Orion: The Place Where You Live

Check out a short piece I wrote about Holden Village for Orion's "The Place for You Live" web feature:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/place_where_you_live/view/holden_village_7905/

A poem on "On Being's" Blog

Pretty excited about this!

http://www.onbeing.org/blog/the-silent-footsteps-of-unheralded-vets-a-poem/6048

perpetual motion

“In a little while I’ll be drifting up an on-ramp,

sipping coffee from a Styrofoam container

checking my gas gauge with one eye

and twisting the dial of the radio.”

-Tony Hoagland, “Perpetual Motion”

There’s a Tony Hoagland poem I can’t get out of my head.  I play the lines in my memory like a song: it seems I have the traveling disease again, an outbreak of that virus celebrated by the cracked lips of a thousand blues musicians.  The drifting up the on ramp, the cracked lips of blues musicians, the radio: a disease caused by the lull of motion, a condition resulting in the inability to sit still.  I quoted Hoagland as an epigraph to my graduate thesis and three years later I’m still hinged on the lines of his poem, a captive to a the condition he describes.

I repeated them to myself this morning in the bathroom, while I splashed soap and water onto my face. My partner Peter and I had been pondering where to spend Thanksgiving.  We’d thought for months of going to Portland to cook dinner with our mutual friend Cecilia but her neighbors left their kitchen sink on, saturating the wall and floorboards of their apartment, filling the complex with the smell of wet wood and molding drywall.  Cecilia felt unsure about hosting company with her home in such a state--so we were left adrift and without plan. 

We could stay here.  Peter suggested.  We live in a remote village in the Cascade Mountains where there will be festivities and free food, snowshoeing, and star-gazing--not a bad place to spend the holiday.  But my gut surprised me.  Left to my own devices, I thought, I would celebrate Thanksgiving on the road.  I would eat lunch at the taco truck, wander markets, talk to strangers, cook Thanksgiving dinner in a hostel, and wade in the sage brush on the side of the highway, drenching myself in gratitude for a world this big and wide. 

~

Travel’s a hard habit to shake.  I’m not talking about vacation.  I’ve taken very few vacations as an adult.  I’ve been a teacher and a writer, a college instructor and a naturalist and none of those professions afford much expendable income for hotels, international flights, or restaurant meals.  What I have instead is time, flexibility, a dog-eared atlas, and friends so scattered around the country that there’s almost always a couch to crash on. 

If there were a movement for slow-travel the way there is for slow-food, I’d make brochures about encounters with strangers and roadside fruit stands.  I’d picket for back roads and blog about buying lemonade from the neighborhood stands of seven-year-olds.  I’d praise garage sales and promote stopping to swim in rivers.

This summer I spent five weeks on the road and two on the trail.  I learned how to herd sheep, graft trees, care for chickens, and build shelves.  I ate venison and horse, elk and bull testicle.  I bottle-fed baby goats, summited a 13,000 foot mountain.  I made my car a kind of home: a raft that carried me down two lane highways between small towns.  Even on un-showered days when my sleepy bag had become sticky from sweat and wear and my back stiff from sleeping on floors, I felt lucky to be able to witness so much, to look out my windows and watch the land change shape.

~

In college I took an environmental writing class.

On the syllabus my professor listed two quotes:

To be rooted is perhaps the most important

and least recognized need of the human soul.

~Simone Weil

Why have I always been glad to leave?

~J. B. Jackson

~

In a radio show about road trips, This American Life host Ira Glass observed, It’s hard for an American to just hit the road without some expectations--we all still bind to the cliche about road trips...a road trip stands for is hope. Hope. That somewhere, anywhere, is better than here. That somewhere on the road I will turn into the person that I want to be.

At twenty-seven I have an idea of who I want to be--I've a writer and a thinker, a teacher, a runner, a walker, and a wanderer.  I love the smell of earth and the scent of sawdust.  I want to sit on my porch on summer evenings, to read out loud to the person I love, to walk barefoot through the grass.  I want to cook on cast iron, shop at the farmer's market, and eat long lingering meals with friends and family.  I want a home lined with bookshelves and a clothes line stretching across my backyard.  I live as close I can to these desires.  I take small steps to draw them closer.  When I daydream it isn't about money or cars, clothing or sex.  It's about home: a place where my piney heart can put down roots.

