I'm in the mood for musing today

Sandy has the most dense, lush flower-garden-in-a-container I've ever seen.  Look how healthy and vibrant these flowers are!  Going out the door beside the link desk (located between the two buildings of the Crown Center where we live), her raised container is the one at the sidewalk to the parking lot.  It's the most visible of the dozen or so along the grassy area.

And see how luxuriant the foliage of her flowers is.  Very pleasing to the eye.  Sandy, I'm impressed.  Thanks for making our home even more beautiful and inviting.

"What French things do you have in your home?" Deb asked at the end of her blog post about Paris in July, where she showed us photos from her house, like this Eiffel Tower lamp.  "Me, myself?" I thought, since I have French ancestors.  I tell folks I'm part Scottish, Irish, English, and French because that's the family story.  And I've found a Derrieux great-great-great-great-grandmother (maybe five or six "greats" there) in my family tree.  Maybe I'm not very French, exactly, but it's the first thing that came to mind.

Bookish thoughts

Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others ~ by Barbara Brown Taylor, 2019, religion, 10/10

"...it is not what we believe that defines us, but what we do" (p. 93).

"Jewish identity hinges on how one lives, not what one thinks — another source of holy envy for me" (p. 94).

"Christians often need reminding that our beliefs are just things we say unless they lead to things we actually do" (p. 95).

"Is Christian faith primarily about being Christian or becoming truly human? (p. 103).

"Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me," Jesus says in John 12:44 (p. 119).

"The more I learned about the religions of the world, the more I became convinced that they were all pointing to the same sacred mystery beyond all human understanding, so why not stop granting priority to any religious language and become more proficient in them all?" (p. 189).

"Torah ... has far more commands to love the stranger than it does to love the neighbor" (p. 198).

"Jesus ... too seemed more interested in how people lived than what they believed" (p. 210).

"I asked God for religious certainty, and God gave me relationships instead" (p. 213).

"There is no such thing as religion. There are only religious people, who embody the scripts of their faiths as differently as dancers embody the steps of their dances" (p. 216).

I think I marked more passages in this book than I've ever done before.  Almost sixty post-its!  And it's a book I must return to the library.  I may have to get it for my Kindle; that way, I can do a search for the "best parts" whenever I want to remember.  Click on the title to see what I wrote about this book a couple of weeks ago.