I guess I can answer that one.

We’ve had a great summer, so far. I know it’s almost over, but we have high hopes that we will be back to Costa Rica by sometime after Christmas and will be enjoying the warm sunny weather again.

We’ve been:

• Attending my sister’s wedding
• Still trying to sell this darn house
• Going on a wonderful camping trip to the old campgrounds that I visited annually as a child. Here’s some pictures…

We borrowed a canoe from some neighboring campers who were using our little beach area to park their canoe. Arp and BIL John decided to take the kids for a ride. I asked them both if they felt confident on how to use a canoe, and whether they knew how to get into a canoe. At first they claimed that they did. But then my sister and I watched them attempt to get in and get the kids in, and it looked like the whole darn thing might tip over. Boy Scouts they are not! So I gave them some pointers and took over the part where I give safety instructions to the kids. The whole thing was pretty funny. Once they shoved off, they were fine.

M loved climbing on big rocks, and we learned how they got to the Adirondacks when we went to The Wild Center museum in Tupper Lake on the way home. It was a truly fantastic museum that I would recommend to anyone who is going to the Adirondack area. We could have spent the whole day there.

Arp chills out on the way up to the top of Bear Mountain. He was nice enough to volunteer to carry J in the Ergo carrier all the way up the mountain and most of the way down. At the top of the mountain, a hiker took a look at his shirt and asked if we were from Detroit. I couldn’t help but chuckle when I said “No,” as I don’t think they would have had a clue about the meaning of the shirt.

M and J walk the last bit together on the way to the summit.

Here we are at the top. This is M’s first summit. I think that’s pretty neat because this is the same mountain where I had my first summit. M walked the whole way on his own two feet, just as I did when I was approximately 7 or 8 years old. M is 5. I feel drawn to this particular place. The lake, I mean. I camped there when I was pregnant with M and I have always felt that he, too, had a connection to it. M’s middle name is Forest, which I chose because I did I lot of communing with the trees when I was pregnant with him.

During this trip, Arp and I had also been planning to bury J’s placenta near the lake. It’s been sitting in my freezer for 3 years now. I’ve been threatening my annoying cousin with secretly serving placenta stew at Thanksgiving, but in truth, I’ve just been waiting to find the right place to bury it. Unfortunately, we forgot to bring it! All the craziness of planning what to bring and how to shove it all in the car caused me to totally forget the placenta in the cooler. I’m very sad about that, because we will be leaving this house, and the country very soon, and I don’t have another place that I feel strongly about burying it. I keep thinking about burying it under my favorite tree here at the house, but I don’t want it to be disturbed. I think the thought of the new owners being near my placenta might bother me. So I’ve got to find a new place before the ground freezes. Maybe J might have a place in mind? I’ll have to ask her!  It’s hard to let go of a placenta.

I can’t even believe a father would do this. I am just so filled with rage. And tying this up with religion in the courts is such bullshit. This is a young boy’s own body. What gives the father the right to chop off some of it? And I just love how the religious groups, along with the Anti-Defamation League, are supporting the father’s right to force his son to get circumcised due to religious freedom. Shouldn’t your right to control your own body trump religious freedom any day?! If I were the mother, I would think very seriously of doing something a lot more proactive, if you know what I mean.

Evidently not. About a month ago I found out there are others like me. They are calling themselves naturalistic pantheists, and a variety of other terms, including scientific pantheism, religious humanism, religious naturalism, religious atheism, deep ecology, and nature-worship, among others. So I guess I’m not so special.

I’m not sure why I’m so surprised by all this. But I am glad of two things: I’m kind of relieved that there are others like me, whom I can talk to. And I am happy that I came to my beliefs through a totally personal process. I sort of incrementally worked on my beliefs for many years by just living and thinking about the world. I think that is really the best way to come to a spiritual belief. It really bothers me when I see children being indoctrinated into a certain spiritual faith when they are young. I was raised a Lutheran, and I spent way too many years feeling confused and bitter and trying to escape the group-think. Arp and I finally watched Jesus Camp last night, and I feel an overwhelming pity for the children in that film. The more I think about it, I think those years I spent as a child in a mono-theistic church really narrowed my view on what was possible in terms of spirituality. Looking at the website last night for the World Pantheist Movement (WPM), I discovered that there are many other options I didn’t think were possible – “forms of wicca and paganism that see magic and the gods as symbols rather than realities” or “those in Unitarian Universalism who do not believe in supernatural beings”. I never even considered those options as possible. I had previously been drawn to some aspects of Wicca, but I had quickly stopped reading because the word “goddess” really repelled me. But maybe I’ve been imagining that term only through the eyes of an ex-Lutheran.

Here’s an old photo that I took in 2001 during a walk in the woods behind the house of a friend of mine.