Month: August 2023

Sunday, September 3, 2023: Deegan and Hinkle Lakes, Bridgeport

Robert
Little Blue Heron at Deegan & Hinkle Lakes Park
Little Blue Heron at Deegan & Hinkle Lakes Park

We have Spiritual Outings on the first Sunday of each month during the summer and into the winter. For this year’s September outing, we will return to Deegan & Hinkle Lakes Park in Bridgeport for a celebration of nature, fellowship, and the beginning of autumn on Sunday, September 3.

During this time of continuing covid-19 pandemic we are following current CDC guidelines (see https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/communication/guidance.html).  We request that anyone who is not fully vaccinated practice appropriate social distancing and wear a mask except when eating. Although fully vaccinated people are safe without masks for themselves and for unvaccinated people, we recommend that fully vaccinated people also practice appropriate social distancing and wear a mask except when eating.

We will meet at 11 a.m. in the picnic area for a short service, followed by a modified potluck picnic, conversation, and walking.  Bring food to share if you are able and wish to share; otherwise, just bring food for yourself and share our company.

We would love to have you come worship with us.

For a map, please click on this link: goo.gl/maps/v33mWw5k3Wm

Email westforkuu@gmail.com or use our contact form for more information or to carpool, or write to us at PO Box 523, Clarksburg WV 26302

There Will Come Soft Rains

Robert

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains — August 4, 2026” from The Martian Chronicles reflects the day before the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. This version from BBC Radiophonic Workshop, 1977, titled “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”, was adapted for “Narrator, Vocoder and Synthesizer” by Malcolm Clarke.

Someone’s comment on the YouTube page for a different version provides some context:

This Ray Bradbury story is an anti-war message, as is the Sara Teasdale poem with the same title. However, the full title of the story in The Martian Chronicles is “There Will Come Soft Rains — August 4, 2026”. On August 5, 1945 (US time), the USA dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. August 4, 2026 marks the end of a full 80 years after the bombing. The destroyed house repeating “Today is August 5, 2026” endlessly is a warning of what happened when we forgot Hiroshima 81 years before. Bradbury wrote the story in 1950, just after the Soviet Union first successfully tested a nuclear bomb in 1949. The story was right for its time as it is today. It is about what a Cold War brings when it gets hot.

Sara Teasdale wrote her poem around 1918 during a time of total war and pandemic. Perhaps the poem still has something to say to us in our current condition.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows calling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

—- Sara Teasdale, There Will Come Soft Rains