Shenadoah - images from the Blue Ridge Parkway

Orange VA

Stopped morning walk by this little brook & ivy covered tree.

Souvenir from the Citadel

On Saturday, April 7, our Deva pilgrims and host friends climbed the Citadel Hill in Deva. On the way, young Orsy Mate too great delight in picking the wildflowers that grew everywhere and offering them to us. We didn't know if it was okay to be picking wildflowers, but hey, we were the guests and it was her town. Besides, as Robert Heinlein said: "Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse."

I took the flowers Orsy gave me and pressed them with kleenex in the small photo album I carried. My mom has a hobby of laminating dried flowers, and makes her own notecards as well as occasional framed gifts. So once back in the states, I gave her the flowers from Orsy and asked her to do what she could. The result was this very nice framed keepsake.
In one of life's small symmetries, Orsy picked the flowers two days after her birthday, and my mom gave me the framed flowers two days after my birthday a couple month later. Thanks, ladies!

Into the Twilight

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is aways young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the grey twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

- William Butler Yeats


We're going to Ireland -- with many friends. The trip two years in planning is getting close!

Bring me my arrows of desire

from Marriage of Heaven and Hell

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite.

from Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

-William Blake

from Little, Big

The farther in you go, the bigger it gets.

-John Crowley

Bring me my bow of burning gold

After doing the Beethoven, it was nice to get back to our church choir and a bit less intensity. Also we're doing a song I love, as a William Blake fan -- and it's a great song of social action.

Jerusalem

AND did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

William Blake

This song fits very well with the community dialog concerning poverty, rising from the library's community read of Nickel & Dimed. Neither is this a big stretch from our recent travels to Transylvania, as we contemplate what we are called to do for our friends there. I usually find things to like in Blake, but this is a favorite, reminding us how we are all empowered with marvelous tools and called to use them in larger struggles.

Diesen Kuss der ganzen Weld

Last night, I was fortunate to sing with 150 other people in a Community Chorus performing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra. It was a wonderful opportunity, a difficult piece to sing, and ultimately a truly powerful experience. Several of us commented after ward that it went by so quickly. It's a demanding piece and requires physical and mental focus and energy, so much so that the time slips away.

One of the gifts music gives is the requirement to be "in the moment", and we got to spend six months of preparation in order to spend a long moment in a bit of Beethoven's world. Even after repeated listenings to several recordings of the work, even after rehearsing so long and so often -- daily practice and twice weekly rehearsals for the past couple weeks, I barely scratched the surface of Beethoven's musical art. The tempo shifts, dynamics and harmonies brought a high degree of drama to Schiller's transcendent words.

And then there's the experience of singing together with 150 people. This was another new experience for me and there's tremendous power in so many people working together to create a tightly constructed performance. We were fortunate to have a gifted choir director in Austin Boncher, who surely has a great love for music and teaching in order to build a choir from scratch. Austin needed patience, persistence, humor and talent to bring us together and help us climb to where we needed to go. And all that was just to get us ready for the symphony, soloists and conductor. To complement all that talent and create the synergy of the fourth movement was a unique privilege. To sing with eleven people form our church choir as well as three other people from the library was all frosting on the cake!

Freude, for sure!

Spirit of Life

10 year old Orsy Mate sings at the farewell party after Easter service, while Tony records her and her brother Zsolt and Andy look on. (video taken with Treo cellphone)

Beer Barrel Polka in Transylvania

A party at the Koppandi parsonage in Torocko-St. George: Dean dances with Eva Koppandi while Boti plays; Zoli claps & sings. The "Beer Barrel Polka" -- fun in any language!

we're back

Weary travellers arrive in Chicago - Fox Cities in a few hours!

