Running 'Cause I Can't Fly: The Poet: Anne Sexton, "Courage"

Running 'Cause I Can't Fly: The Poet: Anne Sexton, "Courage"
Excerpt:

"Courage"

"It is in the small things we see it.
The child's first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
[...]
Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off your heart,
then wringing it out like a sock...

Anecdotal Evidence: `Prophecy Is a Matter of Seeing Near Things'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Prophecy Is a Matter of Seeing Near Things'
Excerpt:

Mary McCleary’s collages are better than I could have expected, more technically accomplished, more densely layered, more exuberant, funny, frightening and “literary” than I could have wished for. Twenty-seven of them are on display at Art League Houston...and most can be seen on McCleary’s website.

Take “The Fall of Rome,” a small mixed-media collage from 2006. McCleary divides her rectangle into two triangles, blue above, white below, night sky and snow. Moving downward left to right along the diagonal is a herd of twelve reindeer, perhaps Santa’s. That’s it, except for a multi-colored strip of text running like ticker-tape around the perimeter of the picture. The text is small and unobtrusive, integrated unpretentiously into the design. Typed on it is the poem by W.H. Auden that lends its title to the collage. The final stanza comes as a sort of punch line to McCleary’s picture:

“Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.”

By taking Auden’s image literally, McCleary permits us to read his 1947 poem as if for the first time. She does something comparably comic and inspired in “Time the Painter,” a large (59-3/4 inches by 45-1/4 inches) collage from 2006. A man in overalls stands on a ladder (McCleary is fond of diagonals), painting a clapboard house. I should note that though her collages look like paintings from a distance and in reproduction, each is meticulously assembled from thousands of three-dimensional objects. Along the top edge of the collage is another of McCleary’s ticker-tape texts, this one unidentified but instantly identifiable--

“Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.”

--as the opening lines of “Burnt Norton,” the first of the Four Quartets. Another of my favorites among her works is “Trotline” (2009), in which a man watches as nine boys “bob” for apples hanging by strings from a trotline. Several of the boys have tags hanging from strings around their necks. One is labeled “2 Cor. 11:14.” In the King James Bible: “And no marvel; for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light.” A trotline is a long fishing line strung with shorter lines, each ending with a baited hook. If, instead of being a Christian Scientist, Joseph Cornell had been an apocalyptically minded reader of the Book of Revelation, his work might have come to resemble McCleary’s.

Her collages are always reminding me of Flannery O’Connor’s stories. I...

Anecdotal Evidence: `Filled with Astonishment and Wonder'

Anecdotal Evidence: `Filled with Astonishment and Wonder'
Excerpt:
"I hear you in there, hummingbird,
In the thicket of the orange tree,
Whirring of wings, click of beak,
Furious intent assault
Upon the honeyed blossom.

"You come from foxglove bells
In a garden overlooking a great river,
In a summer long gone.

"But I deceive myself. The ruby-throat
Does not cross the Rockies.
You are perhaps an Anna...

Hiram Bingham Tribute (See also www.hirambinghamrescuer.com.) - YouTube

We Are One: I took the Red Pill

We Are One: I took the Red Pill
Excerpt:

I joked for years that I had a fantasy childhood, it was wonderful.  Learning how completely it was a fantasy was one of the most difficult challenges I ever faced.  I stood my ground.  I didn't wake up to the dreamland of everything is wonderful and I can continue in the dream.  I grieved over the loss of the fantasy.  I stood my ground.  No quarter asked, none given.  On reflection, I am very proud of not giving in to the pressure to leave my past alone and just keep believing that all was well and only today mattered.  In an interesting way in order for me to move forward I had to look back and stop lying to myself.  To stop the lies in my present, I accepted the challenge of facing the truth of my past.  For me, as long as I believed the lies, they bound me to a past that wasn't mine.  It was painful, difficult, and freeing.  I was fortunate to have an excellent counselor that coached me through the process.  My reward for taking the Red Pill, I was able to integrate.  Healing my view of my past, healed my life in my present.  I am thankful I took the Red Pill.  Nobody could do it for me...

