The two topics are clearly connected in my mind, anyway
Growstuff.org is now in "soft launch." As a non-tech person, I'm led to believe that means, "we're not totally done yet!"
It's fun to be on a new site! The forums where people discuss the website itself are very friendly and helpful. I am confident that once I have plants around, I'll be able to ask questions about really basic things (idk what it means when something "goes to seed," for example, stuff like that), & people won't laugh at me, I don't think!
While you cannot yet add people as friends, the # of users is still pretty low, so it's easy to find other people's accounts under the "Members" tab. I am ribbonknight there.
I am a little sad that I can't add my non-food crops/plants (yet). So far, I've only been successful in maintaining non-food plants, like my spider plants & my rabbit foot fern and my peace lily.
During the summer, too, my red runner bean plant last year was my most successful in terms of how big it got/how long it stayed alive/how pretty the blooms were. But it literally only produced one bean.
I'd like to grow some flowers and other non-food plants on my balcony this year, if possible. I want to talk about my non-food plants, too. BUT. That is why I have this Dreamwidth blog, I suppose.
Anyway. Growstuff still seems like it will be valuable.
I'd like to do an inventory of the seeds I still have in my closet & blog about them here.
I'd like to link to an article with a pretty banal headline ("Pope Francis doesn't represent all Catholics"), but I ended up feeling motivated & proud by the end.
I'd like to quote it for my own posterity. & preface it with...I really do understand why people do leave/have left the Catholic Church/Christianity/organized religion, in general. I don't mean to quote it to chide or shame other people, but rather sort of as a summation of why I stay. (Or how I wish I behaved - I haven't been "active" in a way I feel good about since high school, when we shook up our local parish at least a little bit. I would like to do that again.)
Since then, the story of the church has been punctuated by people who consulted their conscience first and their popes later. Francis of Assisi assembled his community of barefoot wanderers before going to Pope Innocent III to seek approval. In more recent times, Dorothy Day didn’t need a pope’s permission before opening a house of hospitality for the poor and resistance against war. The Community of Sant’Egidio, founded in Italy in the late 1960s, has fought HIV/AIDS and negotiated peace treaties around the world on its own terms. Yet, in honor of this witness, Benedict XVI made a habit of visiting Sant’Egidio’s ministries in Rome. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is seeking Dorothy Day’s cause for sainthood. And now, almost eight hundred years after Francis’ death, a pope has named himself after him.
Each of these Catholic heroes had a certain respect for the papacy, but they didn’t let that get in the way of living out the gospel for themselves. They took inspiration from the words of church authorities, but more importantly they took action on their own-in creative, authentic, and Christian fashion. “In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit,” Cardinal John Newman said more than a century ago. If what we expect from the church is what we expect from the aged and insulated man who happens to hold the office of Peter, there is little reason to expect much.
...
What the church needs is more committed and courageous souls in it, not fewer. It needs souls who are too busy organizing communities of radical living and prayer, and working for justice among the oppressed, and composing new hymns, to worry all that much about whom the Spirit and the cardinals might choose as pope. It needs souls willing to undertake new forms of thought and action capable of making what Catholics see as God’s good news a reality in our time-forms that will influence and inspire popes of the future, even if the present ones don’t yet get it.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there.
There are <
> comments on this post at Dreamwidth.
It's fun to be on a new site! The forums where people discuss the website itself are very friendly and helpful. I am confident that once I have plants around, I'll be able to ask questions about really basic things (idk what it means when something "goes to seed," for example, stuff like that), & people won't laugh at me, I don't think!
While you cannot yet add people as friends, the # of users is still pretty low, so it's easy to find other people's accounts under the "Members" tab. I am ribbonknight there.
I am a little sad that I can't add my non-food crops/plants (yet). So far, I've only been successful in maintaining non-food plants, like my spider plants & my rabbit foot fern and my peace lily.
During the summer, too, my red runner bean plant last year was my most successful in terms of how big it got/how long it stayed alive/how pretty the blooms were. But it literally only produced one bean.
I'd like to grow some flowers and other non-food plants on my balcony this year, if possible. I want to talk about my non-food plants, too. BUT. That is why I have this Dreamwidth blog, I suppose.
Anyway. Growstuff still seems like it will be valuable.
I'd like to do an inventory of the seeds I still have in my closet & blog about them here.
I'd like to link to an article with a pretty banal headline ("Pope Francis doesn't represent all Catholics"), but I ended up feeling motivated & proud by the end.
I'd like to quote it for my own posterity. & preface it with...I really do understand why people do leave/have left the Catholic Church/Christianity/organized religion, in general. I don't mean to quote it to chide or shame other people, but rather sort of as a summation of why I stay. (Or how I wish I behaved - I haven't been "active" in a way I feel good about since high school, when we shook up our local parish at least a little bit. I would like to do that again.)
Since then, the story of the church has been punctuated by people who consulted their conscience first and their popes later. Francis of Assisi assembled his community of barefoot wanderers before going to Pope Innocent III to seek approval. In more recent times, Dorothy Day didn’t need a pope’s permission before opening a house of hospitality for the poor and resistance against war. The Community of Sant’Egidio, founded in Italy in the late 1960s, has fought HIV/AIDS and negotiated peace treaties around the world on its own terms. Yet, in honor of this witness, Benedict XVI made a habit of visiting Sant’Egidio’s ministries in Rome. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York is seeking Dorothy Day’s cause for sainthood. And now, almost eight hundred years after Francis’ death, a pope has named himself after him.
Each of these Catholic heroes had a certain respect for the papacy, but they didn’t let that get in the way of living out the gospel for themselves. They took inspiration from the words of church authorities, but more importantly they took action on their own-in creative, authentic, and Christian fashion. “In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit,” Cardinal John Newman said more than a century ago. If what we expect from the church is what we expect from the aged and insulated man who happens to hold the office of Peter, there is little reason to expect much.
...
What the church needs is more committed and courageous souls in it, not fewer. It needs souls who are too busy organizing communities of radical living and prayer, and working for justice among the oppressed, and composing new hymns, to worry all that much about whom the Spirit and the cardinals might choose as pope. It needs souls willing to undertake new forms of thought and action capable of making what Catholics see as God’s good news a reality in our time-forms that will influence and inspire popes of the future, even if the present ones don’t yet get it.
This entry was originally posted on Dreamwidth. You can comment here or there.
There are <
> comments on this post at Dreamwidth.