~

I’m in love with a man who has spent most of his life living in the same place.  Peter grew up on a farm in Decorah, Iowa, a college town laced with rivers, farms, and limestone cliffs.  He went to college ten miles from the house where he grew up and didn’t live outside Decorah until he moved to Holden Village, the retreat center in the Cascade Mountains where we both work now.  Peter is careful with words and gentle with his hands.  When we hike, he pauses to watch ants or to palm the bundles of lichen that cling to Douglas Firs.  Sometimes he makes bouquets, collecting ferns and firs and flowers in artfully arranged bunches which he places in jars on the windowsill when we return home.

Peter talks of farming in the future--a plan that both excites and terrifies me: to root your fate to the land beneath you and to map your years by the patterns of weather.  It’s a life different that the one I grew up with, living in suburban Metro-Detroit, and a life different that the one I’ve made for myself in my twenties, moving every year or so to a different state, a different mountain range, a different job.  But there’s something about the life Peter imagines that calms me--I picture grass growing high around fenced garden plots, dirt-caked boots askew in front of a storm door, and a pantry brimming with mason jars of fruit jams and pickled vegetables. 

~

My first year living in Washington, I got lost in loneliness.    I’d get anxious about the future and nostalgic for times when I could quell my worries with coffee dates with my friends, post-teaching pancakes with my housemate, or home-cooked dinners of carrot soup and oatmeal stout with my then-boyfriend.  Without family or friends nearby, I’d wander in my car on the weekends.  I’d drive three hours to the Pacific Coast.  I’d walk among sea stacks and listen to the sound of ocean slapping shore.  I’d scramble the rocky shoreline and press my fingers against the aggregating anemones.  I’d balance on driftwood and stare at the line where the sea and sky came together, losing my bearings in the swath of blue and gray stretching further than I could see.

I don’t know what it is about movement that calms me.  I don’t know why standing on the edge of the ocean eases my loneliness or why I feel so smitten with highways I haven’t traveled or why, on some days, my car feels more like a home than anyplace I’ve lived.  But I know that travel fills me with hope, reminding me that I’m still on a journey and that I don’t know what my destination will be.

~

When Peter and I travel together, we imagine what it would be like to live in the towns we pass--what it would mean to stay in the places we stop.  Last weekend we road-tripped around the Eastern slope of the Cascades.  We stayed at a hostel and in a camper at the farm where Peter had interned this fall.  We cooked squash, shopped the farmers’ market, and stopped at our favorite shops for coffee.  We walked the high desert roadside and ran our hands along the hand-hewn wood fences that lined cattle pens.    

Peter and I are not married, we’re not engaged, we’re not even moving in together--but we’ve decided that when we leave the Cascade Mountains we’ll move to the same city.  It’s simple--no certificates or ceremonies or leases--but it’s the furthest I’ve ever gone with someone.

I’ve been on my own for most of my twenties.  Even when I’ve been partnered, I’ve made plans alone.  I’ve moved cross country by myself than once, unpacking my belongings into a dwelling I hadn’t seen before moving into it.  For a long time, I glamorized the freedom of flying solo, but recently, walking hand-in-hand with this gentle man, I’ve wondered what it would be like to move somewhere with a person and a plan, to put down some kind of roots, to begin to craft the kind of book-shelved home I’ve always wanted but never strived toward.

~

Last weekend, on our road trip, Peter and I scrambled cliffs that overlooked the Canadian border.  We traversed through brush that left burs clinging to my socks.   When we reached the north side of the cliffs, we came across a wooden cross with a girl’s name on it and the dates 9/11/2005-9/11/2005, a baby who died the day she was born.  Peter went to work.  He walked the surrounding area gathering flowers and grasses, winding them into a bouquet too intricate and pretty to buy in the store.  He didn’t rush--he ambled, selecting exactly the plants he wanted.  I watched Peter’s thin frame in the late afternoon light, feeling so much love for this man who moved with precision, selecting flowers for a baby he’d never met.  When he finished, he placed the bouquet underneath the cross then sat down beside me until the sun dipped below the hills and shadows started to streak the valley below.

