Santa and The Bad Quaker! You'd better watch out...

Bad Quaker Meme Album

"The Nativity" by C.S. Lewis

Among the oxen (like an ox I’m slow)
I see a glory in the stable grow
Which, with the ox’s dullness might at length
Give me an ox’s strength.

Among the asses (stubborn I as they)
I see my Saviour where I looked for hay;
So may my beastlike folly learn at least
The patience of a beast.

Among the sheep (I like a sheep have strayed)
I watch the manger where my Lord is laid;
Oh that my baa-ing nature would win thence
Some woolly innocence!

-- “The Nativity” by C.S. Lewis

It's the Bad Quaker Christmas and Book Release Party!

It's the Bad Quaker Christmas and Book Release Party!
December 13 from 3-5 pm
Ploughshares Farm
6960 E. Hendricks County Rd
Mooresville, IN


It's the official launch of my latest book -- Life Lessons from a Bad Quaker! So we want to celebrate. And what better way than to have a Christmas open house with food prepared by Nancy (y'all know how she is with food!). The house will be decorated as only she can, we'll sing bad carols ("I'm Dreaming of a Bad Quaker Christmas"?) maybe, visit with really cool people, eat great food and enjoy some wonderful beverages.

And, if you're looking for a little silence in the season of not-so-silent nights, you can stay Quaker worship "Fellowship of Friends" style at 6:30.

Oh, yes, and you'll be able to buy copies of Life Lessons from a Bad Quaker (and others of my books) for the low, low "Somebody Brent Knows" price of $14. That's $3 off the retail price. But wait! There's more. As part of this tremendous holiday offering, all author autographs are absolutely free!
You can buy individual copies for that special friend -- or a train car load (at special train car load rates) to give one to everybody you've ever met!

It's the perfect time to buy that imperfect Christmas gift!

If you can't make it and would still like a book, just sent me an email with the quantity you want (and any inscriptions). I'll give you a call back, get your credit card information, and ship you a book. Email orders are $16, but that includes shipping.

Seriously, though, we do hope you'll be able to come and celebrate with us. RSVPs are appreciated.

RSVP to brentbil@brentbill.com or 317-242-9269.

Signing Books: @IndianaHistory

A week from Saturday I'll be at the Indiana Historical Society's Holiday Author Fair. I'ts December 5, from 12 to 4 pm! 

The Author Fair has something for everyone on your shopping list – and for you, too! More than 70 Indiana authors besides me pack Eli Lilly Hall at the History Center every year for a fun-filled day of mixing, mingling and book signing. I'll have Finding God in the Verbs and ... hopefully ... Life Lessons from a Bad Quaker there!

Meet The New York Times bestseller James Alexander Thom, who has a new book out. You can also look forward to favorites Philip Gulley, Helen Frost, Jim Madison and Dan Carpenter.

This year's books range in topics from youth historical fiction and biographies to sports and politics, with a lot of Indiana history. You'll find a wide variety of fiction, nonfiction and children's titles.

Free admission includes the Indiana Experience and Festival of Trees.

"a necklace fashioned/ of attention to this day..."

Each Moment

Behind the mask of summer sun,
the green rush of spring,
the peace of winter’s silence,
and autumn’s fiery crown
there are only moments strung together.
Beads on a chain,
each as valued as the next;
a necklace fashioned
of attention to this day.
What is gone
and what will be
are links fingered lightly
while we chant
the only word we know:
now, the glue
of our daily round,
the shining center
from where we came,
to which we shall return.

Arlene Gay Levine
Source: Movie Life: Poems

Add your thoughts at inward/outward

"the sodium lights of expensive combines eerie as UFOs..."

