Sabbatical activity: the book, books, roundup

January 13, 2024 in books, sabbatical | 1 comment

My sabbatical ended on Sunday with a very happy return to UUCPA. But I have one more post to write about what I did on sabbatical.

One thing I thought I might do was get back to the book I began several years ago, and maybe even get it completely finished and ready for publication. I did not, but I moved a few steps along that path. I reconnected with the editor, apologizing for letting it drop (I had never signed a contract, but I had been offered one) and asking whether they were still interested; I had a Zoom meeting with her, in which I learned what I would need to do to get the process re-started; and I got my revised proposal about halfway to readiness for submission. I like all the changes Skinner House has undergone that (along with the passage of time) make it necessary for me to revise it, and I’m sure that if they accept it again, the changes will make it a better book. I’m fairly confident they will accept it. But I have not yet finished the proposal.

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The other addition I want to make to this series is the books I’ve read since I last reported on my reading.

I finished The Covenant of Water (Abraham Verghese) and Justice is Coming (Cenk Uygur).

I finished only a couple of chapters of Goodness and Advice (Judith Jarvis Thomson) and then shelved it with the other philosophy books in my office. I guess I wasn’t up for that much dense philosophy. Earlier in the year, I ground to a similar halt with Re-Enchantment Without Supernaturalism, by David Ray Griffin. With a title like that, I have to go back to it–also, he was a process theologian, and a great teacher from whom I was lucky enough to take a theology class during my one semester at the Claremont School of Theology–but it was slow going. I am in the unfortunate position of being at heart a postmodern theologian without having the head to read postmodern theology.

I read:

Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver. It made me want to reread David Copperfield, which I think I read in high school (I may be imagining that), but I couldn’t do that right away because I had finally gotten hold of the book I’d been impatiently waiting for:

The Fraud, Zadie Smith. I wanted to keep reading Smith after that, so went straight on to

On Beauty, Zadie Smith, which I might have liked even more than The Fraud. They were great in different ways.

Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, Andrew Shyrock. I’ve already forgotten what put me on to this book. I read some chapters deeply and skimmed others. It was very interesting.

The Sword of Summer, The Hammer of Thor, and The Ship of the Dead, Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase trilogy. My daughter had recommended them ages ago when she first got into Riordan. She liked Percy Jackson best; that’s Greek mythology, and I liked it but I have a particular love for the Norse myths, which is the milieu of this trilogy. I finally got around to them and gobbled them up like buttered popcorn.

Also fun, easy reading: Killers of a Certain Age, Deanna Raybourn.

Let’s see, that’s going backwards. What did I read more recently? Oh right.

The rest of the assigned books for my grad school course: How to Lead When you Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Susan Beaumont; The Art of Relevance,Nina Simon; and The Church Cracked Open, Stephanie Spellers. We were also assigned Salsa, Soul, and Spirit, by Juana Bordas, but I had read it for a course the previous fall, so that was just a skim.

The Angel’s Game and The Prisoner of Heaven, Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I did not read them in Spanish, though a UUCPA member assures me I could do it. These are the second and third books in his series about the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, so the last one, The Labyrinth of Spirits, is on my must-read-soon list.

Most of Music is History, Questlove. Thanks to my mom for recommending this one. Not only has he forgotten far more than I’ll ever know about popular music in the United States, but his thoughts on history itself are deep and fascinating. I let it go back to the library before I was finished, but I’ll resume it one of these days.

Passage, Connie Willis. This one-off, with its serious inquiry into the nature of death, was so, so good that I had to dive back into Willis, so I read two of her Oxford Time Travel series I hadn’t read yet:

Blackout and All Clear. They are really two halves of the same book, as I learned when I started reading All Clear and felt like I had plunked myself down in the middle of something. I had; it should be labeled Volume 2. I had to go get Blackout (unlike All Clear, we didn’t own it) and start from the beginning, and I was really glad I did. Willis has successfully implanted her version of London in the Blitz in my mind, to the extent that I could ask an actual survivor of the Blitz what it was like and I might look askance at them if their version contradicted hers. That’s historical fiction for you. Hers is so well-done that I have to remind myself that she wasn’t there either. She’s just trying to bring it to life for those of us who were born at a later date.

“The Fall of the House of Usher,” Edgar Allan Poe, which I reread because the television version was the talk of the internet. I love his lush, dense prose, but it didn’t make me want to watch the show, or read more Poe, for that matter. Sorry, Edgar.

