Gems from my aggregator
December 21, 2006
I began today with morning prayer, sitting on the meditation cushion beside the big windows in our bedroom. (Today that included a fair bit of chastising the cat, who really thought my tefillin straps, and the tzitzit on my tallit, ought to be cat toys.) It's a beautiful bright day -- the winter solstice, shortest day of the year here in the northern hemisphere. Tomorrow the days start lengthening again. Yay.
Then I came downstairs, made some tea, and settled in to read my aggregator. Here are a few of the posts I read which moved or intrigued me most today:
In celebration of the Winter Solstice, SB of Watermark has posted a beautiful small poem. Lovely and spare. While I'm at it, here's a link to Rachelle's Winter Solstice post at Monkfish Abbey, which tells the tale of Solstice preprations that didn't quite go the way they were meant to...and how light finds its way in anyway.
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In Pinch of salt, Alto Artist of On Chanting takes the prayer-as-cooking metaphor I spun out recently, and muses about her own liturgical life, how her synagogue creates innovation within constraints, and the freedom of choosing to paint with a limited palette.
Meanwhile, Gordon of Real Live Preacher has posted How To Read the Bible, #1, the first video post in a series. (Video runs about 6 minutes.) He's talking about the Christian Scriptures, of course, but I think there's value here for folks of any tradition, or none. I especially like his points that "the Bible" isn't a single book, but is more like an anthology -- and that reading it cover-to-cover isn't necessarily the way to go.
And Daniel Septimus at Mixed Multitudes posts about Jews and Christmas in Herzl's Christmas Tree. (Be sure to read the Plaut article he links to, which is fascinating.) If only I could !@#$% log in, I'd be leaving comments on this blog left and right -- Mixed Multitudes is one of my favorite new additions to my blogroll.
Speaking of new additions to my blogroll, I recently discovered Milk and Honey, a blog by Rabbi Debora Gordon, who's in Troy, NY: a mere hour from here! I'm sorry she wasn't blogging during the year when I was going to Albany (next town over from Troy) every week for CPE; still, perhaps we'll cross paths in the new year. And until then, there's always the blogosphere...