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Beginning with this issue, and for the next six issues, Seeds will be featuring the SPICES (Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, Stewardship), which form Quakerism’s core values. also known as testimonies. The first Spice: Simplicity. Many of the SPICES are basic life values that would improve anyone’s life, but we were specifically interested in exploring how they exist as spiritual values in the life of our community.
In this issue, we are introduced to recent Monteverde arrivals Don and Lois Crawford. Longtime resident Sarah Dowell reflects on coming to Monteverde and establishing a simpler lifestyle. Elliott Honeycutt shares poetry on the subjects of simplicity and awareness. Carol Evans provides a short piece on the SPICES as a spiritual reality and not just a checklist. Lewis Steller shares the story of a precious desk and of letting go of material objects while cherishing the values they convey. And finally, when Lucky Guindon shared in meeting recently, it caused me to reflect on my own spiritual journey and how a simpler faith can also be a deeper and more rewarding one.
Our next issue will be out in September and will feature the next SPICE: the spiritual value of Peace. If the Spirit moves, send us your essays, poetry, artwork, photography, or interviews on the role of Peace in your life. Anyone, Quaker or not, may send submissions to the Seeds e-mail address: seedsmfm@gmail.com. Deadline for submissions is August 31.
“Simple can be harder than complex.”
Steve Jobs
Table of Contents
- A Little Bit About the Crawfords by Don and Lois Crawford
- “Sending You Light,” a song shared at meeting by Lois Crawford
- Simplicity by Sarah Dowell
- Living at the Center by Carol Evans
- Into the Complex Realm, a poem by Elliott Honeycutt
- The Desk: A Study in Simplicity by Lewis Steller
- Running, a poem by Elliott Honeycutt
- My Long, Strange Journey to a Simpler Faith by Tom Cox
A Little Bit About the Crawfords
By Don and Lois Crawford
We’d like to introduce ourselves to you. We are the Crawfords, Lois and Don. We arrived in Monteverde in January for a long stay of indeterminate length and are happy to be living in Santa Elena in a large, one-bedroom apartment.
Most recently, we lived in Harrisonburg, Virginia, which is in the Shenandoah Valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Allegheny Mountains.
We are both retired, having worked for many years in a variety of businesses. Lois is a writer and editor who worked in marketing and advertising for small companies over the years. Her last formal employment was working for James Madison University’s Center for International Stabilization and Recovery, where she was the editor of an international magazine dealing with the removal of explosive remnants of war. She learned a lot about landmines, bombs and other weapons that remain long after a conflict is over.
Lois likes to cook and try new recipes. For twelve years she produced a website, RecipeIdeaShop.com, which focused on healthy foods. She also blogged extensively and wrote two books about how changing her diet improved her health. She sold the website last spring but continues to write occasional posts for the new owner.
Don worked in a sales role for a variety of small businesses over his career. He most enjoyed working with businesses where he could help achieve the dreams of the owners. During the pandemic, Don served as a business advisor in the local small business development center. He enjoyed helping several clients start new businesses and helping others weather the maelstrom of the pandemic.
We are blessed to have found each other later in life after we each had raised a daughter. Then together we chose to raise two of Lois’ nieces when their mom could no longer care for them. These four ladies have blessed us with nine grandchildren ranging in age from five to twenty years old. Our kids and their families are spread over the US, from Wisconsin to North Carolina. We are grateful for the technology that lets us keep in touch with them.
Most recently we worshiped with Valley Friends Monthly Meeting in Dayton, Virginia. Lois was active on the peace and social concerns committee, communications committee, and others over the twenty years we lived in the area. Don served on the property and finance committee.
We are actively involved in the work of Baltimore Yearly Meeting’s summer camping program. In addition to sending our two youngest daughters to Shiloh Quaker Camp for several years, we have enjoyed seeing all of our grandchildren attend as soon as they are eligible. Don continues on the camping program committee, and we both volunteer as cooks for a couple of weeks at Opequon Quaker camp. This year, we will have two twelve-year-olds at Opequon and two teenagers participating in BYM’s Teen Adventure, a 21-day backpacking experience.
We are blessed to have found a home at Monteverde Friends Meeting. We feel loved and welcomed here. The work of the school, and our love for the nurturing of children to become the voice of their generation for the betterment of our world, fits well with our spiritual practice.