Since Christmas, when I gave and got a pile of books: The latest No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency book, From a Far and Lovely Country, Alexander McCall Smith; A Study in Drowning, Ava Reid. Joy picked books for us based on the recommendations of Alix E. Harrow, since all of us liked her novels. Harrow is right; Reid is an excellent writer; but this one was for young adults, and it had one of the failings to which young adult fantasy (though not Riordan’s) is prey: the strikingly beautiful young female protagonist is so clueless about love that she keeps having experiences where suddenly noticing that she can feel the main male character’s breath makes her flush, “for some reason,” and she wishes he would stay in her room awhile longer, “for some reason,” and he looks at her for an uncomfortably long time, “for some reason,” until I start to have fantasies of being a young-adult-fantasy editor so that I could hit Ctrl-F, search for “for some reason,” and delete its every appearance. This one was particularly egregious because before she started crushing on him, she found a piece of paper where he had written her name over and over, and it still came as a surprise to her that he was crushing on her. No one in the real world is that naive. The plot was a bit of a mess, too, but despite all of this, she is a writer I’ll watch for. There was just so much there that made me want to keep reading.

And on our way to Solvang just after Christmas, I downloaded a few books I was willing to read or reread, hoping the fam would all agree on one. They did: The Book of Form and Emptiness, Ruth Ozeki. So I reread it, first listening en route, then finishing it via audio and eyes after we got home. What a great book. The only problem with Ozeki is that she can’t write as fast as I can read, and I am forever impatient for her next book.

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Finally, I assure anyone who has read this series of posts and thought “Did she sleep at all during sabbatical?” that I did, as late as I wanted to most days, and that I also took time to do two crosswords (New York Times and Washington Post) almost every day, and also do my daily Spelling Bee, Connections, Wordle, and Quordle. I didn’t think my word games took that much time until this week, when I got back to work and my Spelling Bee game really began to suffer. I wrote this series of posts because I have an overwhelming tendency to look back at opportunities like this and think I wasted them (anxiety: it’s the fun mental disorder!). I needed to document, for my own sake, what I’ve been doing, so that I could look back on these posts and reassure myself that I did not waste the time.

And it is totally legit for sabbatical to be a time of relative relaxation. For me, the biggest stress reliever is simply not having anything I must do. Reading–even books that are pretty heavy, slow going–and making art and playing piano and going to the gym are all challenging in their way, but like the Sunday crosswords, they are the challenges I enjoy. The daily tasks of maintaining a household also continue during sabbatical, but add next to no stress when they aren’t competing with work. So for six months, I could sleep until I was ready to wake, then go up the hill to the gym, then come back and fold and put away a load of laundry, then play piano, without feeling like I was stealing time from my job. I could sit down at the art table at 10 pm and not go to bed until 12 without worrying that I was going to be exhausted during the next day’s meetings.

Now, to add the job back in without unbalancing myself: that’s the next joyful challenge.

I hope you’ll check out my new column, Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed or Vexed

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Year Compass

January 13, 2024 in organization | Tags: | Leave a comment

Inspired by a colleague who uses Year Compass annually, and freed by the leisure of sabbatical, I decided to do the whole booklet this year. (I can’t remember which colleague, and can’t find whatever Facebook post she had commented on, so thank you, whoever you are!) I say “booklet”; what I actually did was write the headings in my journal and take it to Solvang when we traveled there between Christmas and New Year’s, and answered the questions there. I change journals whenever one runs out, not at the end of the year, but as it turned out, the 2023 questions brought me right up to the last page of my journal, and I began the next volume with the 2024 questions, which was lovely. Now they are on the first page, the easiest place to look when I need to remind myself of my intentions for the year.

Many of the headings in the Year Compass are “magical triplets,” such as: “I am ready to let go of these three things.” “These three people will be my pillars during rough times.” The last of the triplets for the coming year is “I will reward my successes with these three presents.” Those were hard to come up with, and in fact, I have still only come up with two: luscious yarn, and a really nice notebook. I have plenty of both, so buying more would be a special treat. Maybe I’ll make the third one that sundae at Fenton’s Creamery that I’ve fantasized about for a long time. Nothing too crazy, just a couple of scoops of Coffee Cookie Dream with hot fudge and whipped cream. Can you believe I’ve been an ice cream lover in the Bay Area for 20 years and never gone to Fenton’s?

