Reflections on Matthew 6:25-33
The Lilies of the Field
May 25, 2008
Church of Our Saviour
We worry too much. This is the flip side of the glory of being a human. We can have compassion, we can strive to imagine an infinite holy being, and even strive to imitate her. We have freedoms unimaginable for those natural wonders portrayed in this beautiful passage- the lily of the field and the birds of the air. And yet we worry.
We who worry are referenced in our Old Testament passage as well- we are the prisoners to whom the Lord says, "Come out." We who worry are the ones who are in darkness, to whom the Lord says, "Show yourselves."
But you might say, “Why shouldn’t we worry?” Given the earthquakes, tornadoes, food shortages, global warming, wars and rumors of wars, traffic congestion, heart congestion, the impending split in the Anglican Union, gasoline prices going through the roof, never having anything to wear, and the cruelty of bad hair days?
Well, according to scripture, we shouldn’t worry because we live in an unending state of grace- we just haven’t noticed it yet. We live unendingly in the great love of God, who as Jesus says, loves us ever so much more than a mother loves her nursing child. And even with the disasters looming, we live in an unimaginably beautiful and vast shelter- the shelter of creation- a shelter than literally could not be more glorious, more perfect for our needs.
In our gorgeous Gospel reading of today, Jesus calls to mind two creatures that don’t have very much in common with human beings.
A bird- a hummingbird, for example- is living in the moment to an extent that we can barely fathom. And living in the present moment makes worry impossible, because you have no thought of what is to come. Only, as the Buddhists would have it, this perfect present moment. If the hummingbird stops to think about the incredibly fast buzzing of its wings, it will fall. If it stops to consider the flavor of the nectar it is about to drink, its energy might not hold out.
With the lilies of the field, it seems to me we move into a higher level of consciousness. They don’t even move, at least not perceptibly to us. They just absorb the God-given glory of the sun, the minerals in the earth and spin out their exquisite form for us. And yes, they are clothed more incredibly than any designer fashion. But human beings rarely get to that level.
About the only person I can think of who approaches the serenity (or the beauty) of the lilies of the field, is also a person who has probably suffered more loss and hardship than anyone I know.
When I was 8 months pregnant and I had a two year old, I hired the formidable Laotian mountain woman, Fahm Fou Sae Chow, to help me. I was working at home, doing business coaching over the phone, and I needed someone to allow me quiet to work a few hours a day. When she first took stock of my situation, she looked at me with great pity.
“Just YOU??" she said. " Where is your mother? Your sisters? Your aunties? You are the only woman in your house??” She obliged me by cheerfully, and certainly without worry, by doing the work and supporting me as a mother, a sister and two aunts would have done.
I was very proud of the fact that I was going to have my baby at home. I knew that Fahm Fou had 8 children and so I asked her if she had them all at home. “No, no, none at home,” she said brightly. I was about to ask her what kind of hospital she went to when she finished the thought:
“In the field- very good in the field- no mess.” I then asked her if she had been alone all those times.
“Oh no!” She said. “Sometimes my husband was with me- sometimes.”
"You had all those babies in the field?” I asked.
“All except for Caen. We found him.”
“What?”
“During the Viet Nam war a man had a 2 year old tied to a porch- an orphan. He had food in a bowl like a dog. We asked for that child and he was happy to give it away. I was just 18 and I live with my parents. When we got married, Caen was our firstborn!”
I got to know my babysitter well. She invited my family over to her house in San Pablo many times, and I have rarely seen people live so well, or so worry-free. She had her grown daughters and a married son living with her and they had planted a large garden. All their bountiful, beautifully cooked meals came from that garden, complemented by chicken and pork that would have seemed like a dream in the holding camp in Thailand where she lived with her 8 children before she managed to come to the states.
After Fahm Fou and her eight children managed to get out of Laos, they were housed in this holding camp for 5 years. Times had been very hard in Laos during and after the war. Fahm Fou lost her husband and everything else she had during the war, and one of Fahm Fou’s sons got a high fever from eating spoiled pig- the remnants of a tiger’s kill in the jungle. His name is Caen, and he never fully recovered, and remains a sunny child at the age of 24.
