Don't you hit me with that cosmic debris

I had a meeting Saturday morning at the Old North Church that went better than expected. It was a little strange walking up to the door, since the pole barn that used to stand behind the little white frame church has been leveled and hauled away, leaving a flat plot of bare ground. Last week's windstorm blew sheets of metal roofing off the barn and onto the church and shot a 2 x 4 like an arrow through a window. This was late Sunday afternoon when no one was in the building, so the damage was minimal.

The meeting went as well as could be expected, and I escaped in time to get to the bank and have breakfast (eggs, toast, coffee) on the patio while reading the business section of last Sunday's paper. Somehow, for reasons I can't explain, breakfast on the patio defines The Good Life. The patio itself was still a mess from last weekend's storm, so my first order of business was to sweep it off.

I remember how much I enjoyed sweeping the patio and sidewalk at our little house in Home Park, near Georgia Tech on the near northwest side of Atlanta. The kids were small - a newborn and a toddler - and our neighbor to the back would play his bagpipes on Saturday morning, and I would sweep the tiny yard. Now I find sweeping to be kind of meditative, for reasons I can't explain, besides getting all those leaves and maple seed pods and pine needles and random junk off the bricks and into the beds where they can decompose in peace and reincarnate as ajuga and salvia.

It was warming up, so I started a batch of sourdough and put it on the bricks to rise. My main chore was still stripping leaves from cut-off pear branches, and slowly but surely the pile was reduced to rubble. That tree, intentionally cut down, was the smallest and tidiest of the mess that was everywhere in the yard. The other pear tree, which the wind blew down, remains to be disposed of, and the even bigger pile of maple limbs in the front yard isn't cleaning itself up either.

Half of the neighborhood has piles of branches lying loose at the curb waiting to be picked up. The other half has neat little bundles of sticks beside industrial strength paper bags full of leaves, also waiting to be taken away. I don't see any point in leaving it at the curb for the city to pick up and take away and grind into mulch. It can stay here and eventually find its place, some as compost, slow-cooking among the kitchen scraps, and some in the beds around the flowers and groundcover, taking its time breaking down into smaller and smaller particles. It's all good.

I may have rushed it a bit, but the bread was out of the oven in time for me to go to a fall equinox celebration at the Big New Church in Hipville. There were some talented drummers there, and even though the group was small the rhythms cooked. Everybody had a story about the big storm: how awesome it was, how long their power was out, and how glad they were when it came back on. We lit some candles and took a few sunflower seeds home to plant for next year.

WOSU dutifully played "Autumn" from Vivaldi's Four Seasons on my way home from the Buddhist Center on Sunday. Leaves are falling on the table as I write this. So I'm touching all the bases in this transitional season: the UU committee structure and its democratic process, documentation, and accountability; the Pagan rituals, mostly nonverbal, of gathering fruit, flowers, and seed; the Buddhists gathering to sit, listen, walk, chant, and contemplate the words of the teaching to solve a problem; the suburban middle class peasants of Methodistville cleaning up the yard so the neighbors don't get the wrong idea that we're liberal universalist hippie anarchist tree-hugging nature freaks, for goodness sakes. So let them think I'm a responsible citizen. My ulterior motive is free mulch and firewood.

It hit me while replacing a short brick walkway with flagstones. If I'm culturally Methodist, politically Unitarian, and aesthetically Buddhist, where do I pigeonhole all the other hats I wear? Maybe I can get tax-exempt status for the Church of the Mixed Metaphor. The taiji I practice every night on this same brick patio is already a three-cornered Neo-Confucian synthesis of Taoist, Confucian, and Buddhist traditions. Where do I put the Deweyan Pragmatism that underlies Progressive education and the better part of of the textbook business? If William James was right in defining religion as 'ultimate concern', then even editing page proofs could be one of The Varieties of Religious Experience.

The flagstones look good, by the way, thanks for asking. It's always nice to come back down to earth from these flights of fancy. I even got around to hauling out the extension ladder to untie the rope swing from the broken branch of an apple tree, climb up on the roof and remove a couple of small branches, sweep off the loose debris, and pull the leaves and gunk out of the gutters. There's no such thing as 'yard waste'. The flower beds can always use more carbon-based material.