But really, what made it hard to think of rewards was that successes are usually so sweet that they are their own rewards. For example, I aimed to end each work day this week with an empty inbox. (As I’ve written before, for many people this is not a worthwhile goal, but for me it’s invaluable.) Yesterday, just before I turned off my computer and headed home from UUCPA, I snapped a screenshot of this lovely sight.

Who needs more reward than that?

Solvang drawings

January 5, 2024 in beautiful places, drawings | Leave a comment

The nice thing about having my sketchbook with me everywhere is that when we’re waiting for the food to arrive at a restaurant, I can draw what’s on the table. When we were in Solvang, we went to dinner at a place that had these nice oil lamps on the tables, with their irresistible patterns of shadow and light.

California’s oak trees always say “draw me,” and I am usually too intimidated to heed them. I like this drawing, though. It’s an exercise in not being too specific–just following the general patterns of the tree. That’s really difficult for me for a variety of reasons. I don’t know if I’ll finish it, but I’ve returned to it for the past few days, having gotten a start on it at the winery where it grows while we were still in SoCal.

Sabbatical activity: grad school

December 31, 2023 in sabbatical, United | Leave a comment

When I started planning my sabbatical, I thought, “Ooh, I’ll have all this time. I could take two classes at United rather than my usual one per term.” I quickly realized that this would soak up a great deal of the time freed by sabbatical, that there is no hurry to move through my program, and that I should stick with just one course. So I did: The Arts for Leadership (the course description and syllabus is probably viewable on one of the lists here, though maybe not when you read this, since the course lists change with each semester). Assuming that the final project I turned in a couple of weeks ago was satisfactory, I have completed three credits, putting me 1/3 of the way to the DMin degree. The last three credits are the dissertation and, immediately preceding it, the DMin Practicum and the Research Tools and [Dissertation] Proposal. So I have only three more courses before that process begins, which feels rather sad since there are at least half a dozen courses I am itching to take. (One of United’s perks for its graduates is that we can audit courses for free, so I can carry on that way.)

The purpose of the DMin degree is highly pragmatic, as a rule: while one’s dissertation must be academically rigorous, the aim is less to produce original scholarship and more to learn something that one can apply in one’s ministry. This semester’s course was organized the same way, with the final project being the outline of a plan (integrating the arts and leadership, of course) that we could then implement in our setting. My plan is to facilitate the creation of a mural by guests of three programs for unhoused people that UUCPA hosts, literally putting their vision for the wider community before everyone’s eyes. So this course was a perfect fit with the sabbatical, since it sends me back to UUCPA with a plan in hand for a project that I think will work really well in our congregation. The fact that this was my course this semester was a happy accident; it is required for the DMin in Theology and the Arts, and this was my first opportunity to take it. I’d heard that the professor (Rev. Dr. Cindi Beth Johnson) was top-notch, and the rumors were spot on.

Since I had so many other things I wanted to do, reported in my “Sabbatical activity” posts here, I’m glad I decided to take only one course this term. And I’m really glad it was this one.

I hope you’ll check out my new column, Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed or Vexed

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Salinas Valley

December 30, 2023 in beautiful places, drawings | Leave a comment

Pencil, approx. 8″ x 5″

We went south for a few days after Christmas to meet up with friends and hike in the beautiful Santa Ynez Mountains. The route took us down through the Salinas Valley. At one point a patch of sun on the otherwise clouded hills was so striking that I considered stopping to take a picture, or asking Joy to take one out the window as I drove, because I knew I’d want to draw it later. The moment passed, unrecorded except in my mind, and when we got to our destination, I went looking on the internet for a reference photo. I really wanted it to be of these same hills. Nothing quite captured the quiet drama of that illumination–moral: take the photo when it strikes you–but this one was pretty. Thank you, Shutterstock (photo 1055815059).

Sabbatical activity: going to services

December 17, 2023 in Unitarian Universalism | Leave a comment

That’s a trick title, because I have gone to a grand total of two church services in my six months of sabbatical. I’m rather ashamed to admit it, but it’s true. I had a plan to go to the San Francisco services fairly regularly once we were back from our summer travels, a plan that foundered on the rocks of taiko class (10:45 Sunday mornings). But what took me so long to figure out that a good two-thirds of the UU congregations in the country have services that end by 10 a.m. my time? I just got out of the Sunday morning church habit. Which is instructive. Going to services is a habit, like any other; once in the habit, one tends to carry on, and once out of it, one also tends to continue not-going. Something for all of us who tend these wonderful communities to remember.