Fahm Fou, without worry, had born seven children in the fields that the lilies and the birds happily shared with her in her beloved Laos. And, in her unworrisome way she somehow found time to embroider the most exquisite flowery creations for herself and her family to wear- the traditional richly ornamented garments of the Hmung mountain people. She lived with me almost daily for 2 years, and during that time she created her glorious embroidered wonders for everyone in my family. We were all dressed like lilies of the field by the time she got through with us.
Fahm Fou was puzzled about many things in our culture- among them the need for strollers. She often carried my infant daughter in a beautifully embroidered traditional Hmung snuggly she had made. In fact she carried my daughter virtually all the time that I was not nursing her. My daughter inherited some of Fahm Fou’s care freeness- some of her lack of worry, maybe from all that wonderful snuggling- that ever-present warmth. Fahm Fou taught me a lot about being a mother, and a lot about life. And in fact, something about God.
It seems to me that Jesus wants us to be like my infant daughter, enfolded in that warmth, held securely even during the dips and turns and ups and downs in the daily activities of the enfolder. God wants us to have that security, that faith.
But a life lacking in worry is so foreign to our culture that it seems almost necessary to plum other cultures, if not other times, to get a glimpse of it. I’d like to end with a poem by a favorite 13th century mystic of mine, Jelaludden Rumi. This is a poem addressed to we who worry in the voice of God. It’s called “You Worry Too Much.”
Oh soul, you worry too much…
Look at yourself,
what you have become.
You are now a field of sugar canes,
why show that sour face to me?
…You say that I keep you warm inside.
Then why this cold sigh?
You have gone to the roof of heavens
of this world of dust, why do you worry?
Oh soul, you worry too much.
Since you met me,
you have become a master singer,
and are now a skilled wrangler,
you can untangle any knot
of life's little leash
why do you worry?
Your arms are heavy
with treasures of all kinds.
About poverty,
why do you worry?
…Oh soul, you worry too much.
You have seen your own strength.
You have seen your own beauty.
You have seen your golden wings.
Of anything less,
why do you worry?
You are in truth
the soul, of the soul, of the soul.
You are the security…
why do you worry?
Be silent, like a fish,
and go into that pleasant sea.
You are in deep waters now,
of life's blazing glory.
Why do you worry?
Amen
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
A Whirlwind Tour of the Trinity
Trinity Sunday May 18, 2008
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
In the name of the Triune God, eternally creating, redeeming and sustaining, Amen.
Well here it is Trinity Sunday, and in churches all over the world preachers are trying to explain the unexplainable. What is this thing called the Trinity, and how can you be three but still be one?
People have explained the Trinity in all kinds of ways. I have heard that the Trinity is simply a symbol of the first and most lastingly divine thing we experience as an infant- the father, the mother and the child. I have read that the Trinity is the first model for the church, in that it is in of itself a sort of wondrous community. Or that in certain church social circles there is so much triangulation that we just naturally worship the Trinity.
But I believe that any exploration into the Trinity has to start with a deep wondering about God the Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Having been out of seminary for 3 years now, I recently had a revelation. Before I went to seminary I was very uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus, but very comfortable with the idea of God. After I enduring 6 years of seminary, I found that I was very comfortable with the idea of Jesus, but uncomfortable with the idea of God.
Before I was educated, I thought of God through the lens of Lakota Sioux spirituality: MITAKUYE OYASIN, which is Sioux for “All My Relations.” In other words, God is truly all-encompassing. All creatures are our relations and are all part of God with us. There really was nowhere that God did not touch, and the where and whyfores of what God did and did not do were a huge mystery. Isaiah later imparted something of this feeling to me speaking the words the words of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.
Then I read about process theology and I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book ,”Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”
Rabbi Kushner came to a new conclusion about God when his young child died of cancer. He cold not reconcile the God he loved with anyone who would allow such a thing to happen. He described his new philosophy like this:
A 707 crashed into a bridge in Washington DC- that was physics. By when Maury Schmutnick, who had never had a heroic thought in his life, jumped into the river to save a drowning stewardess, that’s God.