Things we won't be saying as often:

• No more palinka! Kitschi!
• Blessed Bill & the Manholies!
• No Woman, No Cry
• Mogadishu
• Wow -- that's great soup!
• Can I have some hot water for my coffee?
• Wait -- that was only the first course? I definitely should not have eaten so much!

skipping stones in waterfalls

Almost heaven, Transylvania - Dean & Tony in the mountains above Lupeni, Easter afternoon. An incredibly beautiful near-freezing mountain stream, dense woods, rocky cliffs, snow-capped mountains. This would be a great place to hang out for a few days in the summer!

Easter in Lupeni

Rev. Koppandi Zoltan (Zoli) in the pulpit.

Happy Easter

We woke up this morning to sunny blue skies and clear mountain air in Lupeni. We're staying at the home of Zoli & Ildi and will soon accompany them to Easter services here in this mining town in the southern range of the Carpathian mountains, surrounded by snow-capped peaks. Naturally, Johnny B. Goode & Blessed Bill headed out at first light, accompanied by good hostess Ildi, to look for places to go uphill, as John & Bill do most days, with a promise to return in time for Ildiko's breakfast.

Yesterday morning each of the six of us awoke in a separate place, having spent the night in a home stay with members of the Deva congregation. We gathered at the templom at 10 AM and climbed the 500' Citadel Hill. At the top, we gathered inside the cell where David Ferenc was interred and died, and held a short but moving service. We held hands, stood around the commemorative marker, sang "Find a Stillness" in two languages, and people shared their personal reflections. Then we headed down to a feast at the templom.

I found myself walking with Bill and Arpad Tofalve, my 72-year-old host from the night before. Halfway down, we turned off the main path and set out to find the place where Roger had helped Bill do a vertical ascent some years before. Naturally we got lost and spent some time bushwahcking down a steep path, picking our way from rocks to roots. Arpad kept saying (in German) that there were better. less steep ways. But we came through fine and got down to a wonderful feast with lots of food, drink and laughs. Too soon we had to end the party to drive to Lupeni, but we'll return Monday morning for a second Easter service with out Deva friends.

men at work

Today a short but hard workday -- we hauled dirt. And hauled and hauled. Three guys with shovels filled buckets, a bucket brigade sent the buckets to the window to be dumped in a growing pile in the courtyard, and the empty buckets got sent back to the diggers. Once we got into a groove we moved, and cleared maybe 8 yards of dirt by lunchtime. In the afternoon we were sore and tired, so we took a break and headed to the Internet cafe. In the evening we visted the house Arpi is building in the country.

the sound of the men working on the chain gang

Had an extremely productive day working on the church. Got a large 20x40') parquet floor removed and managed to preserve most of the wood, with much care. Also got the sub-flooring and a course of beam pulled out, bringing it down to bare dirt, which we will excavate & level tomorrow for a new poured sub-floor. Had a bunch of men from the church working, few of them as long or hard as Danis Baci, the lay leader who is in his 70s. We had a few disagreements as to what to do and how to do it -- the floor removal being slightly controversial. But everybody pitched in and we got a lot done.

After supper we visited the home Erzebet, the church treasurer and her husaband Arpad. Arpad is 72 and speaks German, so he and Tony and I have been conversing in German. their son Arpi was there, and their grand-daughter Antonia. Antonia is the cause of some despair to Zoli, as she speaks mostly Romanian and probably will not attend Hungarian school. But we had a nice visit, gave them some money for their church, and then Arpi helped us find the Internet cafe.

Long & winding road

Tuesday morning, Bill & John were going to get out early to go up the Sleeping Giant, which rises 500 feet or so above Torozco. Though they got up at 5:00, Dean and I joined them, and after about a half mile following sheep-pellet strewn roads uphill in the dark, we were overtaken by Tony. The road kept getting steeper and turned into a trail, and after another mile, I was getting winded & it became clear that I was holding up the others, so I called it quits, probably a half-mile shy of where the climb was about to get much more vertical. I went on a little ways further after the group left, then turned back to the town. The sky began to lighten as I walked slowly downward, listening for the wild animals Tony had insisted he heard screaming on the mountain. But no werewolves attacked, and I was able to see the lights of Torozco & Torozco St. George, as the villages began to wake up.