U2C3 logo, from a window we could see during worship

I did think of it earlier this fall, looked up a few services, and got up in time to go to one, but I had a flu-y thing and couldn’t keep my energy up long enough even for a Zoom hour. Two weeks ago, I finally got my act together again, and was so, so glad I did. I attended the livestreamed service of Jefferson Unitarian Church (Golden, CO) that Sunday; it was great, so I picked a service for last Sunday, but overslept; this morning, I tried to attend one livestreamed service, but the time on the website was incorrect due to a seasonal change, and had to quickly look for another one. Again: there are lots of options in the Central Time Zone! So I ended up at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Corpus Christi, charmingly nicknamed U2C3.

Both today’s service and the one on December 3rd made me regret not going every week. Both were a great fit for my sabbatical spiritual practice of letting go of judgment and letting curiosity take its place. Oh my, does my judging mind have things to say about church services! It’s only natural, since it’s my vocation, and of course I’m making many mental notes about what does and doesn’t work. But its being my vocation is also the reason that curiosity is so much more useful than judgment. Instead of evaluating what works, what doesn’t, what I like, what I don’t, etc. suspending that process (or telling that judging voice to please pipe down during the service, at least) opens me up to ways of doing things that I’m not accustomed to. It makes room for me to appreciate other ways and others’ creativity.

And creativity there was, both of these weeks. Jefferson is one of the many churches using the Soul Matters monthly themes, and the theme was Mystery: right up my street, for a few reasons. One: again, curiosity in place of judgment. I am trying to be more open to the unknown, to what I may yet discover, and judgment tends to make a person go right past Mystery unaware, because she’s comparing everything she encounters to what she already knows. This person, anyway. Two: I’ve been making a lot of art, and spending a lot of time talking with others about the relationship between art and religious leadership (my class in this semester of grad school was The Arts for Leadership), and one of the great things art does for me is take me into that space of unknowing and discovery. Three: I have been thinking a lot about how uncomfortable Unitarian Universalists, not only me, can be with the unknown, and how spiritually limiting that is. If I had to choose a dissertation topic today (which thank goodness, I do not), it would be something like “Using the Arts in a Congregational Setting to Re-Enchant Religion Without Supernaturalism.”*

The Time for All Ages was clearly one of a series in which Unitarian Universalism, a pleasant man in a t-shirt reading UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISM, gave a wrapped gift to the director of religious exploration, who opened it on behalf of the congregation. Both Sarah Billerbeck, their DRE, and the man playing UU, were clearly comfortable being off-script, so their dialogue was pleasantly conversational while also hitting their main points, nor did it matter that I hadn’t heard previous entries in the series. The box was empty, because, well, Mystery. It isn’t something that is handed to us; it’s part of our search, and we don’t know what we will find. Together, they reached the conclusion that because we have the freedom to search, our faith leaves us a lot of room for mystery. When Unitarian Universalism said, “In fact, Mystery is one of the greatest gifts I give you,” I had tears of hope in my eyes. Can it be that our faith is actually particularly suited to acquainting us with mystery? Then Rev. Wendy Williams’s sermon was beautiful, in a thoughtful and heart-felt style, and ended with a suggestion about how to open to mystery that was so like the advice I had just given someone on Ask Isabel that I had to laugh. My advice was about gratitude, something that does come easily to me–and here it was, traveling in the circuitous ways by which the universe delivers wisdom, coming to me from a colleague I deeply respect in order to help me awaken to mystery. Thank you, Wendy and universe.

Today’s service, at the congregation in Corpus Christi, was about the many festivals of lights at this time of year: Diwali, Hanukah, Advent, Kwanzaa, Solstice. These kinds of services are difficult because if they’re presented as actual celebrations of the holidays, they are almost certainly appropriating others’ religious practices, whereas if they do the respectful thing and simply tell us about the practices, they can be very report-y and dry. The folks leading the service were carefully respectful, which allowed that judging mind of mine to relax awhile, and so where it might have piped up with “Uh oh, this could be a report instead of a worship service,” I was able instead to appreciate how the leaders (most of whom weren’t ministers or worship associates, so they were probably quite nervous) crafted a sensory experience of growing light, a whole table full of candles and lamps that must have given off palpable heat as well as a beautiful sight.