“Sending You Light“
At a recent meeting, Lois Crawford announced that her daughter would soon be having surgery and asked the Meeting to hold her in the light. As we did so, she sang this song. Some who heard it suggested that it would be appropriate to share in this issue on Simplicity. Simple prayers. Simple worship.
The original music and lyrics (2012) are by Melanie Demore, an American musician and composer. Lois says, “When my friend was sick, I began to sing the song, but I could not remember the artist’s more complicated lyrics. Consequently, I changed them so that I could remember them.”
Please listen to Ms. Demore’s amazing song on YouTube.
Sending You Light (Lois’ version)
I am sending you Light to hold you, to heal you.
I am sending you Light to hold you in love.
I am sending you Light to hold you, to heal you.
I am sending you Light to hold you in love.
I walk the path with you. Go slow, dear one, don’t hurry.
I hold your hand and comfort you. There is no need to worry.
‘Cuz I’m sending you Light to hold you, to heal you.
I am sending you Light to hold you in love.
Simplicity
By Sarah Dowell
This is about simplicity of lifestyle, a way of living in which fewer resources are needed and there are fewer meaningless distractions. When I arrived in Costa Rica over fifty years ago seeking a place to make a home, I’d come in part because it seemed the benevolent climate here would make it easier to live in a simple way, in a beautiful, natural setting. I’d just left British Columbia because the severe winters there didn’t fit my image of being able to live with the level of simplicity I was seeking.
I don’t think there were any guidebooks for Costa Rica in those days. However, as I traveled around with my partner, someone we chanced upon thought we might like living in the remote community called Monteverde. By hook or crook, we hitchhiked our way here.
Upon arriving in April 1971, I immediately loved the setting and the climate. And I quickly felt the same about the Quakers who lived here and their way of life. At that time, the community consisted of about one hundred people who were mostly farming families. So, my partner and I bought a little coffee farm in upper San Luis. Soon we had a shack, a garden, a cow and calf, a horse, several pigs, some chickens, a dog, and a cat. By then we also had our infant daughter.
We had no electricity and no income, and this life required us to work from sun up until well after sundown while living off our steadily-diminishing savings. It was more than a year later that I finally accepted the reality that neither the partnership nor the lifestyle was working for me. Rather than attempt to “live off the land,” I realized that I needed to continue searching for my “simple way of life.”
With my little daughter on my back and the dog at our heels, we rode the horse back up the mountain to Monteverde. For a few years, I did some teaching while renting a tiny cabin for my daughter and me. Then I met and eventually married the father of my son. The two of us built a wooden home from scratch in the middle of the forest, where the children were raised and where my second husband Mel and I live to this day—albeit a somewhat remodeled version.
It took many years of “simple living” for me to realize that life was definitely much simpler with electricity! Eventually, we also decided to get a telephone. I remember thinking this device equally simplified and complicated our lives. Nowadays, we can’t imagine not having computers! As we were getting into our late 70s and 80s, we added a vehicle, a little electric cart that we’d now be hard-pressed to do without.
When Mel and I met some twenty-seven years ago as two single people, we quickly realized that we both preferred a similar lifestyle, though his had begun on the South Caribbean coast when life there was more communal and everyone had little material wealth. Over the years, family and community and lots of committee work have sometimes made life quite a bit more complicated, but that was a type of abundance that we both could embrace.
I’ve asked myself, Why did I seek a “simple life” all those years ago? Maybe it had to do with growing up in comfort but with little peace of mind. I sought a more natural setting because I experienced more internal peace that way, and for the same reason, I wanted fewer material objects to buy, maintain, and replace. Only later did I hear about “living softly on the earth” and “leaving a lighter footprint.” Mostly, I guess a simpler lifestyle in a natural setting just makes me—and Mel—feel better.
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”
William Morris
Living at the Center
By Carol Evans
The Quaker testimonies—the “SPICES”— are sometimes evoked in place of a creed to explain what it means to be Quaker. It can sound like a checklist:
Simplicity? Check.
Peace? Check.
Integrity? Check.
Community? Check
Equality? Check.
Stewardship/Sustainability? Check.
