Creative Joy

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine wrote to the last remaining community of Shakers at Sabbathday Lake, Maine, seeking permission to stay with them for a couple of weeks and observe their day-to-day lives and worship and then create poetry based on her observation and participation. Her lofty goal was not without precedent—the Quiet in the Land project had done it in 1996—but her query was met with silence. Undeterred, my friend and her mom set out to visit Sabbathday Lake (along with a number of other Shaker historic sites) in the summer of 2007.

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The number of victims of the 1995 sarin gas attack in the Tokyo subway by the AUM Shinrikyo cult is almost 6,300 in a nationwide police survey — far more than the earlier estimate of over 5,000.

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