And then the band, which had already done a lovely rendition of “Light One Candle” (and oh, how those lyrics resonate this Hanukah, whatever one’s political views about Israel), sang “Glorious,” a Melissa Etheridge song that I had not heard before and that I then sang in my head all the way to my taiko class. That one is going to be heard in a UUCPA service next year, you can bet. “Everyone will hold this light”–and again I was moved to tears, not only by the words but by the way the two singers and the small acoustic band brought such feeling to them. On Muni, no one notices or cares if you get a little weepy.

I’m very grateful to these two congregations and their worship teams. I’m looking forward to next Sunday, and I’m just sorry it took me this long to start going to services.

*A seminary professor of mine, the late David Ray Griffin, wrote a book with this title–Re-Enchantment Without Supernaturalism–and I was so excited to discover that that of course I got a hold of it immediately. It doesn’t take the tack I want to, but the title sums up my hopes.

1000th post!: Hiddur Mitzvah

December 11, 2023 in art, politics | 3 comments

WordPress informs me that this is my 1000th post on Sermons in Stones! Wow. Thanks for coming along for the ride!

In Judaism, there’s a concept called hiddur mitzvah: the beautification of a mitzvah or commandment. It means that while one can discharge one’s duty to fulfill a commandment in a very plain way, adding beauty to it is praiseworthy. There is a commandment to light the Shabbat candles; Jews could mutter the prayer and light two candles that stayed lit for the minimal amount of time and weren’t blown out, and that would fulfill the responsibility. But hiddur mitzvah encourages us to do more: for example, use beautiful candlesticks, preferably ones that are used for no other purpose; use new candles that burn longer than is required; set the prayer to music; gather with our loved ones and hold hands around the candles as we sing together. 

Naturally, as I grew up as a Jewish child who loved everything artsy and craftsy, this concept suited me down to the ground. It meant that there was a rich folk art tradition of decorating everything: calligraphed ketubot (marriage certificates), embroidered tallit (prayer shawls), silver filigree spice boxes used at the close of Shabbat, even illustrations from the Book of Esther on graggers, the noisemakers used to drown out Haman’s name whenever the cantor sings it during the Purim services. I made a tallis for my dad, a ketubah for my parents, and more Hebrew school art projects than I can remember. To this day, I remember the exact color and pattern on the contact paper we used to decorate the pushke (charity box) we made in Hebrew school and then kept on a household shelf and filled with our spare change for the rest of my childhood. (Hiddur mitzvah and the many ritual objects are a gift to Hebrew school teachers. So many crafts opportunities!)

Papercuts emerged as part of this tradition. One is supposed to pray facing east if possible,* but there is absolutely no requirement to hang a little sign on the eastern wall inside one’s home. But it became a tradition not only to create such a sign (called a mizrach, which means “east”), but to make it beautiful with calligraphy or, in the 18th-20th centuries in Western Europe, a papercut. This beautification was more than decorative; it had the power to change a person’s awareness of the very meanings of the mitzvah, the same way setting a prayer to music does much more than make the prayer pretty and easy to remember. Imagine someone opening their prayerbook and situate themselves facing east, and as they look up, their eyes fall on an intricate work of art, perhaps portraying the Old City of Jerusalem, or the Western Wall, or the words of a verse from the Torah. Their prayer is now accompanied by visions of places that their people gathered again and again on every holy day. It is witnessed to by the hands of an artist who dedicated her creativity and many hours of her craft to the faith they share. The art invites them into a world of beauty and contemplation during their time of prayer.

8″x8″ papercut, still in progress

This tradition keeps coming to my mind as I work on the papercut I’m making grieving the destruction of millions of olive trees that Israeli “settlers” and the Israeli army have committed over the years in a bitterly self-destructive, anti-halakhic (halakhah is Jewish religious law) attempt to deprive Palestinians of their livelihood. If I were making a mizrach or ketubah, papercutting is the art form I might use. Instead, I’m making a political, largely secular statement–and it occurs to me that art in general is a kind of hiddur mitzvah.

I will eventually write a post here about how my connection to Israel and my conception of what it means to be Jewish in the world after 1948 have changed in response to crimes like the destruction of Palestinians’ trees. Its approach will be logical and discursive, a statement of facts and feelings, and I imagine it will accomplish the basic task of clarifying and expressing my opinion. That would be the equivalent of the unadorned mitzvah. But making this piece, like hiddur mitzvah, does more than that. A work of art, whether a painting, an operetta, a poem, a dance, whatever it may be, isn’t just a statement. It can create an entire microcosm for the viewer to enter and dwell in awhile. It can take us to new depths of understanding that plain words seldom convey. That’s certainly what it is doing for me as the maker.

