Saints Wendell and Cindy

Saints Wendell and Cindy
Originally uploaded by paynehollow

My wife and I celebrated Valentines Day yesterday by going to the I Love Mountains Day celebration/protest at our state capitol (Frankfort). It was a very good day with a very good turnout for a very good cause that will unfortunately, probably be ignored by our representatives.

Wendell Berry was there and spoke prophetically, of course, of change. Of making change, whether or not our representatives wanted to disagree with their corporate overseers.

Great stuff.

We attended the protest with our pastor, Cindy, Susan and Maria - all from church - along with 1,000 of our closest friends from the region (and the Clack Mountain String Band and Kentucky's own Randy Wilson provided the soundtrack - gotta give a shout out to them!)

BUT, the highlight of the day was that Cindy, got a chance to talk with Berry beforehand.

Cindy (whose husband, Robert, has some family connections to Berry) introduced herself to Berry and reminded him who she was and our dear St Wendell said to one of his colleagues there, "Oh, this is that radical pastor of that church that's like Jesus: They'll love just about anyone."

How great is that??!!

Cindy'll have to put that on her business cards (if she had business cards ) and the church'll have to put that as a header on our blog.

Short of a pat on the back by Jesus himself, for what higher praise could we ask?

We Love our Mountains

Love Mountains Poster
Originally uploaded by paynehollow

Our beloved Amos says it all as he tells everyone what he would do with the signs he made to stop those guys who'd chop off our mountain tops. Amos had made some signs that said, simply, "Stop. Stop. Stop."

I will - I will get some nails to the hammer and then I would just get my signs and go up to the mountain and and - and then hammer, hammer the nails on to the trees so - so when those guys go to chop off the mountain - mountain top, they'll go, "what? what?" and they'll go away.

The Appalachian region has lost 7% (more than 470 mountains destroyed!) of our mountaintops to coal mining (which has been used up as rapidly as it's been acquired, so it's not like it's even solving our energy problems or anything!)

A more informative video can be found here or you can go to kftc.org or iLoveMountains.org

This must stop.

"Go Away..."