~

When I confessed to Peter the feeling I’d had about Thanksgiving: the restless want for wandering, he told me that he wouldn’t feel unanchored traveling around like that for the holiday.  We’ll be together, he said, we’ll be grounded in each other.

It feels cheesy to write about: this contentedness.  It’s hard to tell an unfinished story--particularly a happy one.  Narrative arises from conflict.  Peter and I have dozens of questions but we encounter them with our feet on the trail and our eyes on the horizon.  We have next to nothing.  We hold onto hope, vulnerable on a road that will wind and twist.

It seems I have the traveling disease again.  Only this time, I’m by someone’s side and we’re walking together, smelling of sage and letting the autumn wind whip our faces under a sky too big to see the edges of.  We go forward in gratitude.  We make muddy footprints on the matted trail we’re breaking through the brush.

~

Bread Potluck vespers: A Seven Year Plan

(copy/pasted from http://www.holdenvillage.org/village-life/blog/rachael-button-seven-year-plan/)

RACHAEL BUTTON: A Seven Year Plan

September 25, 2013 at 12:05 PM

On Saturday, Becky told me that approximately every seven years the body rebuilds itself. Atom by atom, cell by cell our physical being changes, until our body has only a handful of cells in common with the body we had before—until we are different. Becky and I had this conversation squatting in a patch of blueberries below Hilgaard Pass, palms stained blue, tongues tart with blueberry juice. I’m glad these blueberries will be part of my next body, Becky said. I love the idea of bodies being built by food—not just nutrients and calories—but by the experience of eating: apple pie shared with friends in a lamp-lit room, morning coffee and croissants savored over conversation at Chalet 5, or Sunday Eucharist, which happens twice for many of us here at Holden, once in the round in front of the altar, than a again after the service, when we huddle around the Lord’s Table and serve each other seconds of blessed bread and wine.

In Luke 24, the disciples recognize Jesus when he breaks bread with them. They’d been walking together since the beginning of the chapter but it is the act of blessing food and eating together—that reminder of taking Christ’s body into their bodies—that allows the disciples to understand the change that had been happening in their hearts the whole time.

Last spring I found the summer theme, “Made known in the breaking of the bread,” an odd choice. Why choose verses so attached to food when the Holden kitchen had just been contracted out, changing our rhythm of eating as a community? Several weeks ago, when I returned to the Holden for the first time since June, I changed my mind. After 170 miles on the trail, I visited Holden as a hiker, with a sore back and a body made skinny and shaky from long walking days. The day I entered the Railroad Creek Valley, Villagers gathered at the top of Chalet Hill for a potluck. We laid lawn blankets on the grass and ate black beans and baklava, cucumber, feta, quinoa, orzo, kale, zucchini, cantaloupe, and meat-mash. I heaped my plate and sat cross-legged beside friends, people whom I knew and people whom I didn’t know yet, who had taken time on their Saturday to cook for community. As someone who was working to rebuild her body, I needed that meal, the calories and the nutrients, but also the company, the scenery, and the flavor of foods crafted by people I love. I want the memory of that potluck meal to be part of my body, my cells, my next seven years.  

Perhaps Jesus’s disciples would have recognized him sooner if they’d met Christ on the road to Emmaus during a more certain time. But they’d watched empire slaughter their savior. They’d seen a person who symbolized salvation hang on a cross, body broken and deflated by death. It took the table to break them away from sorrow, to bring them back to flesh, hope, and a body that had been changed from dead to alive. At the table, in community, their world began anew, with a meal that would become part of their changing beings.

When I returned to Holden to start the new school year, I found a different village than the one I left: a village laced with red caution tape and trenched in by heavy construction. Yet even in the midst of all the clanking trucks and orange vests, I found meals with friends that filled me not only with calories but hope, meals that allowed me to see and know my community here at Holden: Claire’s croissants; Kari’s apple pie; Gary’s BBQ, cooked on the pit behind the kitchen; dinners eaten outside during the last warm evenings of summer; breakfast fruit held out an extra five minutes by Juan so that us latecomers can still enjoy pineapple and blackberries; extra oatmeal toppings added to the line by Rachel, who loves hot cereal as much as any Holden staff member; coffee in the registration window brewed in small batches by Bonnie and Tressa; blueberries on the trail; seconds at the communion table, and bread baked and eaten by our community here tonight. When we eat together we talk. We sit, we chew, we listen, and pause our work for fellowship at the table. In the midst of altered rhythms, these shared meals allow us to recognize Christ in ourselves and others here in this valley. I want this kind of eating to become part of us: a piece of the self we’re rebuilding, part our next seven years and the people and place we’re becoming.

