Joy Houck Bauer

Dear Friends ~ When I first encountered the term "Threshold Time," I pictured Lucy Pevensie before the wardrobe, poised to encounter an entirely unseen world. My beautiful friend had invited me into her family's Día de los Muertos celebration, where she described the week straddling October and November as a time when the "veil" separating the living and spirit worlds feels thinner, and therefore more permeable. I'd always understood, in theory, that we remain connected to others even after they've died, but my friend's tradition had a grounding effect. I could touch a table laid with warm food – material matter. As if the honored guests had knocked on the front door and hung their coats in the entryway.

The possibility that these two distinct worlds can draw closer to one another exists in many spiritual traditions, of course. It brings to mind a poem Wendell Berry wrote not long before he himself slipped behind that veil:

Dear friends ~ Sometimes when he is feverish and sick, my son wakes crying because he feels "too big for everything." He'll tell us his arms are heavy and huge, and his body has ballooned beyond the edges of his bed. So we pull him into a hug and whisper reminders that he is actually quite small: Feel how you fit into our arms? You wouldn't even reach the ceiling on your tiptoes. And see how high the trees outside tower above the house? As his sense of self shrinks back into proportion, my son's breath slows and his body relaxes. His smallness, it turns out, comforts him.

I hope the words gathered in this newsletter offer a similar relief, along with Padraig O'Tuama's encouragement to "Look at the solar system. Look at the universe. Look at stars. We are nothing. That's not rubbish; that is the everything." May the vastness of the world we inhabit leave you gasping in awe, and assure you of your place in it. ~ Joy

Dear Friends ~ Surrender. A simple and bewildering word. My childhood brain still carries the image of the wicked witch scrawling "Surrender Dorothy" across the sky while cackling triumphantly. My young heart soared when Dorothy refused to give in. In a world awash in forces that require resistance, entertaining the thought that a certain kind of surrender could open the gate of power and possibility seems outrageous, and worse, dangerous. Yet, confoundingly, this is the way grace and the Holy seem to work. Saints, sages, and poets know this and bear witness to the Mystery. Yet the spell song of it is hard to remember, unnerving to sing. It asks us to step back from the cherished self of efficacy, step down from the pedestal of control, and humbly open to other ways of receiving the healing and the future we long for. This is a magic beyond good and evil, beyond prediction, certainty, and knowing what's right.

Dear Friends ~ In another corner of my life, I teach what I call Baby's First Research Paper classes to middle school students. Recently I guided two dozen tweens through a project creating timelines of the people and events that made possible an invention of their choosing. Their topics ranged from toasters and the Slinky, to water purifiers, baseball mitts, and seat belts. I soaked up pages of interesting factoids over the month (Did you know that astronauts have used Silly Putty to hold instruments down in zero gravity?), watching them morph from mere points on a line, into stories — or "biographies" — of things. I wouldn't categorize them as "Entrepreneur Seizes Business Opportunity" stories as much as "Someone Recognizes Another Person's Need and Devises a Way to Meet the Need" stories.

Dear Friends ~ Is it strange to envy a turtle? Not just turtles in general—I'm referring to the specific Terrapene carolina Carolina (box turtle) who took up residence in the tall grasses behind the woodshed this summer. She and I often crossed paths, especially in the morning hours while she bathed and sipped from the puddles in the gravel road. I liked to crouch, peer into her wary amber eyes, and make small talk about the weather. My dog proved similarly excited about the turtle, though he tended to make more noise about it, barking and prodding her shell like you or I might knock on a neighbor's front door.

Dear friends ~ “This isn't the world I want to live in." The thought echoes in my mind as I close the news app, the messaging app, the email app. My lungs wrestle down a gasp of humid Appalachia air in response to the endless feed of Apocalypse I just conjured with thumb swipes across a screen.

No, not Apocalypse. They are, in fact, creation stories. What else to call it when a group of people assesses the world and says, “We want it to look different than this," and then imagines a new paradigm into existence? From idea...to fruition. Creation.

Dear Friends ~ This afternoon while slicing onions and tossing them into a pan, the realization washed over me that in four decades I've eaten more than (at this point I pulled up the phone calculator, allowing the onions a few slow minutes to soften in the oil) 14,000 evening meals. While I do my fair share of cooking these days, it's safe to say that I've personally prepared only a small fraction of those many, many dinners. If I haven't cooked all that food that sustained and satiated me, I wondered, who has?

Dear friends~ It is early summer, and nearly nine o'clock until dusk finally pulls down the shades on the warm, humid day. It's well past bedtime for a Benedictine monk who will rise at two in the morning, then gather to pray at three-thirty. Yet he stands in the doorway to his dwelling, gently calling for the nameless stray cat he befriended as a kitten five years before. He hears her soft mewing nearby and finally notices where she's perched on a low wall not far off. "It's time for bed," he whispers into the dark.

Dear friends~ Here is how you play "Hippo Toss", a game designed for two players:

Dear Friends ~ Each day after morning kindergarten my mom sent me harrumphing to my childhood bedroom for a nap. The sun would shine through the tree outside my window, casting shadows on the peach hearts wallpapered around the room. Begrudgingly at first, I settled into the quiet space, but eventually the shimmying branches lulled me into stillness.

Above my dresser hung an embroidery piece—yellowed with age, and cross-stitched with pastel, looping letters like the ones in the old family Bible my mom kept in a box. I didn't know how to read very well, and the scrolling font made it a special challenge to puzzle out the stitched message. For many months I contemplated and daydreamed about what it might say, until the mysterious cipher revealed itself: a prayer for a resting child. "Now I lay me down to sleep..."