I'm out here a thousand miles from my home,
Walkin' a road other men have gone down.
I'm seein' your world of people and things,
Your paupers and peasants and princes and kings.

Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
'Bout a funny ol' world that's a-comin' along.
Seems sick an' it's hungry, it's tired an' it's torn,
It looks like it's a-dyin' an' it's hardly been born.

Hey, Woody Guthrie, but I know that you know
All the things that I'm a-sayin' an' a-many times more.
I'm a-singin' you the song, but I can't sing enough,
'Cause there's not many men that done the things that you've done.

Here's to Cisco an' Sonny an' Leadbelly too,
An' to all the good people that traveled with you.
Here's to the hearts and the hands of the men
That come with the dust and are gone with the wind.

I'm a-leaving' tomorrow, but I could leave today,
Somewhere down the road someday.
The very last thing that I'd want to do
Is to say I've been hittin' some hard travelin' too.

"Song to Woody"~Bob Dylan


A year ago in the mountains, I set to work on homemaking and peacemaking and blogmaking determined to be the change I wished to see in others.  It's been quite a journey to learn more about people who don't think like me and the surprising number that do.  This week's been a real retrospective on the past while and it's got me waxing all sentimental about where God's taken me in the first quarter of my hundred years.

I've talked about my hundred years before, and I really do mean to live one hundred years.  The women in my family have lived to be ancient pillars, setting the precedent for those of us who've followed.  Great-great grandmothers and great-great aunts have lived well into their nineties.  Now my great grandmother sits on a hillside finishing up her hundredth year, reading tatting patterns with a magnifying glass, praying she'll be taken before her eyesight is.  I want to be like these women, to have a hundred years to spread love and skills to those around me.

This past week our simple living group met with Bill Nickle of the Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center.  Mainly he and our pastor reminisced on their days of civil rights work while I asked questions for handling those who think peace is merely a "nice idea."  I wonder sometimes, if David and Bill know how much their time with us, learning simplicity and environmental stewardship, has really impacted me personally.  I've been able to learn what matters in our lives and how to weed out the things (and most of them are things) that don't.  I've been blessed to see the joys of a peaceful home and have learned to be an instrument for peace in others' lives.

What a blessed year.  I guess this is the Thanksgiving entry--thanks for the gifts of simplicity, thanks for the hard work of peace and thanks for teaching me that the world is full of different kinds of people who all have an interesting story to tell.