Summer break, first snow, September equinox

Who would 
have guessed
it possible
that waiting
is sustainable—
a place with

its own harvests.

.-Kay Ryan, Patience

Larches at Hilgard Pass

I spent the summer of 2009 living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, splitting my time between the northern coast of Lake Michigan and the Southern coast of Lake Superior.  I gave tours at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point and barista-ed at a coffee shop off Highway 2.  I read a book a week and baked my own bread.  I wandered the woods, hiked sand-dunes, and explored the ruins of abandoned logging villages.  I slept in a tent, in a bed at my parents’ cabin, in an apartment above a movie theater at the shipwreck museum, in the basement of a 19th century coast guard building.  I vagabonded.  I read.  I recorded notes.  I hardly wrote at all.

In the fall, when I returned to graduate school in Iowa, I confessed to a professor who I loved and respected that I hadn't finished an essay all summer.  I told him about my adventures and asked him for advice on how to balance exploration and reflection.

He paused then gave me an answer I didn't expect: "Summer is for going out, drawing material, filling up the well.  Then when the weather turns, you come back to your desk and write."

~

This summer I traveled by car for five weeks.  I stayed in a hostel in the North Cascades and ate my way through small town bakeries as I drove Highway 20 toward Spokane.  I herded sheep, burnt invasive Alyssum, served meals at a shelter, learned about tree grafting, and built shelves from wood taken from the forest service burn pile in Hotchkiss, Colorado.  I ate horse, venison, and elk, bull testicle, and alligator.  I hiked to a hanging lake and summited a 13,000 foot mountain.  I bottle-fed baby goats, swam in Iowa rivers, and walked dirt roads bordered by fields of fireflies.  I went rock climbing at the ledges near Lansing and drank home-brew with my brother.  I canoed and stargazed.  I went to my cousin's wedding and walked 170 miles--from Stehekin to Canada and back on the PCT. 

There’s a freedom to travel that I needed this summer.  After spending nine months living and working in a mountain village that spans less than a quarter mile, I wanted to wander.  I wanted to the smell of high desert sage in Eastern Washington and feel the smooth surface of slip rock in Moab, Utah, I wanted the cool mountain air of Rocky mountains and the thick humidity of midwestern summer. I needed to walk myself tired then return to my little mountain village, full of experience, ready for another year of being grounded in light and darkness, the changing of the seasons, and the rhythm of community.

~

I returned Holden Village twenty-two days ago.  A new school year began.  I've hiked mountain passes and swam in lakes.  I've sat out under the stars and soaked in the hot tub.  I've taken our two second grade students on their first hike to Holden Lake.  I've baked bread from mountain blueberries.  I've started cross country training with the high school team.

I know how to live with urgency.  I know how to wake up early and how to stay up late.  But this morning, when my alarm went off, my eyes felt watery from allergies and my body spent from hiking.  Outside, clouds covered the mountains and the air felt damp with the potential for rain.  I let my body settle back into bed, pushed snooze and decided that today would be a day for writing and rest, a time to transition into a slower season.

~

Today is the fall equinox--the halfway point between the solstices, the day of the year when the hours of darkness and light are almost equal.  It's a day to strive for balance and celebrate the turn of the season.  As of tomorrow, the days will begin getting darker.

This morning, after deciding to sleep in and not hike, I went to the chalet next door for Sunday morning coffee and scones.  I bundled in a sweatshirt and a puffy vest, sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace, and joined in slow-Sunday conversation with my neighbors.  Outside clouds cloaked most of the mountains.  After about a half hour of coffee-drinking someone pointed at the peaks.

“Snow!”

We all looked at Buckskin’s summit--its peak dusted white.

~

I don’t feel ready for winter.  I love snow and sledding, fireplaces, and sing-a-longs but there’s still half a dozen places I want to hike to before the snow comes and even on a rainy Sunday, I feel guilty about the miles I didn’t walk, the places I didn’t visit, the adventures I didn’t have. 