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Want of a Closer Union'

Anecdotal Evidence: `The Want of a Closer Union'

The Unconventional Baroness

The Unconventional Baroness
Excerpt:
When the Door Was Opened
It all started more than 20 years ago when her son Jonathan, a medical missionary at the time, told her of the desperate shortage of nurses in Sudan. People were dying by the thousands of treatable diseases and famine. A believer in the fact that if God opens a door one should go through it, Lady Cox, a qualified nurse, responded and spent several months in Sudan.
Medicine runs in her family. Her father, Robert John McNeill Love, was an eminent surgeon at the Royal Northern Hospital in London and the coauthor of the authoritative medical textbook, A Short Practice of Surgery. Born in 1937, her personal faith developed in her childhood, inspired by the biblical story of Samuel's experience of listening to God. Confirmed at age eleven, her chosen text was Joshua 1:9: "Have I not commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest." She has turned to that verse many times since, in preparation for her many dangerous missions. As a child, she prayed these words: "If you want, send me — where you want." As a teenager, she declined a place at university and chose nursing school instead.
After working for some years as a nurse, Lady Cox moved into academia, as a social scientist and then as head of London University's Nursing Education Research Unit at Chelsea College. She went on to be appointed a vice president of the Royal College of Nursing, an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, and founder chancellor of Bournemouth University. She also became a trustee of numerous educational and charitable organizations, including the Andrei Sakharov Foundation, the Siberian Medical University, and MERLIN (Medical Emergency Relief International).
Soon after qualifying as a nurse, Caroline McNeill Love married Murray Cox, a young general practitioner. Her two sons, Robin and Jonathan, followed their parents into the health service, Robin becoming a doctor in the Royal Navy and Jonathan a nurse and a missionary. Her husband then developed a specialty in psychiatry and became a renowned senior psychiatrist at the hospital for the criminally insane, Broadmoor. He developed a passion for the use of theater and music as therapy for the patients at Broadmoor. One of his many books before his death in 1997 was Shakespeare Comes to Broadmoor.
Lady Cox's years as a social-science lecturer at the then — Polytechnic of North London led, unexpectedly, to her political career. In the late 1970s, higher education institutions in Britain were hijacked by the extreme left Marxist-Leninists, and she witnessed the consequences. Appalled by the indoctrination and intimidation deployed by extremist lecturers and students, she wrote a book called Rape of Reason, which detailed the tactics of the Trotskyites. This book came to the attention of then — Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who saw in Caroline Cox an ally in the battle against Communism and called her to 10 Downing Street to invite her to accept a seat in the House of Lords...
What Keeps Her Going

Lady Caroline Cox Courtesy of Christian Solidarity Worldwide

As the years have gone by, her travels around the world have become increasingly dangerous. But eager to dispel any image of heroism, Lady Cox, recipient of the 1995 Wilberforce Award, which recognizes "an individual who has made a difference in the face of formidable societal problems and injustices," admits to having a "fit of faithless, fearful dread" before going on her dangerous missions. "I don't want to go. Home is very comfortable, with clean water, electric light, warmth, clean clothes. To wrench yourself away and go voluntarily into a conflict zone, you recoil against it. I don't particularly want to go and get my guts blown out. I don't really want to go and get malaria." But, she adds, she goes because she knows that "I will come back receiving more than I have ever been able to give."
She recalls preparing for a trip to the tiny Armenian enclave of Nagorno Karabakh, which she has now visited 54 times, at the height of the war, "feeling dark and not wanting to go." Then she heard the passage in Mark's Gospel that says "no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age (homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields — and with them, persecution)." That keeps her going. "I just come back so humbled and inspired by their dignity, courage, faith. I have a deep commitment to those people."
She is motivated by a number of factors. Theologically, St. Paul's letter to the church in Corinth, where he writes that when one part of the Body of Christ suffers, we all suffer, is her primary inspiration. But there is also a political motivation. "Those of us who have freedom should never take it for granted. We ought to use our freedoms on behalf of those who are denied them. We are privileged to be born into a democracy and a free society, but we need to remember that it is a privilege — for those to whom much is given, much is required."
Lady Cox has a deep concern about the threats to Christianity in the world today, particularly the growing militant Islamism, which is, she believes, a "real threat to our spiritual and cultural heritage." We in the West, she says, "have an obligation to act as a watchman, to warn the rest of Christendom and the rest of the world." In her new publication, The West, Islam and Islamism: Is Ideological Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy?, she challenges the free world, and moderate Muslims, to take the threats from the radicals more seriously and develop an appropriate response.
The threat from militant extremist Islam is typified not only by the rise of al-Qaeda terrorists but by evidence she has witnessed in Sudan, Nigeria, and Indonesia. In all three places, there is jihad taking place against Christians and moderate Muslims, and efforts are being made to introduce Sharia law. "That is really a death knell for Christianity," she argues. The international community needs to "wake up" and think about an intelligent "moral, Christian, strategic response" to these threats. "Christians out there trying to hold a frontline of faith for freedom to practice Christianity often feel very beleaguered, very unsupported, and very vulnerable."
But with the rise of Islamic extremism, it is not only Christians who suffer, Lady Cox argues. Moderate Muslims are also targets for the extremists....

