He's My Brother — John William Hickey

This morning I got the sad and unexpected news that my brother, John William Hickey, has been hospitalized and diagnosed with liver and kidney cancer which is advanced enough that it appears to be untreatable. After getting the news I rushed to my computer to see if there was any eMail from our sister, Nanci, and found that she'd sent the picture on the right (before the news about Johnny). It struck me as a foreshadow of exactly what I expect Nanci and I to be doing over the next days, weeks, or months: reaching out to our brother so that he knows we're with him, supporting him in love, praying for him to have what he always wanted: to come, to go, and to leave — to fully live his life — on his own terms.

What more can I say?

I'm in pain — deep sadness over the anticipated loss — with a myriad of confusing, mixed feelings. For now I'm not going to say anything more other than to include a not-so-recent picture — a real picture of the three of us — from Johnny and my birthdays in July 2004.

The other foreshadow that comes to mind is from my posting of just two days ago... with a background of the ethereal voices from the Libera boys choir, the "Elderly Father to Son" video reads: "If ever I do not want to eat, do not force me. I know well when I need to and when not. And when some day I say to you that I do not want to live any more... that I want to die... do not get angry; some day you will understand". Yes, indeed. Life will never be the same after my Mom's dying weeks in the summer of 2000; I do understand. So does my sister; see Nanci's blog about Johnny. And see also the YouTube clip of Libera singing "Far away" — that haunting melody, the source of the "Elderly Father to Son" soundtrack.

My Own Epiphany — Listening to "The Voice of the Water"

I've been wondering when I would have an inspiration upon which to base my first blog entry of the New Year... and how appropriate that the epiphany I was looking for came during the UUC service I attended today on Epiphany Sunday. My first hint was from the weekly bulletin, in A Thought Before the Service Begins :

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If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

—Antoine de Saint-Exupery

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The image of our "First Parish Church" — shown on the right — is from early October, so it's not the Wintery snow banks that I saw there today. But I like this image because it shows the changing of the seasons — just like we were doing today with Elea's sabbatical.

Below is the Rumi poem, read by Becky Pine during the Chalice lighting today.

Everywhere, something begins to arrive every soul is seeking truth; every soul parched with thirst they've all heard the voice of the quencher of thirst everyone tastes the love, everyone tastes the milk anxious to know from where wisdom begins to arrive waiting in fever; wondering ceaselessly when will that final union begin to arrive people of all beliefs raising their hands to the sky their chanting voices in unison begin to arrive how happy is the one whose heart's ear hears that special voice as it begins to arrive clear your ears, my friend, from all expectations so you can hear the sound as it begins to arrive if your eyes are marred with petty visions wash them with tears your teardrops are healers as they begin to arrive keep silence, don't rush to finish your poem the finisher of the poem, the creator of the word, will begin to arrive                —Rumi, 13th-century poet

Becky's poem opened my mind to listening for and really hearing "The Voice of the Water" — the metaphor we have chosen to symbolize our congregation's quest for spiritual rejuvenation which we will be doing over the next four months during Elea's sabbatical. Ever since I first read Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha as a teenager, appreciating the sound of the water (and the wind, and most of nature)... have brought me closer to my true inner self. So I'm totally on board with this metaphor!! As background for this journey, I offer an audio-made-into-video of Rev. Elea's sermon on "Grace". Described also in my sister Nanci's "Gifts of Grace" blog, click on Part 1, Part 2, or Part 3 of "The Breath of Something Incomprehensible", divided into clips solely due to YouTube size limitations.

Christmas at the Pammett's, 2007

Yes, indeed. Christmas has come and gone... and a grand time was had by all !!
This image is our Christmas 2007 Picture, even if it isn't actually from Christmas Day. Of course, this is the tree shown here in the story about us going out to cut it down, a whole month before we decorated it. We took this picture right after we'd finished decorating the tree, 2 nights before Christmas. It's the only picture we have of all of us; I photoshopped into it the person who took the main picture that you see here, so that I could give this collage as a keepsake to eJP's friend who came to spend the few days around Christmas with us. Silly me... I stepped onto the chair just to have my daughter snap an image of me — to later be photoshopped in — but it never occurred to me that it would end up looking ridiculous because that left me about 18" taller than everyone else.

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Inside, around the tree and presents, we constantly had a cosy warm fire because shown below is the backyard scene from around the same time — we had about 3 feet of snow in the days leading up to Christmas this year !!

Breath of Heaven — the GCCC Women

This video clip is from the Sunday evening performance of the 2007 Groton Community Christmas Chorus.

