In this newsletter:

1. News, notes, and needs. 
2. Contributions from the Community: Rita Roxas, Andrea Miller, Ronald Koetzsch and Rose Reis-Jackson. 
3. Inner Life.                                                                                     
4. Gospel Reading.
5. Contemplation by Luis González.

 

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      You are warmly invited to two open-air conversations based on a selected excerpt from the work of James Baldwin, the Fire Next Time. Written in 1963, the voice of this powerful African-American leader continues to speak to and challenge us today. We will seek to understand his perspectives and explore our responses to his insights and understandings. 
     These conversations will be held Saturdays, August 8 and 15 at 10:30.  We will meet at the Fair Oaks Library and find a shady place to sit.  BRING CHAIR.  It would be helpful to know if you plan to be there.  Please email: cmartine12@icloud.com
   If you would like to do something artistic as well, Alice Stamm will offer a sketching session beforehand at 9:30, same place near diamond. If interested be welcome and bring a board or similar to support paper and a chair. Alice will provide pencils and paper. No previous experience necessary!!!!

 

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      Dear Friends of the Christian Community, I am offering a talk on the 9-year change and how Waldorf Education meets this important stage in life.  I work independently with several families who have children in the third grade and they want to know more about what they can expect from their child this year.  So I am opening up this talk to anyone who might be interested in meeting at the park on Saturday, August 15 for an open air presentation on Crossing the Rubicon and what that means. Thank you!
      Please, see flyer for date, hour and place here:
 https://mcusercontent.com/e60c37139edfb116b56f5f68c/files/6920ad6d-08bd-4ee0-8013-65aa603c9e25/Waldorf_in_the_Park_2.pdf 

Teresa Thorman

            

 
     I am delighted to announce that I have opened my practice as psychotherapist in Fair Oaks. I am a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with more than 20 years of experience in helping clients with a wide variety of mental challenges and questions. My therapy approach is collaborative and deeply compassionate. I warmly welcome your unique experiences, your challenges, strengths and needs. My work is inspired by Anthroposophy. I work with individuals ages 18 and up.  Evening and weekend appointments are available. Sliding scale is available. Please, call 916-200-8591 for a free consultation, email me at margitilgenmft@gmail.com or visit my website at margitilgentherapy.com

 
 

 

 

   A Trip to the Ocean 
 

     When I was much shorter, and probably starting when I didn't realize how very short I was, our family spent the month of August at the beach. It was an eight hour drive East from Pittsburgh, Pennylvania requiring driving the length of the Pennsylvania turnpike with its seven tunnels as it passed through the Allegheny mountains towards the Atlantic Ocean. Then flat. Flat land for several hours that was New Jersey. The soil then became sandy. I kept a keen eye on the horizon. But, it was my nose that signalled the imminent arrival at the sea. My nose gave me the thrilling scent of the salt sea air. The air held the seagulls cawing, and the moist sea salt as we passed the calm bay moments before the sea. No trees. My father would stop to buy fresh clams for our dinner. The light, soft light of evening after driving all day. The ocean, the breeze. Shades of blue water and sky meeting. White sand dunes. Wide beach with sandpipers scurrying up and down at the water's edge. 
     Then one summer, when I was a bit less short, we boarded a train. A very long train ride delivered us to the beach. A wide white beach. Seagulls, sea air. But it was different. I stood looking at the ocean watching the waves, the seagulls. It was strange. Foreign. I felt lost. Tricked. Out of sorts. Sad. Still short and now confused. I was told it was the Pacific Ocean. A crushing surprise to me that there was more than one ocean in the world. What happened to the one I knew and loved? Where was it? What had they done with it? How? Why? 

Rita Roxas 


 

                                                                             Joaquín Sorolla

 

     Sea foam treasures fizz back into the air, where they were grabbed from in the first place as the waves plummeted their way towards the sandy earth. Off in the overcast albeit bright distance, sea birds are wheeling and calling, rocketing down towards the sea only to pull up at the last possible moment. Nearer, seagulls rest from their searching and scavenging on the forming, undulating waves. The cacophony of the waves and birds, the reflective power of the sand and clouds reveal a stillness within. Hearty, heartfelt sea air breathed in acts as a natural and special battery of renewal. Breathe it in deep. Exhale. Ready to face any next steps as this year of years continues its march forward. 

