"Culture is the integration of the divine in every day life." - John Edward Hurley

*** Meditation I -- Willie Louise

I first rode down Highway 18 South in 1978 when I was twenty-seven, riding my bicycle across America through the Southern states. I came to visit Willie Louise, my second cousin, who lived in Bolivar, down the road from what is now my home in Hickory Valley, Tennessee.

Willie Louise had invited me when I saw her the year before at my father's wedding to Stella at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in neighboring Jackson, Tennessee. (Stella was my "mama-ta", a southern term of endearment invented by Stella as an alternative to that dreaded phrase, "step mother.")

I had not seen Willie Louise since my Aunt Mary's wedding at St. Luke's where I had been a flower girl twenty four years earlier. The importance of the occasions and the length of time separating them spoke to the divide between the cousins who had stayed on the land and those who had gone to the cities.