One might say, “We should do this because it is in keeping with our Quaker values.” In reality, however, the testimonies are a historical guide of how Quakers have lived when they have looked to the guidance of the Spirit. They are manifestations of a life in the Spirit. All of the testimonies are interconnected. If one lives in the Spirit, all of the testimonies flow out of the Guide. Simplicity is perhaps one of the most central of the testimonies. Simplicity is complex in that it has many facets, but in essence, it all comes down to just living in the Spirit.
When we talk of simplicity, people tend to think first of physical simplicity—having less stuff. Simplicity is not the same as poverty. The earth can sustain all our needs but not all our desires. It implies a sense of justice, of not taking more than our share of nature’s bounty, sharing with others who do not have enough to meet their needs. “Live simply, so others can simply live.” This is closely linked to sustainability (care for the environment) and to the peace testimony.
Simplicity in our use of time means taking time to listen to the Spirit and ordering our activities accordingly. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all else will be added unto you” (Luke 12: 22–34). It means paying attention to what is most important. Perhaps this is the essence of Quakerism: a life guided by the Spirit.
Into the Complex Realm
When you simplify enough
By Elliott Honeycutt
You don’t find absence
But abundance
Not a void
But a world
The paradox is that simplifying
By reducing man-made complexities
Results in awareness of
(and perhaps entry into)
A realm far richer
And more intricately interconnected
Then any we can ever imagine
And this complexity soothes and centers
Its myriad fractal geometries
Labyrinthine web of processes
Network of calls and responses
In sound and light
Are glimpses of a genesis continued:
The forest for filling its nature
Its systems, adapting, interacting,
finding equilibrium.
In the sea of green
one finds life’s every color.
“Simplicity enables us to live lives of integrity in the face of the terrible realities of our global village.”
Richard J. Foster
The Desk: A Study in Simplicity
By Lewis Steller
I still have the last letter my grandmother ever wrote me, a handwritten note of about three sentences she sent to my first apartment in Seattle. In a few months, her relationship with dementia would deepen and notes from then on would only have her signed name, if anything at all.
She wrote a little bit about the games she and my grandfather were playing together, thanked me for the photos I had sent of our Thanksgiving celebration, and then noted that while the sofa and table I had inherited from her were visible, she did not see The Desk and wanted to make sure I still had it in my possession.
The Desk was a family inheritance across three generations—it served as my grandfather’s desk while he was in medical school, my mother’s desk while she got her master’s degree, and lived in Massachusetts for many years before moving to meet me in Seattle shortly after I got my first full-time teaching job. It was a beautiful, handmade hardwood desk with custom drawers, brass hardware, and a humongous top—1 x 1.8 meters—that I used to joke rivaled the size of some U.S. states.
The reality was that I could not forget The Desk because it took up more than half the floor space in my tiny bedroom and was the place where I stayed up most nights planning lessons during my hard-fought first year of teaching. I loved it; I covered it in half-graded papers and coffee stains; I brushed against it when getting in or out of bed every day.
It was no coincidence that the missive from my grandmother alluded to the furniture in my apartment. My grandparents served as my primary stable caregivers growing up, providing childcare most weeknights and every summer until high school. I often credit them with giving me the kind of interests that would later click with Quakers 40-plus years my senior—card-playing, hand-sewing, crosswords, and gardening, to name a few. The other thing I inherited from their generational sensibilities was a strong conviction in the value of physical objects, held dear by two children of the Great Depression who had built their household treasures from nothing.
As a child, I spent hours playing with toys saved from my parent’s generation, using clothing passed on from the 60s and 70s, and even learning to sew and knit with fabric and yarn saved from my great-grandmother’s personal stash. Above all else, my inherited family values centered on the preservation of physical objects, no matter the cost. As a part of that legacy, I received several pieces of furniture that became, both literally and metaphorically, the full extent of my family inheritance. So, the letter was no surprise. I wrote back, saying that yes, The Desk was safe and in good use. She seemed satisfied with that response.
Over the next ten years, I moved five times around Seattle to different apartments, collective houses, and a duplex. The Desk was always the hardest piece of furniture to move—its top alone weighed approximately 12 kilograms, being one huge, solid piece of hardwood, and the different nuts, bolts, and fragile drawers needed to be carefully disassembled and reassembled in each location. In one house, it was a shared art space, often covered with paint and ceramics. One roommate used the large surface area for a full gaming setup in a dimly lit bedroom. The Desk was where I learned how to teach remotely at the start of the pandemic (pictured at right), and it was the centerpiece of our living room for that long year of full-time Zooming with students, friends, and family.