Andrea Miller


 

                                                                                      Kurt Jackson


 

      A few weeks ago, Anne and I were able (thanks to the generosity of friends) to spend several days at Sea Ranch.  Sea Ranch is a planned, privately owned community of about 1800 homes on a ten-mile stretch of land next to the ocean in northern Sonoma County. 
          At Sea Ranch all the homes share a rather stark and angular look and almost all are oriented so that they provide a view of the ocean. During our stay there, Anne and I spent much of our time, both in the house and walking outside and along the beach, staring out at the ocean. Why? Why are human beings so mesmerized by the ocean landscape?
  Compared to other natural landscapes—an Alpine mountainscape, for example—the ocean provides a rather simple, even potentially boring, visual experience. There is a huge stretch of water, perhaps still, perhaps moving and white-capped; an indistinct horizon line; and above, the sky—clear, dotted by clouds, or overcast. 
        The world’s oceans cover about seventy percent of the Earth’s surface and contain ninety-seven percent of the water on the planet. The oceans’ deepest point is in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific, over seven miles below the surface.  There are over 222,000 known life forms in the oceans and, according to scientists, millions that have not yet been discovered. All of this is interesting and impressive, but the question remains:  Why do we love to look out at the ocean?
     Early in the last century, the French writer Romain Rolland, coined the term oceanic feeling.  According to Rolland, the oceanic feeling is ”a sensation of eternity” and “an experience of being one with the external world.” Characterized by a deep inner peace as well as joy, the oceanic feeling is, Rolland claimed, the fundamental religious experience out of which all the world’s religions developed.
      So, perhaps, out there at Sea Ranch, as Anne and I sat and peered silently at the seemingly endless expanse of water and sky, we were experiencing, in some measure, the infinite, eternal, unknowable, and loving Being who has brought the vastness of the world—including us—into being. And we were experiencing, in some measure, our living connection to that Being.
       There are other ways to engender the oceanic feeling—prayer, meditation, selfless acts of love . . . —but a visit to the actual ocean is a worthwhile option.  
  

by Ronald Koetzsch, improved by Anne Riegel-Koetzsch 


 

 

                                                                              Kurt Jackson


 

In the dark depths of Earth's batholith
Live creatures bearing light
Illuminating the pressured place
Thousands of metres deep
With bioluminescence
The chemical signature of deep ocean dwellers
Candlelight in the depths
Fed by fire from inside.
 
                               Rose Reis-Jackson
 

 
 

 

    “For as long as Christ remains ‘someone else’ who is outside our person and is observed from the outside, he cannot yet reveal to us his full redemptive power. He wants to grow in our innermost core, he wants to be revealed as the higher transcending ‘I’ in the same inner place in which we become aware of our own self. Why are the words ‘I’ and ‘I am’ spoken so many times in the Gospel of St John? Certainly not because here was someone who in an ordinary sense constantly wanted ‘to talk about himself’, but to indicate that place of experience, that hidden most holy of places, in which not only our own ‘I’ opens its eyes but also the ‘I’ of Christ.”

 

 

                                                               Nestor de la Torre



“Love After Love”

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
 
                                  Derek Walcott
                             

5. Contemplation

   Separation can be experienced like a real loss. We witness children when they grow up to become adolescents and start to lock their bedroom doors; or in real dramatic lives of the refugees having to leave their homeland.  Every such loss carries with it a longing to meet again; although the encounter, if it ever happens, will be an entirely new one. The children and their parents will never be the same, and so the refugee and the homeland will also never be the same. 
    The Gospel of Luke, chapter 15, is about the deepest separation that dwells in our soul, the separation between our innermost being and our origin, the spiritual world.  The gospel picture reveals to us the new encounter that can happen after separation and the loss. This new encounter is an intimate encounter on an individual, personal level. Even though each sheep is an important member of the whole group, the new encounter with the shepherd is unique for each one’s heart, and it is filled with the joy of reunion. 
    The Gospel also reveals another two very interesting aspects: the longing that comes after this separation is not only human, but also divine. There is a divine shepherd, whose voice longs to sound in each one of us. After we, as the lost sheep did, have moved so far away from the shepherd that we cannot recognize his voice anymore, there is a divine longing to be in communion with us, a longing of the creator towards its creation. 
     And the key for this new encounter to take place is repentance, the capacity to have a deep realization of our need to change. Without the core turning of this key there cannot be the understanding and the will to turn our heart to the shepherd’s voice. We will keep ourselves too busy listening to our own voice, for His voice is very gentle and it always invites us to take real steps beyond where we are.
    The heavens rejoice when we encounter them in a new way. Joy is the place where repentance and forgiveness, searching and finding, longing and fulfilment, meet anew. When we unlock the door of our heart to listen with new ears to the voice of Him who guides us from within, he can guide us home.

 

 

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