Had a nice leisurely morning waiting for the other guys to return. It turned out Tony had gone almost to the top, Bill and Dean reached a saddle between two peaks and John had gone on to one of the peaks. We went on to another excellent meal, checked out of the pensiune and were off to Deva. We stopped for lunch in Alba Julia, a Roman town with the burial place of John Sigismund, the Unitarian king, who proclaimed religious freedom. Then finally to Deva and the pensiune/guesthouse Melite, run by Presbyterians across the street from the Unitarian templom. We had a 4:00 lunch (more palenka), then met the congregation in a reception (more palenka), took a tour of the new Hungarian language school. Managed to smash my camera in a story too long and sad to relate, but it's still partly usable. Then back to Melite for supper (3 hoiurs after lunch). Some of the guys went after supper to visit the home of Arpi, who has a three year old and a very pregnant wife, but John and I were wiped out and stayed at Melite.

Such a perfect day

Monday we had a great meeting with the Bishop -- a nice man with a lot of cares trying to shepherd all the concerns of Transylvanian Unitarians. We began to gain appreciation for how much Unitarian concerns are intertwined with Hungarian ethnic identity. After a long conversation about his hopes for the church for partner relationships and for our partnership with Deva in particular, we got a brief tour of the offices of the church HQ, where they are keeping alive traditions form the 1500s. We also got to meet the parents of Koppandi Zoltan ("He's a Zol man"), since his mom works for the Bishop.

We then had lunch at the Hubertus restaurant across the street, a new fairly upscale place specializing in wild game. Yes, the restaurants (and every place else) do have napkins. Had a great meal, and we were joined by Zoli's older brother Boti, also a Unitarian minister. After lunch -- Tony downing the Dracula special and others enjoying delicious boar and venison -- we headed out of town.

We stopped in Meszko, the "Alabaster Village" where Christine Wise Morgan lived 70 years ago when she was married to Balasz Ference, before she came to Appleton and helped found our UU Fellowship. We got into the church in Meszko, which still has the paintings on the walls & ceiling that Christine & Balasz put there. Then we went to the Torda Gorge, a great wilderness preserve in a narrow gorge with 300 foot cliffs. We walked a mile or two in and found a spot where "Polar Plunge" Dean, responding to many challenges, took a dip in the nearly icy mountain stream. The setting was unbelievably gorgeous as we walked out, voices of the river and many birds, mountain columbine in purple and white, blossoming trees and blooming shamrocks. The gorge was fairly narrow in spots, the river and path squeezed between vertical walls and we saw a few climbers. In one spot, someone had spray painted "red hot chili pampers." This was frightening to contemplate.

Then on to Torocko, even more mountainous, and a pensiune with nice warm rooms in the shadow of Sleeping Giant mountain. Had a superb supper in a little restaurant run by the woman who owns the pensiune and whose grand-daughter kept running in and out. We couldn't finish the dessert (spiral nut buns called "hornet's nests") and she promised to pack it up for us to take the next day.

After supper, a drive to the house of Boti, who is the minister in neighboring Torocko-St. George. More palinka (every place you go, you get palinka first thing), then we had to suffer though an evening of singing Leonard Cohen, Hungarian folk songs, and dancing the polka. Fortunately, Boti's wife Eva is an extremely good sport and gracious hostess. Boti is a lot of fun and a good guitar player. We talked about Tom Waits and watched videos of the Hungarian musician Hobo. Finally, late to bed, with plans for some of the group to climb the Sleeping Giant in the morning.

Kiskapus - Koloszvar

In a few minutes, we go to meet the Unitarian Bishop of Transylvania. This will be brief as its hard to get much 'net time.

Last night we stayed in the rural village of Kiskapus, and had a nice stay in a small pensiune which would have been perfect if it had had heat. We had great food and fellowship and took a long walk through the village and up into the hills. We crossed back and forther over the small river, single file on shaky footbridges. People were very friendly -- everyone said hello or waved.