After these many years together, however, a moment of reckoning came: moving to Costa Rica.
As we began to plan our move after I accepted the job at MFS, it became clear that the time had come to decide what to do with The Desk. Even when moving it into our new home after getting married, it was clear that my days of keeping such a heavy and cumbersome item of furniture were numbered. We moved in the day before our wedding, carrying in box after box of books, cooking equipment, and bedding. When we finally got to The Desk, I felt as though I would collapse.
We got a good deal on a storage unit to keep our most precious, mold-prone objects while we tested the waters in another part of the world. However, its small size meant that my days with The Desk (and any other remaining familiar furniture) were definitely numbered.
I began asking around my community to see if anyone was interested. No one responded. In a dense city like Seattle, all square footage is precious and I was not surprised that such a large item was unpopular among other young folks constantly moving to find more affordable rent.
I then tried to donate The Desk to the local thrift store. When I pulled up in a rented U-Haul with nothing in it but The Desk, they all but laughed at me. They said they could not accept such a large piece of furniture, especially one that had evidence of wear and tear (read: crayon drawings from when I was a toddler).
Finally, I decided I would give away The Desk to anyone on the Internet who was willing to pick it up. I posted it on a local Buy Nothing group, put it on Craigslist, and listed it for free on Facebook Marketplace. Days, then weeks, passed, as our departure date for Costa Rica loomed closer and closer. When I left for one last visit with my family in Colorado, The Desk was still sitting in the front of our house, waiting for someone—anyone—to claim it. Was I going to have to pay for my landlord to dispose of this precious family heirloom because no one wanted it in their care?
Finally, while I was away with family, someone responded to an online post who was interested in picking it up. Miraculously, he arrived five days before we had to have the apartment completely clear of our belongings. Fievel arranged the meeting while I was gone. It was strange that after all of those years of caring for this huge, heavy symbolic beast of a fixture, it somehow disappeared from my life without me even having a chance to say goodbye.
Giving away or donating so much of my familial inheritance of furniture and other objects brought up a lot of mixed feelings for me. Both of my grandparents passed away several years ago, but I carry many memories of them dearly, and I am pretty certain that they would be sad to know I had given The Desk away. However, after dropping everything and moving across the world to find a community congruent with my values, I find that I am less and less bothered by the idea of releasing physical objects, however precious, out into the world.
It wasn’t until this year that I reflected on my grandparents’ own story, and how incongruent their love of physical objects seems with its trajectory. My grandparents met as scientists in a small town of artists and researchers in Massachusetts—not unlike the community of Monteverde. They got married without my great-grandparents’ blessing, in a church that was not the one in which my grandmother grew up, with her wearing a red dress as a sign of rebellion. They moved to the Philippines after having their first child, with another on the way, bringing very little with them. When she got married, my grandmother didn’t know how to do anything related to housework beyond boiling water and making a bed, but she taught herself how to sew, cook, clean, and build/maintain furniture many decades before DIY books or YouTube.
While my grandparents’ explicit legacy was that of the conservation of physical objects, preserving them, and carrying them from place to place, I think the example of their lives actually tells a different story. My grandparents were constantly following their hearts, learning and growing in ways that helped them meet their goals, and they also imbued these practices into me as a child and young adult. It’s these very values—self-reliance, the reuse of materials, and the simplicity of making things from scratch—that have persisted longer than the objects themselves that were preserved by those same principles. Perhaps the actual inheritance I got from my grandparents was not the objects themselves, but the guiding values that have helped me learn to let them go.
Running
My feet tap out a tune on keys of dirt and root.
By Elliott Honeycutt
Breath fills my feet as my senses fill the space.
Together they plunge me slowly into a stillness
The forest waves, barrels, and beckons.
These woods are playful yet dangerous
like a tiger one thinks is tame,
so safety is found in the focus of play.
Here I honor these woods in awareness.
In the lightning of instinct finding its charge
in eyes that marvel,
ears that attend,
in senses alive and unbound
which miss no word from the woods.
My first and final statement—a song;
footfalls on shade and sun.
