Comments for Pilgrim Cafe

Comment on One Great Pregnancy by Riding the City Bus (Engaging Milieu) « Pilgrim Cafe

Riding the City Bus (Engaging Milieu) « Pilgrim Cafe — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 17:59:36 +0000

[...] Riders, even for the few moments they are aboard, find their day altered. It is a self selected enforced community of waiting, and so much happens in the short time you are aboard. Those who open themselves to the experience can soon feel sensorial overload. Those who have found coping mechanisms engage them immediately upon entry. To continue a metaphor, riding a city bus is a beautiful reminder that we are swimmers in an ocean of relationships that is constantly changing our experience and our being (Rilke). [...]

Comment on Aging by Allen Simons

Allen Simons — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 21:55:59 +0000

A great interview! Poses questions for me. How do I remember old age in others as a child? Now at 67 and caring for an older person, how do I experience it?

One of the most helpful comments in the interview aside from corraberation, was that Jane Grose speaks about a tendency to rush things as though life can return to normal before they make the transition. She recalled how her mother chose Tuesday, September 11, 2001 to enter a new stage of dependency right when Jane desperately needed to be at work. She says that life never returned to NORMAL until her mother died.

Children are interested in getting things done and making decisions, while aging parents are intrested in relationship. Old can be a time for repairing family relationships if we take the time.

Comment on Sungha Jung by Steve Goodier

Steve Goodier — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 12:30:45 +0000

I love your blog, Al. Thanks for sharing it. – Steve

Comment on Sonnets by Bob Jeager by Allen Simons

Allen Simons — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 16:03:10 +0000

Death by inches is a concern. I have often thought that is the last humiliation held silently in the hand of the Creator. It is like hearing, “Yes, my child, you are the leaf that withers and then is slowly food for other life.” It is a welcome reunion but a difficult one to contemplate.”

Comment on The Spirit of Mexico by Allen Simons

Allen Simons — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:42:08 +0000

I hear this. I have been dealing with letting go of the dream associated with my house. I have thought about the association with laying the stones for the next part of my life. I have had to spiritualize that next step and disentangle myself with the bricks and mortar. Is hard. Comes us so many places. Was at the new Community Center on the other end of the block on which the house sits. I began feeling myself grieving the loss of a house so close to this new energy in Fruita. I have, however, had great energy in my JHS (journey of the human spirit) in recent months. Thanks for the metaphor.

Comment on Retirement a New Beginning by Sonnets by Bob Jeager « Pilgrim Cafe

Sonnets by Bob Jeager « Pilgrim Cafe — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 03:48:35 +0000

[...] More Jeager Poems [...]

Comment on The Spirit of Mexico by Bob Jaeger

Bob Jaeger — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:10:21 +0000

Jim: “All I Know is I Built this House” is beautiful—a wonderful paean to the process by which we build our lives, momlent by moment.

Comment on Pipe Dream or Possibility? by Allen Simons

Allen Simons — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 23:49:14 +0000

Absolutely, Bob! There are certainly underlying issues that give rise to acromony. Much safer personally to blame and debase than it is to open to the delicate places within.

Comment on Pipe Dream or Possibility? by Bob Jaeger

Bob Jaeger — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 20:58:03 +0000

Good thoughts, Allen. We have so many issues that need thoughtful discussion and sane action. I wonder, though, if we’ll be able to tone down the discourse, or have meaningful discourse at all, until we, as individuals, deal with the fear, greed, selfishness and paranoia that underlie the vitriol.

Comment on A View from the Ridge by Allen Simons

Allen Simons — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:31:16 +0000

Prior to my seminary training I attended graduate school in music, eventually determining that music would need to be an avocation and not a career choice. I remember that collision of dream with reality being the second major choice in my early wrestlings with the call of the spirit (the first being my choice to marry a young woman who I had met in undergraduate school and was engaged to).

The setting was the Viet Nam war era. I had friends fighting and dying in the jungles of Southeast Asia. I had gone to graduate school on a student deferrment. Changing directions could have opened me up for the draft and thus immediate deployment. So I chose to enter seminary and have lived the choice I make.

Was it a choice I would have made had I not been living in the shadow of the war? Such a question is hard to clearly answer. I had ample encouragement to consider Music Ministry or Pastoral Ministry as a career choice, but I do think things moved faster than I was prepared to embrace, leaving this a ragged edge that I would leave dangling from my early journey.

Entering seminary I became a spokesman against the war and a demonstrator for racial justice. Free time might find me on a picket line or at an antiwar ralley joining campus bards and folks singers.