Abbey-Roads: I did not know...

Abbey-Roads: I did not know...
Excerpt:

One of my favorite bloggers and dear friend of this blog, Rosalind, died last September.  We all knew her as Shadowlands...

Skopeji: To Joseph with Love

Skopeji: To Joseph with Love

La Escalera

La Escalera Ranch ("Mule Deer") from Lyda Video & Photo on Vimeo.
Near where I grew up.

Inky Fool: Pudibund

Inky Fool: Pudibund
[Propagating the Inky Fool by hitting the button.]
...Happens to us all...

¡ Otra Vez! ¡ Vol de la Oiseaux Sauvages!

Remember those 'wild birds'? Oh, I am so happy!  Truly: Vol de la Oiseaux Sauvages

Watching waterfalls in the mountains!...
"I know now too what a tinkling brook is." -Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

A 'Light, Seeded Through...."

Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow. – Flannery O'Connor

...The hedghog from its hollow root
Sees the wood moss clear of snow
And hunts each hedge for fallen fruit
Crab hip and winter bitten sloe
And oft when checkd by sudden fears
As shepherd dog his haunt espies
He rolls up in a ball of spears
And all his barking rage defies

[...]

Frost breaths upon the stiffening stream
And numbs it into ice—the plain
Soon wears its merry garb of white
And icicles that fret at noon
Will eke their icy tails at night
Beneath the chilly stars and moon
 Nature soon sickens of her joys
And all is sad and dumb again...   ~John Clare,’February’, The Shepherd’s Calendar

"... there is always light, from the slimmest of glimmers to full moony illumination, and it is that light, seeded throughout, that we will remember, long after we close the pages and turn off the lamp."  —Barbara Crooker, Rattle

 

We Are One: Change my perception

We Are One: Change my perception
Excerpt:
When I finished, there was a long pause then he quietly told me that he would put an engineer on the line to help me resolve the issue.  I needed many experiences to finally convince me that I am not stupid.  I can analyze and solve difficult problems.  I like that about myself.  I also believe that I can learn something from everyone if I take the time to listen.  

Patrick Radden Keefe: A Mass Shooter’s Tragic Past : The New Yorker

Patrick Radden Keefe: A Mass Shooter’s Tragic Past : The New Yorker
Excerpt:
...she had accidentally killed her brother Seth in 1986...

Cold cases are hard to investigate under the best of circumstances, and the shooting of Seth Bishop was especially difficult because it had not been treated as a crime to begin with...

During the day, friends had to coax her to leave the house. Today, a young person who had witnessed—or been responsible for—the violent death of a sibling would almost certainly receive therapy. But Amy received no counseling or psychiatric evaluation after Seth’s death. Her father was not a big believer in psychiatry, and Amy told me that she had not wanted to confront what had happened. “I was very insular, sticking to the house and trying to get over things,” she recalled. “I felt terrible. I didn’t want to explore feeling terrible.” The Bishops chose not to move, so Amy continued to eat meals in the kitchen where her brother had died, and to walk past his bedroom, which her parents had left intact, with its Revolutionary War wallpaper and a handmade sign above the door—an old woodworking project that bore the chiseled letters “S-E-T-H.”

... Miller suggested that the problem was more complicated. “There are people in our community who are walking time bombs,” he said, adding, “They are so hard to identify.”

... Patrick Radden Keefe: A Mass Shooter’s Tragic Past, The New Yorker

 

Well........

Isegoria, commenting on a post by Aretae, wonders just what it is that our school system is actually supposed to do: 
"What I can't understand is how our schools do nothing well. They don't prepare kids for the work world. They don't teach kids important abstract concepts. They don't even entertain kids."