Vacation Week Coming to a Close

Progress continues.  Terrible quality of photographs, but progress nonetheless. Our week at Chautauqua nears its end, and it has been good. We have enjoyed being together in a beautiful setting without telephone interruptions. We have enjoyed times of quiet and times of talk. We spent part of one evening visiting with our fascinating landlady and her interesting husband. We have walked and listened and watched.

We have a major change in our lives coming within the next month, and we've taken time to think and talk about that. We might not have had that opportunity had we been at home. So that has been good.

The symphony has been glorious, many of the lectures superb, and the general atmosphere amiable.

One morning I skipped the lecture and drove into Erie to meet a couple of internet friends. I'd arranged to connect with Kat at a quilt shop she knew of, and she was going to give me back We The Purple, having completed the long-arming of same. To my pleasant surprise, she brought along Holly, another internet friend. Holly and I don't connect often, but whenever I'm with her, I have that warm and happy feeling of being with someone where a whole lot of words aren't necessary; there is just easy understanding.

I've thought about Sacred Space, the theme of the week, and one thing I've concluded is that the sanctity of a particular space is connected to the person experiencing the space. I do not wish to say that any space can be a sacred space. Rather, I am suggesting that for any space to be sacred, one must go to a set-apart space within the self, and then a space may be experienced as sacred.

I have had that experience a few times. As a young, emotional, and impressionable teenager, a camp I attended felt like sacred space. Later as an adult visiting the Holocaust Museum in D.C., and again in D.C. visiting the Vietnam Memorial, I knew I was in sacred space.

There remain just a few blocks and The Farmer's Mistress will be ready to assemble. I hope to do that soon after returning home. The potential recipient of the quilt is about as far away from being a farmer's wife or mistress as I can imagine. But one never knows.