Prophetic tiger at the edge of the village

In Freya's mailbox as the heat-hammer moves slowly Eastward from Okieland . . .

The National Organization for Women was founded on this date in 1966 Washington, D.C. NOW is the largest women’s rights organization in the United States, with 550 chapters in all 50 states.

On Wednesday, the Washington-based National Geographic magazine that has surveyed science and the natural world for 135 years reached another difficult passage when it laid off all of its last remaining staff writers. From here on out it's all freelancers and editors. FYI: Disney owns NatGeoMag.

Artists are prophets. They say what can’t be said in ways that can be heard. They create music, sing, rap, dance, paint, sculpt, and write it in dramas. They are the forerunners for the community. . .A lot that comes out of artists is not coming from them. It’s coming through them. Art is an expression of Spirit. – Richard Rohr

Today is the 112th anniversary of Czeslaw Milosz's birth. The internationally recognized Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat, was born on this date in 1911 Szetejnie, Lithuania. Regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in 2004.

Arts Poetica?

. . . . In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:
a thing is brought forth which we didn't know we had in us,
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.

. . . . There was a time when only wise books were read
helping us to bear our pain and misery.
This, after all, is not quite the same
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.

. . . . What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,
under unbearable duress and only with the hope
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.
– Czeslaw Milosz