Rhythms on the forest floor,
and the melody of catching my breath
to love a place
and lose myself.
Be still and know that I am God
Shared by Lucky Guindon at a recent meeting
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know
Be still
Be
My Long, Strange Journey to a Simpler Faith
By Tom Cox
“Be still and know….”
Lucky Guindon shared this beautifully simple testimony at a recent meeting. And although I have heard it said before by other contemplative Christians, the timing and setting in which she spoke it resonated within me regarding the wondrous gift of a simpler faith.
Jesus had a simple faith. He reduced the Ten Commandments to just two: love God; love each other. See if you can handle that. When his disciples argued over which one of them was greatest, he put a child before them and warned that unless they could become like the child, they would never experience the kingdom of God. The simple faith of a child is not only needed but required.
My faith journey is a bit of a meandering mess that has made me the Christian mutt I am today. I was first raised in a Congregational Church in the Chicago suburbs. By grade school, the Congregationalists seemed too “loosey-goosey” to my father, so he took us to the other end of the spectrum and the Episcopalians with their high church pomp and reliably consistent liturgy every Sunday, where I was eventually confirmed. Still, I would say that my parents were merely nominal believers at that point. I never remember seeing them pray or read the Bible or discuss religious matters at home, except perhaps for church business matters.
By the 1970s, parachurch ministries were all the rage in US high schools—a remanent of the Jesus Movement of the 1960s. These were national organizations not affiliated with any particular church or denomination. They included Youth for Christ, Young Life, and Fellowship of Christian Athletes. This was my introduction to evangelicalism, as well as to the subtle use of peer pressure in religious circles. Part of their strategy definitely included using the popular and influential kids to proselytize all us “normies.” Believe me, more than a few religious decisions for Jesus were heavily influenced by raging hormones and a desire to be seen at the “cool kids” table. I raised more than a few eyebrows on my parents by leaving early in the morning with a Bible tucked under my arm. Was Tom in some sort of cult?
By the eighties, I was off to Texas for college where the only real choice on Sunday mornings was Southern Baptist, but the evangelical parachurch folks turned out to be just as active on college campuses. When I returned to Chicago after college, some folks I knew from Youth for Christ in high school had started their own nondenominational “seeker-sensitive” church. It met in a movie theater, had no cross or religious symbolism, used modern music for worship, and even staged dramatic presentations to help support the message of the pastor. Over the next fifteen years, I became a program director, a writer of dramas, and eventually an associate pastor at this church. No seminary or ordination necessary. I like to say I was “deputized.” Another pastor and I led the church for a year and a half while they did a national search for a new senior pastor, and during that time, we grew the church to over 1,200 people on a Sunday morning. By that point, however, neither of us wanted the job.
There are a lot of good things I remember from that time. I established great relationships with many wonderful people, and we did some great things. We even traveled to Russian and Ukraine to demonstrate how a modern church could use the arts to attract their young people who were not interested in the Eastern Orthodox faith.
During that time, I saw lives changed, people get sober, and marriages saved. I saw kids grow into amazing adults. But I find myself more haunted these days by the cringy moments in which I participated. The ways we used heaven and hell on a proverbial stick to enforce proper belief and thinking. The ways we cherry-picked scripture to keep women out of leadership and submissive to their husbands. The ways we said we welcomed LGBTQ+ folks but only because we wanted to change them and “pray away the gay.” The ways in which questioning or doubting one’s faith was discouraged if not branded as disloyal or even demonic. The ways in which our predominately white, affluent church spent thousands of dollars on facilities and staff and programs and technology, but very little on reducing suffering and social justice issues in our community.
That was messed up. It was wrong. Why didn’t I leave? These are the thoughts that still haunt me when I think back on that time. Then I go easier on myself and remember that we were young and untrained. At the time, that church was my everything—my friends, my income and career, and the place where I thrived and my talents were valued. We existed in a bubble with no oversight or authority. Instead of doing the work to determine what I believed spiritually, I had basically been handed the teacher’s textbook with all the answers in the back. I felt pressured to memorize the answers and was discouraged from actually working out the equations on my own.
