Fishslipper Light

A day of many gatherings, which brought moments of light, but little time to write about them. Here are a few:

The quality of light in my backyard, midmorning, was striking. Leaves and clouds blew by swiftly, so one moment the yard was dim,

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then the spotlight came on, and neighbor’s garage and maple tree blazed brightly,

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  And then the garden was full of light and the maple tree faded into the background.

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Then, later in the day, the calligraphy of bare branches lit by sun at Oxbow

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  And the lights and shadows of these oak leaves still on the tree

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Sparkles from the sun on the water in amongst the weeds and grasses and flowers in the roadside area near the Oxbow entrance

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And a moment of light  (or perhaps “lite”) as seven former members of the Assembly group Fishslippers met for breakfast, after a gap of eight years, and remembered how we had come by our name.

Back then, we had just begun meeting. We had come together around an interest in exploring how to live justly and joyfully in North America. We went around the circle, telling a little about ourselves and why we were interested in the group. Two couples had recently returned to the US after MCC terms, others had spent parts of their childhood in other countries. There was a lot of energy and grand ideas were flowing about ways of being countercultural.

Then it was Andrea’s turn. She shook her head ruefully. “I don’t know,” she said. “You’re all so serious and here I am, knitting fish slippers.” She waved her knitting at us – and indeed, it was a slipper designed to look like a fish. A bit like this, only in a solid blue-green, and adult size.

 “Perfect,” someone else said. “We’ve been talking about swimming upstream, against the cultural current.”

“And we’re wanting to do it joyfully,” someone else chimed in, “ We could all use fish slippers.” One thing led to another, and Fishslippers we were from that day forth.

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