 years, though, she's eaten a plant-based diet—and used to worry what that would mean for family gatherings.
"Violence is always a bad choice," John Calvi, a Quaker healer, said in this 2014 QuakerSpeak interview. "It not only makes a horrible mess at the time that it’s happening, but it leaves an even bigger mess after it’s been done."
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🎶Oh, listen to my story, I'll tell you no lies,
How John Lewis did murder poor little Omie Wise.🎶
Hal E. Pugh and Eleanor Minnock-Pugh reveal the Quaker connections to the real-life story behind one of the 19th century's most enduring murder ballads.
One Caregiver’s Journey with Dementia, a new @pendle_hill pamphlet, is not so much about loss and grieving as it is a lovely story of Anne Felton’s inward experience as she and her husband, Keith, lived through the several years of his decline.
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Those mourning the loss of a baby go through stages of grief just as those responding to the passing of an adult relative do. Perinatal loss counselors enable bereaved relatives to acknowledge their departed baby as well as their own emotions.
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Caring for someone living with dementia is something many people have experienced or will experience at some point—about 5.8 million people in the U.S. have some type of dementia, according to the CDC. A new @pendle_hill pamphlet tells one couple's story.
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