Harvesting All Night

by Jane Hoogestraat

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Twenty years ago, my father stops
in the small farm town where he was a boy
to watch his nephews, already men, play softball.
The long arc of a ball hit toward the far corner

leaves the light behind for a long sigh.
He told us later he wanted to stay that night.
When the harvest is late, the ground too muddy,
the players will wait until the earth freezes, then harvest

all night, the sodium lights of expensive combines
eerie as UFOs on the horizon, ringed by frost stars.
A family cemetery dated 1949 holds now the second
generation after the immigrants, and a few small graves

from the third. It will all last another generation or two,
be tended, that cemetery, the games in the park.
Dvorak visiting in Iowa caught it once,
as it retreated from him, a country that could

not be his, although he called it a new world, and brave.
His largo captures all he would know
of native melody, the indigenous music of the plains
that will outlive everything we’re losing, everything we are.

"Harvesting All Night" by Jane Hoogestraat from Border States. © BKMK Press, 2014. (buy now)

I’d like to find/ The shrine of Chimayo

Five Wishes

Photo of Chimayo by Brent

by Anne Porter

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I’d like to have a wild bird
Perch on my hand
A sparrow or
A chickadee
Sudden with her sharp feet
And fragile daring

I’d like to see again
The etchings Rembrandt made
Of stories from the Bible

Though they’re as plain
As Bethlehem’s hay
A radiance fills them

And I would like to visit
The Laguna Indians
And their old church
Made of whitewashed clay
With logs for rafters

And in it their Madonna
To whom they’ve given
A white lace apron

And I would like to learn
To accept my death
To accept our dying
That strange dawn

So deeply scandalous
That God himself wept
At the death of his friend

I’d like to find
The shrine of Chimayo
Where the lame leave crutches

I’d like to go there
With my daughter Katie

It would be enough
Just to be there
Without any miracle.


"Five Wishes" by Anne Porter from Living Things. © Zooland Books, 2006.  (buy now)

"...with the disappearing sun. I wonder what I owe the fading day..."

On the Shortest Days
by Joyce Sutphen

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At almost four in the afternoon, the
wind picks up and sifts through the golden woods.

The tree trunks bronze and redden, branches
on fire in the heavy sky that flickers

with the disappearing sun. I wonder
what I owe the fading day, why I keep

my place at this dark desk by the window
measuring the force of the wind, gauging

how long a certain cloud will hold that pink
edge that even now has slipped into gray?

Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp
in every window and nests of stars

on the rooftops. Ladders lean against the hills
and people climb, rung by rung, into the night.


"On the Shortest Days" by Joyce Sutphen from Modern Love & Other Myths. © Red Dragonfly Press, 2015. (buy now)

"the burning bushes have ignited, struck their book of matches..."

Now

by Barbara Crooker

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What can l say, now that summer’s gone, with the weight of its heat,
its thick blanket of humidity, the cacophony of zinnias, marigolds, salvia?
Now the sky is clear blue and cloudless, that sure one-note
that can only mean October. You’re gone. The leaves turn gold
in the calendar’s rotisserie, giving up their green, and the burning bushes
have ignited, struck their book of matches. It’s enough to make the heart break,
isn’t it? We keep going down the one road, there’s no turning back.

"Now" by Barbara Crooker from Small Rain. © Purple Flag Press, 2014.  (buy now)

And Now it's October

And Now it's October
by Barbara Crooker

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the golden hour of the clock of the year. Everything that can run
to fruit has already done so: round apples, oval plums, bottom-heavy
pears, black walnuts and hickory nuts annealed in their shells,
the woodchuck with his overcoat of fat. Flowers that were once bright
as a box of crayons are now seed heads and thistle down. All the feathery
grasses shine in the slanted light. It’s time to bring in the lawn chairs
and wind chimes, time to draw the drapes against the wind, time to hunker
down. Summer’s fruits are preserved in syrup, but nothing can stopper time.
No way to seal it in wax or amber; it slides though our hands like a rope
of silk. At night, the moon’s restless searchlight sweeps across the sky.

"And Now it's October" by Barbara Crooker from Small Rain. © Purple Flag Press, 2014. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

"hold our breaths at the sudden beauty..."