There was one man who asked if we were Hollanders, and when we said "American" he came and shook all our hands. Then he told us a long story in Romanian. He had not a word of English, but with some questions, and some back and forth, we got the gist (or thought we did). He talked about things being hard in Romania -- he was still upset about the Russian domination and current economic problems with the energy pipelines from Russia. He was upset that Roosevelt & Churchill had sold them out to Stalin at Yalta. He went on at some length. He was maybe 80 years old and a Roma (gypsy). But he was glad to talk.

As we got about as far upriver into the gorge as we felt we could go while daylight was fading, we saw a group of people who were picnicing or camping in a meadow. As we watched from fifty yeards away, they began dancing around their fire, while some of them waved axes. A strange sight -- human, interesting, scary and funny.

We walked back downriver to the village and our (unheated) pensiune, walking past concrete telephone poles. Now as we passed the houses in this quiet and isolated rural town, we saw that some had satellite dishes. But there was only one restaurant and one cafe, and both were long since closed,boarded up and abandoned. Other than our pension and the tiny store which looked like an auto parts dealer, there were no businesses.

Be here now

After a day of travel, three flights, & a few moments of doubt, we arrived in Koloszvar, met the other three pilgrims (Tony, John & Dean) and went immediately to the Unitarian school, where we were interviewed for an Internet radio show. The host, Rev. Zsolt Solymosi, was gracious and friendly, but I was pretty dragged through the wringer and probably incoherent -- but all the guys had lots of good things to say. The show will be available at www.unitarianradio.ro at 5 PM central time on Monday. If there's time we might do another show next week before we leave. We're all doing well and will try to send along more news and maybe pictures when we can.

Expecting to fly

2d leg - Bill and Tom after checking in at O'Hare. We head to NY in 2 hrs.

One of the most interesting things at O'Hare was having lunch and our waiter was from Bulgaria -- a young guy who seemed to be out for good times. We told him we were going to Romania and he said "What the hell do you want to go there for?" We talked a bit and the most important thing he seemed to want us to understand was the tremendous resentment that 500 years of Turkish occupation had left. He said his own grandfather had been enslaved by the Ottomans when young. A good reflection of Balkan politics & history to start the trip.

Are you ready?

I'm not ready, but getting close.  Excited but nervous and all that stuff.  Zillion details of packing and trying to get checklists completed at home and work before leaving town.

In two days, three of us will drive to Chicago, spend the night, get on a plane the next morning, fly to New York, get on another plane, fly to Milan, meet the other three guys, get on another plane, and fly to Cluj-Napoca aka Koloszvar.  It's exhausting just writing it -- but then we'll be in Transylvania for nine days.  We'll attempt to answer the musical question: can six men do OK on a long trip without their wives to straighten them out?  I'm guessing it's yes, but we will miss them.  In fact, this will be my longest time apart from Marsha in the last 36 years.  It will be an experience in many dimensions.

I'm not too worried about communicating with the folks there: I enjoy languages, and know people can get along without a lot of common vocabulary.  I expect to use some of my college German.  I do worry about enjoying the food, and not wanting to offend our hosts.  This will not be like in restaurants where we can order.  But part of this trip for me is learning to worry less and let it be.

Sights to see, work to do, people to meet, songs to sing, and one great big hill to climb.  New places, old world culture and new languages.  It's gonna be great! (with the possible exception of cucumbers and/or tripe soup...

How Can I Keep from Singing?

I'm a lucky guy, in lots of ways. But one way of which I am conscious is the ability to make music and sing with people. The last week is a case in point. After our Irish band, Celtic Knot, played a full slate of gigs around St. Patrick's Day (one story from this is on the New Cybrary), I had four nights which included two rehearsals for a folk music gig with friends Doug Wheeler and Barbara Hoffman, a rehearsal for singing Beethoven's Ninth as part of a community choir and then the gig with Doug & Barbara at the Brewed Awakenings coffeehouse. Lucky, lucky to have friends who want to play and sing and a community offering opportunities.

