Closeness to God

Chers Amis,
"God is closer to you than you are to yourself, " someone told me without explanation a few weeks ago. I puzzled over this for a long time. What does this mean? How is this so? A few straggling ideas came to the troubled surface of my mind. . . We are a construct of atoms, animated by a soul, propelled by electrochemical impulses, reacting to our environment, other objects and beings within the same grid of space and time. God is the space and the time. He is the creator, owner, lender of all matter. He is the designer of the particles and the space between them, the force that sets them in motion, the time we wander through, the air we breathe, the spark within us, our beginning and our end, our dust and our consummation, our life lived or wasted, the energy and its transfer. He is our chemistry, physics, art, beauty, decay, rebirth, the Alpha and the Omega. I am only a sensor, an eye, an ear, given a second to see, glimpse and record a bit of this greatness. I am only a note, a pause, a cosmic firefly and yet, he calls me, "Sing with me. Dance with me. Remain in me always." How can I not for in him, we live and breathe and have our being whether or not we understand the mystery.
-- Marjorie

My Love Hate Relationship with Insects

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
James Russell Lowell

Chers Amis,
Flying insects and I have a troubled past based largely on irrational fear and poor eyesight. Books, I have always loved. They don't move. They don't sting. However, as a child the mere whisper of buzzing would send me hurtling in the opposite, and often hazardous, direction. There is a tale repeatedly told around our holiday table of how while fleeing a solitary yellow jacket, I collided full force - face first - into an enormous pine tree, much to the amusement of those present. God, having a sublime sense of humor, graced me with a daughter who adores creatures of every stripe and risk level. Caddie is like a zephyr or a rainbow - impossible to catch and bind within the walls of any building. She has a special affection for insects which, like a kitten, she brings me to admire and identify. This has been the source of my salvation for it requires a book! Suddenly the beast is tamed and I have come to enjoy identifying all the flora and fauna that surround mon moulin. Even those that sting! P.S. This is a Giant Resin Bee (Megachile scupturalis) that we found nesting on our deck. Only the females sting - if you contain them in your hand. A good bee.

Letters from My Mill

Chers Amis,
Enfin, a quiet moment to sit down and tell you about the sweet happenings at my moulin - my mill. Why all the talk of mills you ask? Well, it started with a desire to clean up a cluttered corner and make room for a new school year's books. I only meant to pack up all those dusty tomes that I couldn't bear to throw away but a few called to me from the top shelf like friends from the past whose paths no longer intersect your own. Voices from far away - Verlaine, Baudelaire, Pagnol. Most lofty and reserved, some angry and cynical. But one clear voice caught my attention, Alphonse Daudet's "Lettre de mon Moulin." It is a collection of stories and anectdotes about the people and places he encountered while living in the first floor of a old mill in Provence. So happy, was he in this place, this "Little corner, perfumed and warm, a thousand miles from newspapers, cabs, smog! . . . And all the nice things around me." From there he wrote, his door wide open to the sunlight. I could smell the honeyed hills and smiled, taking the bouquin down for a long conversation to catch up on all the news. It reminded me that while my home isn't really an old mill set up on the lavender scented hills of Provence with a lovely wood of pines sparkling in the sun, it is my simple corner of goodness and joy. Welcome to mon moulin.