These thoughts were bolstered by an incident closer to home, although, thank God, not in my own family. The VERY FIRST 20 minutes of my tenure as a chaplain at SF General hospital was sent to comfort a couple whose 3 year old had run out into the street and gotten struck by a car. She was on life support, and the parents were trying to decide whether or not to disconnect her live-saving systems. After a long and agonized struggle, they had to come to the horrific realization that she could not be saved. I as so undone by this tragedy that I had a memorial service just for the chaplains and nurses and myself. The grieving couple, thank God, had their own church community. But I preached a sermon for that little girl in my homiletics class and I kept her picture by my home altar to pray for her and her parents. You are not supposed to these things as a hospital chaplain.
But as time went on, I realized that Rabbi Kuschner’s idea of God was too easy an answer. I felt it was wrong to put God in a box, that God in fact was the very definition of “Out of the Box.” A phrase I heard somewhere kept coming back to me: “Do you praise God only when the hurricanes do not blow?”
Or do you embrace and say yes to creation in all its wildness? Is that not at least one definition of faith? Around this time one of my greatest influences was a kind of a renegade priest who was at the time serving (for free) as vicar of St. Cuthbert’s in Oakland. He was known as a kind of an “out of the box” thinker. This was right after the great tragedy of the Tsunami title waves in Indonesia, and I posed this question to him:
“How do you reconcile the reality of that scale of devastation with the idea of a loving God?” He said, “God gives the plates of the earth’s crust the freedom to be plates of the earth’s crust. They then do what plates of the earth’s crust do.” He challenged me to imagine a world in which creation did not have this freedom. We would have an utterly ordered world with no death, never any chaos, no wildness- no wilderness.”
In the book of Job God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. He speaks of the glories of creation; the unfathomable complexity and power of that God-made creation, and man’s arrogance in thinking he can comprehend or control it.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
God speaks of the great power of the Leviathan, the sea monster whose creation is noted in our beautiful Genesis reading of today.
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make a covenant to be your servant forever?
These wonders are a mystery I don’t want to mess with; the great and truly unfathomable whirlwind that is the glory of God.
If we look at the second member of the Trinity, Jesus, the Son, we have a being who seemed to understand this great glorious mystery in a way that encompassed the Jewish awe of its majesty, while also seeing God in an intimate and loving way. Jesus called God “Abba” which in Hebrew means not Father, but “Daddy.”
Jesus had this trusting, intimate relationship with God, but still understood the power and the mystery. As he knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, dreading the way his life was apparently going to end, he prayed that the cup be taken from his lips. But, he said, not mine, but your will be done. We may not even be able to comprehend the love of God the awesome creator, but we know the Son so well that we can and do understand the love of Jesus of Nazareth through the myriad stories of his healing, forging and ultimately redeeming love.
I believe that part of the reason we have been given that glorious reading of Genesis today is that it contains the very first mention in the bible of the Holy Spirit. The “Ruach Elohim”- the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit that swept over the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit, I believe continues to sweep over the face of the waters, and over the face of everything else too. The Holy Spirit, I believe is working all the time. I often note that when things go well for us, we say, “Boy, the Holy Spirit was really working there!” As opposed to all the other times when the Holy Spirit finds itself unemployed! And our gospel reading of today is the only time the Trinity is specifically mentioned. It is mentioned in the context of the Great Commission- commissioning us all to go forth and spread the news of this unexplainable, mysterious, all-encompassing triune love.
We need the wilderness, we need wildness, but the majesty and the glory and the fearful mystery of God is too much for us. I guess that’s why we need the Trinity.
If we truly have a have a triune God, if we have a true Trinity, then we have all the vastness and wildness and unpredictability of God the Creator. But we also, in the same being, have the human compassion, forgiveness and redeeming love of Jesus. And we have the great power and mystery of the Holy Spirit, which can and does cause both the great and wild mystery of God and the human love of Jesus to flow through us like a great river.
Paul ends his Letter to those tempestuous Corinthians with the following beautiful blessing:
The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Whatever happens, whenever the hurricanes blow, still and always we exist in the love of God. That love is unending, that Father will never leave us, that spirit is within us whatever happens, and that son will always grace us with forgiveness.