Eventually, my doubts could not be held back. It began with 9/11 and watching the church grow more nationalistic. Then came the Iraq War and I saw the militarism and Islamophobia creep in. The internet was still in its infancy, so much of my radicalization happened the old-fashioned way—through books. I began reading Shane Claiborne, the first Christian I knew of who criticized war. I read Jim Wallis and learned of progressive Christian politics. I read Blue Like Jazz by Donald Miller, in which he went to a pagan celebration and erected a confessional. When people entered and began to confess, Donald stopped them and instead begged forgiveness for all the sins the church had committed over the centuries. I watched videos by Rob Bell and discovered Fr. Richard Rohr. Later came Nadia Bolz-Weber, Rachel Held Evans, Barbera Brown Taylor, William J. Barber, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. There were older books by Thomas Merton and the liberation theology of Howard Thurman and James Cone. One day, when my boss at the church saw a rather innocuous book by Brian McLaren on my desk, he warned me to watch out because “that book is dangerous.” A book. Dangerous. I knew it was time to go.
I took the first job I was offered. It was for a conservative Christian publisher in Pittsburgh, but that was okay. It was my day job, not my church. I could edit the books and then drive back into the city and to my newly discovered progressive church that got in trouble for feeding the homeless and for conducting secret gay weddings until the Presbyterian USA denomination eventually made them official. We held subversive Bible studies in the basements of tattoo parlors and welcomed doubt as a spiritual necessity for understanding. It was there I officially began “deconstructing” my faith.
Deconstruction is a term often used in progressive Christian circles. Some see it as the work of the devil while others see it as the only way for them to still follow Jesus in a way that is not toxic, traumatic, or unethical. Basically, you put your faith up on a lift like a mechanic with a car in a garage. You disassemble it, part by part. Then you look at each part and decide if you still believe it. Is it really necessary to believe in this for you to be faithful? Things like the doctrines of hell, salvation, and the infallibility of scripture; your visual image of God; the meaning of the cross (did God really kill his son because you are so terrible); Puritan views of sexuality (what do you mean the word homosexual was a mistaken translation that didn’t appear in Bible until 1949?), everything. You toss out the parts that no longer make sense or seem consistent with your image of a loving God. Then you try to reassemble the parts that DO fit. I’ll be honest, some folks never make it back. Some must also deal with real trauma—both physical and psychological—that they experienced in church. Some end up chucking the whole thing and walking away. I can’t blame them. But others are somehow able to reassemble this mess into something beautiful, useful, and lasting.
During the pandemic, I emersed myself in the contemplatives and in Catholic mystics—men and women who encountered God on their own, outside of the church system. My favorite was St. Francis, a rich young man who returned from war and stripped himself naked before the bishop of Assisi. He renounced material possessions, embraced peace, and went off to rebuild the church by owning nothing, ministering to lepers, and worshipping God in nature. I see him as probably the most Quaker of the Catholic mystics.
I believe this journey was instrumental in us leaving the United States and settling in Costa Rica—and Monteverde in particular. Quakerism has been an easy fit for my simplified faith. It is more about the life you live than the things you believe. It does not rely on doctrine or creeds but leans on values (like the SPICES!) which then become the basis for listening to God and responding. And although my past keeps me hesitant from jumping into things like membership and belonging to an organization, I have loved sitting in silence here and utilizing the focused energy of the meeting to continue to work these things out in my head and in my heart.
Over the years, my faith has been boiled down and condensed into a much simpler but more flavorful stew. Simpler, but not easier or less sophisticated. It is my journey, and not necessarily something I would prescribe or insist on for someone else. It no longer solely resides in my head as dogma. It values doubt and wonder over quick answers and rigid surety. It is more elusive. It requires the internal work of listening and discerning. It seems more biblical, or at least more Christ-centered—the product of a man who never wrote anything or started any church but instead insisted that the kingdom of God is within you.
It is a lighter faith. A more loving faith. It is less fearful. It is a faith that abides and plays well with others. It will never impose itself on others because it understands that, at best, it’s probably only 5% correct. It is fluid and ever-moving, not rigid and brittle. It is more like a kaleidoscope that constantly changes into something beautiful as it turns. When challenges and doubts appear, it is more resilient and flexible. It is more grace-based.
If I live another 15 years, I’m sure more change will occur. Some things I believe today may make me cringe then. But that’s okay. It’s all a part of the journey. And what a long, strange trip it’s been.