And after a summer spent traveling, writing feels more difficult than usual--in a way that makes me question what I do and why I do it.  I have half a dozen unfinished essays started.  After so much movement, so much travel, sitting by a computer makes me squirmy--hours spent staring at a screen working through my thoughts feel wasteful compared to time spent outside.  I have to retrain myself in slowness and reflection, in the art of staying in a place and sitting with a feeling.

~

There's a momentum to the seasons but in the mountains, they seem to shift without warning.  Last weekend I swam in Domke Lake, Lake Chelan, and Holden Lake.  I lay back and let the water hold my body's weight as I looked up at the mountains all around me.  The sun beamed off the water, and it seemed like we'd have months more of summer.  Then the weather changed.  Autumn began and suddenly there's snow on the summits and as much dark as there is light in the day.  

I'm a better climber and a better hiker than I was when I moved to Holden.  I know more about the mosses and lichens, more about the texture of bark and the shapes of leaves.  I know more about living in community and caring for children.  I've slowed the pace of some of my hikes.  I've stopped to pick berries and swim naked.  But I'm still learning how to live here, still learning how to slow.  I want to keep recording, reflecting, writing, and balancing.  I want to cultivate wonder and practice patience--and on a fog-shrouded Sunday I want to linger in bed, look out the window at the falling rain, and feel at peace.   

Traveling, Exploring, and More Gary Snyder inspired list-making

Things to do in the Cascades, east of Lake Chelan:

-Cook black beans and kale
-Drink beer
-Read guidebooks
-Hot shower
-Floor-sit
-Bakery-hop
-eat a Cinnamon Twisp
-Drive dirt roads
-Call home
-Walk sidewalks
-Whistle at marmots
-Sing folk songs to cougars*
-Discover the timer feature on your camera
-Fill tires with air
-Slip on snow
-Look at maps
-Follow footprints
-Photograph glacier lilies
-Hike toward Holden

Things to do in Okanogan county:

-Vacuum car
-Wash exterior
-Get organized
-Walk the strawberry patch
-Afternoon tea
-Brie and crackers
-Freckle shoulders
-Sweat
-Climb barbed wire
-Dodge sprinklers
-Decompress
-Drink home brew
-Homemade ranch with celery
-Linger over salad
-Carry cat on shoulder
-Sleep outside
-Pee in the grass
-Wake with the sun
-Banana bread and coffee
-Scramble rocks
-Smell sage
-Herd sheep
-Trace tree cambium
-Learn about grafting
-Tour felting yurt
-Wish weeds unwellness
-Fist-fulls of roots
-Biodynamic farming lesson 
-Burn invasive species
-Horse meat with Tapatio
-Bagels in Republic
-Hugs on the highway shoulder
-Drive into the next drainage

Things to do in Spokane:

-Smell ponderosa
-Linger over dinner
-Hugs and conversation
-Sleep in clean sheets
-Wake slow
-Prep green beans and lamb
-Serve lunch
-Meet travelers
-Compare notes
-Repair tires
-Change oil
-Wine on the patio
-Story telling
-Story hearing
-Dinner party at Sheryl and Bill's
-Catch up on phone calls
-Morning coffee
-Afternoon pasta-making
-Conversations in the sun
-Feel like family
-Plan another visit


*which may or may not be watching you on the trail

Robert Frost, roads not taken, and the poetry of graduation

Graduation speeches make me tense.  The platitudes that saturate such occasions often leave me feeling more skeptical than inspired.  The speeches made at both my high school and college graduation quoted Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken.”  In both instances the speaker talked about success and the path one travels toward it.  They both quoted the end of Frost’s poem where taking the road less traveled makes all the difference.  But neither speech tackled to the poem’s beginning: Frost’s description of two paths in a yellow wood bending into the undergrowth, “worn about the same,” two similar-looking trails that veered in opposite directions.  Frost writes, And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black./Oh, I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back.  

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back. Those lines evoke so many instances for me: times when I've left jobs, people, places, relationships, with the wistful hope of returning, times when I've had to make a decision about the future, wishing that I could chose both roads. In my mind by focusing solely on the poem’s last line, the speakers at my commencements missed Frost’s point: the memory of not just the path traveled but the haunting image of the road not taken—the trail that gives the poem its title.