At a retreat recently we said the following prayer, which, I felt, protected us with the power of the triune God:
Throughout this day, enliven our minds
inspire our conversation, inform our decisions,
and protect those we love.
And should today bring what we neither anticipate or desire,
increase our faith and decrease our pride
until we know that when we face the unexpected,
we do not stand alone.
Amen.
Church of Our Saviour, Mill Valley
In the name of the Triune God, eternally creating, redeeming and sustaining, Amen.
Well here it is Trinity Sunday, and in churches all over the world preachers are trying to explain the unexplainable. What is this thing called the Trinity, and how can you be three but still be one?
People have explained the Trinity in all kinds of ways. I have heard that the Trinity is simply a symbol of the first and most lastingly divine thing we experience as an infant- the father, the mother and the child. I have read that the Trinity is the first model for the church, in that it is in of itself a sort of wondrous community. Or that in certain church social circles there is so much triangulation that we just naturally worship the Trinity.
But I believe that any exploration into the Trinity has to start with a deep wondering about God the Creator, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
Having been out of seminary for 3 years now, I recently had a revelation. Before I went to seminary I was very uncomfortable with the idea of Jesus, but very comfortable with the idea of God. After I enduring 6 years of seminary, I found that I was very comfortable with the idea of Jesus, but uncomfortable with the idea of God.
Before I was educated, I thought of God through the lens of Lakota Sioux spirituality: MITAKUYE OYASIN, which is Sioux for “All My Relations.” In other words, God is truly all-encompassing. All creatures are our relations and are all part of God with us. There really was nowhere that God did not touch, and the where and whyfores of what God did and did not do were a huge mystery. Isaiah later imparted something of this feeling to me speaking the words the words of God: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.
Then I read about process theology and I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book ,”Why Bad Things Happen to Good People.”
Rabbi Kushner came to a new conclusion about God when his young child died of cancer. He cold not reconcile the God he loved with anyone who would allow such a thing to happen. He described his new philosophy like this:
A 707 crashed into a bridge in Washington DC- that was physics. By when Maury Schmutnick, who had never had a heroic thought in his life, jumped into the river to save a drowning stewardess, that’s God.
These thoughts were bolstered by an incident closer to home, although, thank God, not in my own family. The VERY FIRST 20 minutes of my tenure as a chaplain at SF General hospital was sent to comfort a couple whose 3 year old had run out into the street and gotten struck by a car. She was on life support, and the parents were trying to decide whether or not to disconnect her live-saving systems. After a long and agonized struggle, they had to come to the horrific realization that she could not be saved. I as so undone by this tragedy that I had a memorial service just for the chaplains and nurses and myself. The grieving couple, thank God, had their own church community. But I preached a sermon for that little girl in my homiletics class and I kept her picture by my home altar to pray for her and her parents. You are not supposed to these things as a hospital chaplain.
But as time went on, I realized that Rabbi Kuschner’s idea of God was too easy an answer. I felt it was wrong to put God in a box, that God in fact was the very definition of “Out of the Box.” A phrase I heard somewhere kept coming back to me: “Do you praise God only when the hurricanes do not blow?”
Or do you embrace and say yes to creation in all its wildness? Is that not at least one definition of faith? Around this time one of my greatest influences was a kind of a renegade priest who was at the time serving (for free) as vicar of St. Cuthbert’s in Oakland. He was known as a kind of an “out of the box” thinker. This was right after the great tragedy of the Tsunami title waves in Indonesia, and I posed this question to him:
“How do you reconcile the reality of that scale of devastation with the idea of a loving God?” He said, “God gives the plates of the earth’s crust the freedom to be plates of the earth’s crust. They then do what plates of the earth’s crust do.” He challenged me to imagine a world in which creation did not have this freedom. We would have an utterly ordered world with no death, never any chaos, no wildness- no wilderness.”
In the book of Job God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. He speaks of the glories of creation; the unfathomable complexity and power of that God-made creation, and man’s arrogance in thinking he can comprehend or control it.
Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements, surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?”
God speaks of the great power of the Leviathan, the sea monster whose creation is noted in our beautiful Genesis reading of today.
Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook? Put a rope in its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook?
Will it make a covenant to be your servant forever?
These wonders are a mystery I don’t want to mess with; the great and truly unfathomable whirlwind that is the glory of God.
If we look at the second member of the Trinity, Jesus, the Son, we have a being who seemed to understand this great glorious mystery in a way that encompassed the Jewish awe of its majesty, while also seeing God in an intimate and loving way. Jesus called God “Abba” which in Hebrew means not Father, but “Daddy.”
Jesus had this trusting, intimate relationship with God, but still understood the power and the mystery. As he knelt in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, dreading the way his life was apparently going to end, he prayed that the cup be taken from his lips. But, he said, not mine, but your will be done. We may not even be able to comprehend the love of God the awesome creator, but we know the Son so well that we can and do understand the love of Jesus of Nazareth through the myriad stories of his healing, forging and ultimately redeeming love.
I believe that part of the reason we have been given that glorious reading of Genesis today is that it contains the very first mention in the bible of the Holy Spirit. The “Ruach Elohim”- the Spirit of God, or the Holy Spirit that swept over the face of the waters. The Holy Spirit, I believe continues to sweep over the face of the waters, and over the face of everything else too. The Holy Spirit, I believe is working all the time. I often note that when things go well for us, we say, “Boy, the Holy Spirit was really working there!” As opposed to all the other times when the Holy Spirit finds itself unemployed! And our gospel reading of today is the only time the Trinity is specifically mentioned. It is mentioned in the context of the Great Commission- commissioning us all to go forth and spread the news of this unexplainable, mysterious, all-encompassing triune love.
We need the wilderness, we need wildness, but the majesty and the glory and the fearful mystery of God is too much for us. I guess that’s why we need the Trinity.
If we truly have a have a triune God, if we have a true Trinity, then we have all the vastness and wildness and unpredictability of God the Creator. But we also, in the same being, have the human compassion, forgiveness and redeeming love of Jesus. And we have the great power and mystery of the Holy Spirit, which can and does cause both the great and wild mystery of God and the human love of Jesus to flow through us like a great river.
Paul ends his Letter to those tempestuous Corinthians with the following beautiful blessing:
The Grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
Whatever happens, whenever the hurricanes blow, still and always we exist in the love of God. That love is unending, that Father will never leave us, that spirit is within us whatever happens, and that son will always grace us with forgiveness.
At a retreat recently we said the following prayer, which, I felt, protected us with the power of the triune God:
Throughout this day, enliven our minds
inspire our conversation, inform our decisions,
and protect those we love.
And should today bring what we neither anticipate or desire,
increase our faith and decrease our pride
until we know that when we face the unexpected,
we do not stand alone.
Amen.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
Mother's Day
Well I have been thinking of the fate of my people. My people being middle-aged women who are mothers in this high speed, perfectionistic, media-driven cyberborg society. In my mother’s generation the mothers for the most part DID NOT work outside the home, so their houses were looked after by them, the children pretty much looked after by them, and no one expected them to have fresh ground coffee beans, fresh store-boughten flowers, or children who would got a 4.8 grade point average. AND they either had servants if they were well off (THEIR mothers might have had SLAVES if they were well off) OR if they were not well off, they would have extended family- THEIR mothers, sisters, sisters-in-laws, etc.
I had a Laotian babysitter for my youngest child. She looked after my infant while I did a coaching job on the phone. She could not believe that I did not live with my mother, my sister, my aunt. With great pity in her voice she asked me, “Just YOU?? You are the only woman in your house??” She obliged me by doing the work and supporting me as a mother, a sister and two aunts would have done.
I was 8 months pregnant and I had a two year old when I took her on. I was so proud of myself that I was going to have my baby at home. I knew that she had 8 children and so I asked her if she had them all at home. “No, no, none at home,” she said to my great surprise. I was about to ask her what kind of hospital she went to when she finished the thought:
“In the field- very good in the field- no mess.” I then asked her if she had been alone all those times.
“Oh no!” She said. “Sometimes my husband was with me.”
"You had all those babies in the field?” I asked.
