Letters and Journal to Friends : Laura MacNorlin, Friend

Dear F/Friends, here are a few meditations of my heart and life, a living journal of my lived experience. Heads up, my kids are in the background at times, just as they are always of course in the foreground of my life. Also a lovely footnote, As I recorded the intro of this episode, a neighbor walks past in the last few seconds, playing on the speaker of her phone a gospel praise song, with the refrain, I am a Child of God. We are all waking our walk in the best ways we can bring it- to each our own way. Let’s lift each other up in that walking the walk, notice each other doing that waking and trust each other’s capacity to walk in the Light.

Thanks F/friend(s)! In the Both/And, 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻Laura MacNorlin “All I really really want our love to do is to bring out the best in me and in you...” - Joni Mitchell

Inconceivable may be the title of my not yet composed Memoir of being mother to triplets. This episode is a shout out to God above and within, and the hospital where I birthed the triplets. It’s for friends, family, professionals, epic tales, music and my many mentors who have helped me become the bell ringer I am today. Thanks y’all especially to Quaker performance artist Evalyn Parry, specifically her song She Rides. Find her at: http://evalynparry.com/

To ring the bells that you can ring: My journey birthing triplets and finding my tone chime therapy. Listen to the chimes at the Emory Midtown Hospital Atlanta GA where I ring a chime I’ve rung for the last 5 years to celebrate and honor my trying journey of natural triplet labor and healthy births of my children, who as five year olds came to with me to the hospital gardens and rang that chime with me for the first time. http://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM23BW_Wind_chime_at_Crawford_Long_Hospital_Atlanta_GA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6wRYjtvIYK0

Here are reflections in my heart for a few pieces of music that hold me up in my journey, caring for me like friends and Friends on the Quaker path do for me, when I hold concerns for those in my beloved community and for the impact of my own life on peoples lives. I offer the footnotes here, direct links to the resources and music offered in this episode. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HsHokdLZm1M https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Iiycfiq1Zs https://brenebrown.com/ https://listenforjoy.com/

On this I record over a recording by a Friend Nan Bowles, a long time spiritual nurture program School of the Spirit alumni colleague of mine, and listener to the natural world’s ministry. Nan and I became instant friends when we met around 2007, and we’ve had an informal group called the Jesus 101 friends triad with our beloved friend and teacher Angi York Crane. Angi is now a teacher in that program. Without knowing it, Nan and I happen to also be both on the journey currently of being Friends/Quakers who offer our ministry of writing through recording our messages, song, music and connecting the interconnectedness, using the various forms of art that call to us, in exciting, new and wonderful, wondrous ponderous discoveries- these openings are continuously fulfilling our lives. Each of us too has had our own trial and challenging life experiences in the last dozen years of our friendship - and we’ve listened Through and round the spiral of life, and found the Third Way over and over together. Blessed be Nan- and all y’all! The letter offered in this episode is on how that open friendship can give us the exact experience of universal beloved mother love of the universe, that I experience with many people in my life like Nan. To be one another’s Beloveds is to find out how to live for each other as a cloud of witnesses, into a knowing that finds in us the full Light of God and honors our True nature. Listen, listen deeply Listen, in the words of my kindred spirit Nan http://www.nansgreetingcards.com/index.html https://www.friendsjournal.org/2004123/

Parody: Paul Saul and Peter went out on a boat...now can you write the joke? I have this love for the song If I had a boat. This is an episode on Friendship in beloved community and of our enemies, be the trials experiences as internal or in the world. It’s a simple message for our times. The message came to me but I haven’t yet figured out what the message and ministry of the symbolism is. Yet, it came to me to sing about Saul (Paul) and Peter. Disciples friend yet caught in between. The crack where the light gets in y’all? What to do in the journeying on your own and by yourself? If you have any insights or biblical summer study Sunday class for me- let it become the tale you can tell. How does discipleship and facing our problem enemies connect to the message offered by problem faces like John Lewis and before him Ella Baker? What lasts past the metaphor? An open door? A place for where we are all to journey together? Can we figure out where the horizon is and where the shore exists and where the sky ends? Where we all originate and where we are then led to live? How to begin? How will it end? Or at least what is the path plan for the next journey of humans on this planet - or at least this corner of this continent? https://ellabakercenter.org/blog/2013/12/ellas-song-we-who-believe-in-freedom-cannot-rest-until-it-comes

This Paddle Board Poem Song is a metaphor for life and what it’s like to offer you this podcast. This episode is a description of what it’s like to get to go out for a few hours on a paddle board by myself. For this introvert mom of triplets, this floating free boating experience was a much needed chance to journey and adventure by myself, taking care of only me. I’m usually taking care of a gaggle of children. Therefore, this boating journey was a time for me of integrative processing, nature bathing, singing to myself on the waterway and feeling the prayers that follow/flow when I’m observing nature that way . Here is the tune that came to me in that prayer time while riding the wild waves. The other song is a parody of a well known folk song that I have been loving for years, but especially for the last month since the last full moon June to July.

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** I wake these days with startling Dreams- It isn’t that the dream is a snarling starling Thing. It’s that the image of preciseness. Wakes me like a Quaker. Like the quaking message coming. That is me, this message I am to offer you. This one that I want the world to hear.

Laura Grace MacNorlin

“All I really really want our love to do

is to bring out the best in me and in you...”

- Joni Mitchell

If we liked tv it would be a show like this podcast we could make an ATL based queer hippy radical sitcom called the Tword...my kids like Ferron’s misty mountain, so maybe that would be a the catchy theme song?

Connect with me if you can:

A poem and letter to the Ocean of Our People who have been and are coming into being, and inspired by the message given by Alice Fraser

“And because only the unfinished can contain the infinite.” - The Alice Fraser Trilogy

Connect with me if you can Because of the chords youʼve played in me by being you

Iʼd like to connect,

Iʼd like to connect to your chords Lower and upper tones

Om, and low moan hmmmmmmm of the universe.

Thatʼs the long Process

I can hope to let you in on,

I offer the part of me,

the being in the present, my Best offer

of what is,

my imperfect contribution Call it peace or possibility or Order or beauty

The uncompleted, the living into, the beyond what we can contain or comprehend.

Iʼm called to live that in the breathe,

the infinite between.

In the continuous “revelation”, the part at your core, where you get clear just by being Call it ones best living,

the open centered living.

Thatʼs what lasts beyond us. Thatʼs what I understand of you, that is the piece you bring,

even if you think you donʼt or canʼt,

The push off from believing you do,

Because you are bringing it,

into the places you that you come to-

Itʼs that bringing of yourself to the infinite, that brings me to love you,

the infinite uncompleted you.

Our offering to each other is to challenge,

to claim, with clarity

of centered conviction,

And your part of that unfolding infinite.

I am lifted and centered, by believing in your part in that infinite.

And thatʼs the “life chord” that I want to play, I want to listen to it in You, offering a

True clang of

I love you, I love you, I love you

I love you for the

peace you bring to life and offer just by being you,

imperfect, perfect, certain, uncertain, peaceful and troubled -

in all of your parts

Thatʼs how I can love you

Laura MacNorlin

“All I really really want our love to do

is to bring out the best in me and in you...”

- Joni Mitchell