I think this part of the poem often gets ignored because it’s less straightforward, less inspirational.  But to me, this uncertainty isn’t depressing.  It resonates with my experiences of life: with the decisions we make and the way we amble through them, with the paths we trod and the paths we leave behind still wanting wear.  Both Kasey and Joe made choices that brought them here today.  Joe left his family, his high school, the cross country team he captained and the friends he felt familiar with to board at Holden and attend a tiny mountain school.  Kasey imagined her future half a dozen different ways, before she committed to spending the next four years at Boston University.  Both seniors sacrificed: for a path they’re still walking, toward to a future they cannot yet see.    There will be days when both Kasey and Joe will wonder about decisions they made and the places those decisions led them and there will be days when they step back, claiming their road with pride Frost’s narrator presents at the end of the poem, I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence:/ Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference…

I love poetry because it’s sparse and imagistic.  It moves like memory, jumping from association to association in a stream of stories and words.  It’s dense with meaning but lingers on images instead of giving us answers.  When writer Cheryl Strayed was asked for advice she recommended buying ten books of poetry and reading them each five times.  When asked why she responded, “Because the truth is inside.” 

 

Truth unravels our stories, breaking them down to the memories which saturate our senses.  Wisdom doesn’t live in proclamations; it resides in the contradictions that complicate our character.  It’s beautiful in its vulnerability.

In one of my favorite poems, “The Two” by Philip Levine, a man and a woman meet outside a Detroit diner.  Levine writes, 

 

He's tired, a bit depressed, and smelling the exhaustion on his own breath, he kisses her carefully on her left cheek. Early April, and the weather has not decided if this is spring, winter, or what. The two gaze upwards at the sky which gives nothing away: the low clouds break here and there and let in tiny slices of a pure blue heaven. The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided what to become.

The day is like us, she thinks; it hasn't decided what to become.  I love that line—how it says so much with so few words.  The image gives me a lens to think of my own becoming—my entry into adulthood—low clouds and pure blue slices of heaven, an April sky lit with change, still taking shape.  It’s a moment of promise and potential: a snippet of time when answers and destiny seem ephemeral compared to frying bacon, work-spent breath, poached eggs, and cloud-slivered sky. 

 

Joe Coffey and Kasey Shultz have a lot to be proud of abut the people they’re becoming:  both Holden graduates have high grade point averages, outstanding test scores, and scholarship offers from prestigious colleges, both graduates are kind community members and leaders the younger students look up to but if I were to write poems or essays or stories about Kasey and Joe those wouldn’t be the details I’d include.  I’d write about Joe Coffey’s half-built boat coming together piece-by-piece on the platform behind my chalet.  I’d write about his paint stained shoes, wood-warn hands, and the crowd that gathers around him every night to watch him construct the vessel he hopes to sail out of the village.  I’d write about Kasey’s braided hair brushing her shoulders as she sits cross-legged on the Kirchner’s couch reading Mary Oliver poems aloud at Poetry Club.  I’d write about the poems she wrote on neon pink sticky notes every day in December and the way they decorated my desk for months, reminding me of ice cream flavors, flirting with babies, and the sun spattered mid-winter sky.  

 

Both Joe and Kasey are driven and motivated, intelligent and thoughtful.  So what I want for them is more than success.  I want wisdom and insight.  I want boat-building and poem writing, sun speckled braids and saw-dusted feet.  I want them to continue to be as vulnerable to life as they are now--brave enough to fail and courageous enough to look back and wonder.  I want them to get their hands dirty and stop for snacks, to walk the shoulders of back roads and drive two lane highways.  I want them to reflect on both the paths they took and the ones they didn’t with an honesty that leaves them vulnerable to both regret and joy--and when I see them again in future years I want to hear their poems and their stories: their low clouds breaking into pure blue heaven.  

 

(Sing Holden Prayer of Good Courage) O God you have called us to ventures of which we cannot see the end, by paths never yet taken, through perils unknown. Give us good courage, not knowing where we go, to know that your hand is leading us, wherever we may go. Amen.