“All except for Caen. We found him.”
“What?”
“During Viet Nam war a man had 2 year old tied to a porch. He had food in a bowl like a dog. We took that child. I was just 18 and I live with my parents. My boyfriend too. So sometimes I had Caen with me at my parent’s house, sometimes my boyfriend. When we got married, Caen was our firstborn!”
I got to know my babysitter well. Her name is Fahm Foo. She invited my family over to her house in San Pablo many times, and I have rarely seen people live so well. She had her grown daughters and a married son living with her and they had planted a large garden. All their bountiful, beautifully cooked meals came from the garden, complemented by chicken and pork that would have seemed like a dream in the concentration camp in Thailand where she lived with her 8 children before she managed to come to the states. I saw her beautiful garden and was particularly struck with the large purple poppies.
“We lived from them in Laos,” she said.
“You sold flowers?”
“No- opium, but no more!” she said.
“Opium! You must have made lots of money!”
“Oh yes! Enough for food AND clothes!” she enthused.
I managed to raise my 2 daughters without the help of opium sales, but with the help of my husband and our village-like neighborhood, but now it is college time for the oldest one. It’s just like being required to buy a house for each child as they leave home. And the prep! I remember that the night before my SAT exam I went out to a party, inhaled and woke up very groggy, but managed to get to the test on time. I exhaled sharply at the difficulty of one test question, and I saw smoke come out.
No one suggested that I study for this thing- no one I knew did. And the only college councelling I got was one sentence from my older brother's stoned girlfriend: “Hey, man, the College of Marin is a really groovy school!”
“OK. I said. I’ll go there.” But I never got around to it. In San Francisco in 1968 there were so many other things to do.
I had a Laotian babysitter for my youngest child. She looked after my infant while I did a coaching job on the phone. She could not believe that I did not live with my mother, my sister, my aunt. With great pity in her voice she asked me, “Just YOU?? You are the only woman in your house??” She obliged me by doing the work and supporting me as a mother, a sister and two aunts would have done.
I was 8 months pregnant and I had a two year old when I took her on. I was so proud of myself that I was going to have my baby at home. I knew that she had 8 children and so I asked her if she had them all at home. “No, no, none at home,” she said to my great surprise. I was about to ask her what kind of hospital she went to when she finished the thought:
“In the field- very good in the field- no mess.” I then asked her if she had been alone all those times.
“Oh no!” She said. “Sometimes my husband was with me.”
"You had all those babies in the field?” I asked.
“All except for Caen. We found him.”
“What?”
“During Viet Nam war a man had 2 year old tied to a porch. He had food in a bowl like a dog. We took that child. I was just 18 and I live with my parents. My boyfriend too. So sometimes I had Caen with me at my parent’s house, sometimes my boyfriend. When we got married, Caen was our firstborn!”
I got to know my babysitter well. Her name is Fahm Foo. She invited my family over to her house in San Pablo many times, and I have rarely seen people live so well. She had her grown daughters and a married son living with her and they had planted a large garden. All their bountiful, beautifully cooked meals came from the garden, complemented by chicken and pork that would have seemed like a dream in the concentration camp in Thailand where she lived with her 8 children before she managed to come to the states. I saw her beautiful garden and was particularly struck with the large purple poppies.
“We lived from them in Laos,” she said.
“You sold flowers?”
“No- opium, but no more!” she said.
“Opium! You must have made lots of money!”
“Oh yes! Enough for food AND clothes!” she enthused.
I managed to raise my 2 daughters without the help of opium sales, but with the help of my husband and our village-like neighborhood, but now it is college time for the oldest one. It’s just like being required to buy a house for each child as they leave home. And the prep! I remember that the night before my SAT exam I went out to a party, inhaled and woke up very groggy, but managed to get to the test on time. I exhaled sharply at the difficulty of one test question, and I saw smoke come out.
No one suggested that I study for this thing- no one I knew did. And the only college councelling I got was one sentence from my older brother's stoned girlfriend: “Hey, man, the College of Marin is a really groovy school!”
“OK. I said. I’ll go there.” But I never got around to it. In San Francisco in 1968 there were so many other things to do.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