Amy Grant Lyrics

In order to use the above multi-media "controls" you have to click on them to activate them. Then use the "Play" Icon for the video and/or the "faster" vs "slower" icons to navigate the lyrics.

If you click on the YouTube player itself it will take you directly to YouTube where you can search for other video clips, including many different versions of "Breath of Heaven". The Nativity One, in particular, really captured my imagination by depicting what it must have been like for Mary to ride into Bethlehem in that world at that time. It's a really unusual — multi-media — way for the Christmas Story to be told!!

Final GCCC 2007 Performance — Tonight

What a joy it has been giving our gift to the Groton community in the first two Groton Community Christmas Chorus 2007 performances — "All Creation Sings" — yesterday. We had a full house for both performances and everyone seemed to have gotten what they came for. I'm posting now so you can consider this my reminder that the Final GCCC 2007 performance is tonight, December 10^th, directed by Edie Tompkins, at 19:30.
The smallest group in the GCCC is when just the Men (shown on the left) do their number, which for 2007 was "Mary Sat A-Rockin'" [YouTube]. Of course, most of the time on stage you see more like 130 people — men, women, adolescents, and boys and girls as young as 3^rd grade — but since this is my blog, I'm just going to feature the piece that I had the biggest part in.

Check out some candid snaphots from GCCC 2007. Or, for video clips, follow the YouTube pointers in Breath of Heaven or watch what we do every year as our encore — Edie's "Down the Bethlehem Road" Medely, which I broadcasted this year (via my cell) to my oldest daughter because she was stuck at NEU for finals and couldn't come to the concert.

Having been in the Groton Community Christmas Chorus for several years, this year I captured one of the parts that is most special to me — the "centering prayer" that Edie does as the very last thing before the concert starts. Listen to Edie's wisedom and prayer as she uses that juncture to focus us all on selfless giving — that crucial spirit which we bring to the concert every year. Other YouTube video clips include: the Celtic Christmas Celebration ("Shepherd's Joy") with the familiar "Tin Whistle" and Fiddle accompaniment, the Senior choir singing "The Birds' Noel" featuring (among other things) Kevin's short solo, and our triumphant Concert finale: "Go Out With Joy!".

The 2007 Groton Community Christmas Chorus

Today, on the last day of November... present — to me, at least — are two traditional hallmarks of the season:

On the right: my nightime/tripod attempt to capture our Christmas lighting — the garden archway we've had for years + Lynn's pop-up Christmas Tree spiral. And for the first time, this year, I also dressed up the metalic snowman that is usually in the garden / on the wall outside my sauna shed.

On the left: some of the signage I put up to remind the Community that their 33rd-Annual Groton Community Christmas Chorus is just around the corner. See my personal GCCC 2007 multi-media invitation (featuring the Dylan invite), or for a quick link, go directly to the program.

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Cantate Domino For a multi-media taste of the GCCC, click on the Play icon in the middle of the YouTube control on the left to activate the player. And then click on the Play icon at the bottom of the YouTube player to listen to the GCCC women singing Cantate Domino at a rehearsal for the 2006 GCCC last December. Alas, the video in this clip is not very high quality, but IMHO the sound of the chorus is fabulous. I didn't do this on purpose... but as it turns out, I was standing over on the Alto side of the Church when I recorded this, so what you hear has an unusually "off balance" version of the women singing the lower parts of the harmony — most unusual. Or, Go direct:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ixrl1kwVvJ8

The Pammett 2007 Cut-Your-Own-Christmas-Tree Outing

A joyous family outing for the Pammett family — our annual pre-Christmas tradition!

This year we got smart... we decided to do our annual outing to track down the live tree that's perfect for us... sooner, rather than later — because other years we've wrestled with minimal choices because we left it too close to Christmas when there's not as good a selection of live trees left.

With JgP living at Northeastern this year, the only way we could do that was right after Thanksgiving. So last Sunday the four of us got to spend a most joyful late New England Fall afternoon: heading off thru the woods, saw in hand... searching down the perfect Christmas tree to have in our family room this year. And not only did we find a great new tree place (1 Kemp St, Dunstable), but we also discovered a new kind of tree — a Concolor Fir or White Fir — which is "half way" between a long-needled White Pine and the more-traditional Spruce trees with shorter needles but where all the branches bunch up together so that there's no room for decorations. Narrowed down from five or six choices, we unanimously selected the one shown here. You can see more of the tree itself in our "O Christmas Tree" celebration on YouTube.

With help from Photoshop, I was able to fabricate the picture that you see here with the four of us; can you tell which of the two faces are from other snapshots? See this Flickr set for the rest of the pictures.