*All the ones I’ve seen are mizrachim because I grew up in the western Diaspora. Of course, Jews in Asia pray facing west, Jews in Israel pray facing Jerusalem, and Jews in Jerusalem pray facing the ruins of the ancient Temple. The same holds true for Muslims vis-a-vis Mecca, and as far as I know, for all religions that have a tradition of praying toward a particular revered location.

Papercut piece in progress

December 7, 2023 in art | Leave a comment

Papercut, 8″x8″

I am working on a diptych of olive trees in Israel and Palestine. A few minutes after the image came to me, the medium followed: traditional Jewish papercuts, an art form I have loved and admired for a long time, but have never tried. I’m loving it.

According to Wikipedia, papercutting was done throughout the Jewish world, and was especially popular in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe. But between the fragility of the medium and the destruction of so many Jewish possessions in the Holocaust, only a couple hundred of the pieces from that period still exist. In recent decades, artists have rediscovered and reclaimed papercut art, and one sees it often in sacred art: decorating ketubbot (religious marriage certificates) and mizrachim (signs designating the east, toward which Jews face in prayer), illustrating passages from the Tanakh or Talmud.

This piece is going to express sorrow and bitterness about an inner conflict, within me and within Judaism: the conflict between some of the most beautiful, wise teachings of Judaism and the policies of the modern state of Israel. The beauty of the art form is one ingredient of that bitterness. This half of the diptych, the happy half, is not quite half finished.

I hope you’ll check out my column, Ask Isabel: Advice for the Spiritually Perplexed or Vexed, now in its tenth week!

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Seeking to Hide

December 1, 2023 in art journal, drawings | 1 comment

Pencil on paper, approx. 6″x9″

That’s the tentative title for what might end up being a painting. I envision this writing scratched in paint or ink so that an under-layer of paint or ink shows through, but some kind of dry medium might also work, or maybe colored pencil over an ink wash–the layers are important. I have tried it in pencil before, when I first got the idea seven years ago. I know it was that long ago because we were living in Oaxaca then. I didn’t have the idea of making a portrait out of scribbled-out, obscured words at that time. I know I have that sketch somewhere and I’m curious what my earlier idea was.

The legible text tells a story. The most important points are here, but it will be longer and go into more detail in the next version. There’s more I want to write, but as this is quite small, the size of my sketchbook, I ran out of paper before I ran out of things to say.

This whole project makes me think a lot about my friend Karen Schiff, who is also an artist (check out her great drawings and writing about art here).

Sabbatical activity: Human Library

November 30, 2023 in sabbatical | Leave a comment

Perhaps you, like me, have seen this come across your social media feed:

Sounds so cool, doesn’t it? Well, the United States is one of those 50 countries, and a depot of the Human Library has been underway for some time here in the SF Bay Area. A friend and colleague in the UK gave me a heads-up that a friend of hers was moving to my area and that we should meet. She rightly predicted that we would really like each other. (All three of us are UUs.) What I didn’t know until we got together for a get-acquainted lunch was that she–the arrival, my new friend–was the new manager of the Human Library depot. I was very excited, and immediately asked how we could bring a Human Library event to UUCPA.

I expect that we’ll do that fairly soon, especially since our minister of religious education is as jazzed about it as I am. In the meantime, I am going to be a Book in the Human Library, this weekend, in San Rafael! It is on Saturday, December 2, 1-5 pm at Marin Ventures. Readers, for whom the Library is completely free, can have a 30-minute conversation with me about two aspects of my identity: being an atheist, and being a pansexual. I should say “or” rather than “and,” since trying to talk about both in the same 30-minute span would be a bit taxing. 😉

I am really looking forward to it, and I hope I have some good conversations. This is one of those activities that I didn’t particularly have on my list of sabbatical plans, but that fits beautifully with them. I have the spaciousness to devote an entire Saturday to something that doesn’t involve my family (something I avoid as much as possible when I’m working and Saturdays are our only family day). I’m having encounters that I imagine will teach me as much as they teach the Readers. And I’m learning firsthand about a ministry (my word, not the Human Library’s) that we at UUCPA can help offer to our community.

For the dates and locations of other Human Library events, follow the organization here.

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A new Ask Isabel is up! The letter writer is finding it hard to be thankful this year. Click on over to read what I suggested.

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