Untitled

by Athena Kildegaard

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We drove across high prairie,
the Mississippi behind us,
nothing ahead for miles
but sky,

a loamy sky, thick enough
to put a trowel into,
but off to the south
clouds pulled

away from one another
as if to stand back
take a long look,
and in that

space what light was left
of the sun
already gone below
the horizon

flowed up and held there
and we did too 

"Untitled" by Athena Kildegaard from Cloves & Honey. © Nodin Press, 2012. Reprinted with permission. (buy now)

"the row of four-star restaurants on Walnut Street..." A Poem

What I've Lost
by Sarah Freligh

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A taste for Southern Comfort. Umbrellas:
two in a week when I was down
to eight bucks in the bank halfway
to payday and rain in the forecast, tail
end of a hurricane that blew
through Cuba, kissed the coast
of Florida and ricocheted into Philly
where its gray buttocks of sky squatted
over us for days. I tied a garbage bag
turban style, swanned past
the row of four-star restaurants
on Walnut Street, imagining I
was a forties movie queen shooting
a scene on a wet set. Next payday, I dropped
seventy bucks on a steak and a bottle
of rose, something French
and unpronounceable, curly
on the tongue. The sun
was out. I forgot
about rain and sweet
whiskey thick
in my throat.

"What I've Lost" by Sarah Freligh from Sad Math. © Moon City Press, 2015. (buy now)

After twenty years, you will see on my face/ The same expression you see in the grass.

The Call Away
by Robert Bly

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A cold wind flows over the cornfields;
Fleets of blackbirds ride that ocean.
I want to be out of here, go out,
Outdoors, anywhere in wind.

My back against a shed wall, I settle
Down where no one can find me.
I stare out at the box-elder leaves
Moving frond-like in that mysterious water.

What is it that I want? Not money,
Not a large desk, not a house with ten rooms.
This is what I want to do: to sit here,
To take no part, to be called away by wind.

I want to go the new way, build a shack
With one door, sit against the door frame.
After twenty years, you will see on my face
The same expression you see in the grass.

"The Call Away" by Robert Bly from Like the New Moon, I Will Live My Life. © White Pine Press, 2015. . (buy now)

Register Now -- Finding God in the Verbs!

Contemplative Photography: Creativity

Contemplative Photography: Creativity: Creativity is a messy business,  fraught with doubt, fueled by possibility. Where will imagination carry you today? (Diorama by Holly Larson...

"The sea calls to witness..."

from “Flying Point”

DJ Dolack

The sea
calls to witness
some vastness

or that which
is only a declaration
of the limited
and the countable.

And the sun some tourist
wades out each morning
in obligation

to touch
for a few moments
and to forget and drown.

And then later the moon
high as a pill
does its own work

emitting no light but re-guiding
light emitted by another:

six ships in the hour
follow each other
far off

into some great
length of silence.

"If you were a scoop of vanilla..."

What We Might Be, What We Are
by X. J. Kennedy

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If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,

If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.

If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We’d not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,

But you’re just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I’m a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we’ll stay slightly remote.


"What We Might Be, What We Are" by X.J. Kennedy from Exploding Gravity. © Little Brown, 1992.  (buy now)

"We sorrow that racism and hate still exist..." A Letter from Friends General Conference Leaders

How The Quakers Made (and are still making) America -- Quakers and Cajun!

When many people hear the word Quaker, all they think of is oatmeal. Quakers, though, are part of a vital faith tradition that is older than the United States and actually helped form the best parts of our nation. Bet you didn't know that, did you?

We also contributed some of the worst parts, too, and we even talk about it.

Intrigued?? Come to this installment of "Quakers and Cajun" to find out more.

"Cajun and Quakers" will meet at 6:30 pm on June 24 at Zydeco's Cajun at 11 E. Main in Mooresville. Quaker author, photographer, and retreat leader Brent Bill, a member of Spirituality & Practice’s Living Spiritual Teachers Project, will present a fast-paced, whimsical, and informational presentation about Quakers and how they helped make America!

There will be plenty of time to ask questions about Quakers and enjoy Zydeco's great food and libations. You'll find that the food won't be the only thing that's spicy that night!