Music is tied up with my spirituality in ways I am still exploring and seeking to understand. Certainly it points to connections with other people and with stories, and a fundamental way of looking at the world, involving beauty, creativity, melody, rhythm and harmony. At a later time, I'll write something particularly about singing the Beethoven, which is a new realm of experience.

Right now, I'm trying to get my backpack guitar and some music ready to take to Transylvania, where some of our pilgrims will share music & I hope I can learn some songs.

Serious business

Barbara, our Asst. Director, brought everybody in the office gifts from the Museum of Science and Industry. She gave me this l'il dragon. Gabby Bear seems glad of the company. Now I have to come up with a good dragon name when I should be getting ready for the Board Planning meeting...

Beggars to God

Near the top of the Spanish Steps, an old woman in black bends over her rosary, a cup before her for alms.

Find a stillness

There's a Transylvanian hymn in our UU hymnal:

Find a stillness, hold a stillness, let the stillness carry me.
Find the silence, hold the silence, let the silence carry me.
In the the spirit, by the spirit, with the spirit giving power,
I will find true harmony.

The song speaks to one of my favorite parts of our weekly services at Fox Valley UU Fellowship: the silent meditation or prayer. The Buddhist gong that rings at the beginning and end carries me in and out of the silence and challenges me to find an inner stillness. I feel that the entire service revolves around this moment of quiet, the eye in the storm of ideas, sights, joys, concerns and sounds.

As it turns out, it's deceptively easy to play a simple version of "Find a stillness" on guitar, so its one of the songs our pilgrim group will take with us to Transylvania. We may even sing it in church there, as three of us have been part of our choir. It seems fitting that we carry this song back to its home, as a bond between our congregations, as the stillness is a common place for us all.

Journey to the East

This blog is actually occasioned by a pending trip to Transylvania. Some men from our church, the Fox Valley Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, will be travelling to Deva, Romania, to help our partner church with some remodelling. But mostly we're going to connect with friends from around the world. It's also a religious pilgrimage: the Citadel in Deva (shown above) is the martyrdom site of Francis David, 1510-1579, an early pioneer of Unitarianism and religious tolerance. It was David who said "We need not think alike to love alike."

The fact that in April (Easter weekend) we climb the hill to the martyrdom site in Citadel sends me echoes of Chaucer:

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

We're heading out for to seke straunge strondes, ferne halwes in sondry londes & a martir! (seek strange shores, distant holy places in various lands, and a martyr)

What a long strange trip it's been

This is a blog to report on personal journeys. As the blog description says: "there is a road, no simple highway, between the dawn and the dark of night." So herewith: meditations on the journey, on encounters along the road, particularly about travels undertaken, but musical, spiritual and personal journeys as well.

Five things

Got tagged for "the dread five things meme" by Tangognat. Thanks, I think. Since I haven't been blogging long enough to extract a whole lot from my posts, here's fresh stuff. Maybe I'll try to work them all into posts in the coming year.

1. When I was eight years old, I was the pop-up inside of a rolling jack-in-the-box in our town's Christmas parade, and learned that crepe paper is not colorfast on snowy days.
2. I play concertina in an Irish pub band. Not that I'm fast enough to whip through the jigs and reels, but I do okay backing up the songs, can take an occasional lead break and love to play O'Carolan pieces.

3. I spent a wonderful summer working as a porter in a monastery, and learned that monks make mean manhattans. I also sold masses, but left blessing bicycles to the professionals. And I've never been Catholic.
4. I'm not fond of fresh goat's milk, preferring the pasturized and refrigerated bovine experience, which, on the whole, has fewer hairs per glass.
5. I have this statuette of Neil Gaiman's Lucien the Librarian of Dreams, and I got Neil to autograph it. Not for sale, ever.