Our “busy-back-soon, to-do” list
Sunday morning in Okieland . . .The sun is making a brief appearance on the mailbox . . .
. . .trust your instincts, explore your emotions, and watch as the world unfolds in magical, synchronous ways – Skye Nelson-Isaacs
Clara Barton founded The American Red Cross 142 years ago on this day in1881. She was officially installed as its first president, a position she held for 23 years.
91 years ago today, in 1932, Amelia Earhart landed her red Lockheed Vega 5B plane in a cow field near Londonderry, Northern Ireland, becoming the first woman (and second person after Charles Lindbergh) to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She left Newfoundland, Canada, one day earlier, on May 20.
The 2011 film, “The Way,” was re-released to theaters nationwide this past week for a one-night showing, to be aired on mutiple platforms later this summer. Produced by Emilio Estevez and his father Martin Sheen. The film follows a grieving father traveling the “El Camino de Santiago.”
From “Yesterday,” by W.S. Merwin
...my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don't want to keep youI look out the window
...and I got up and left him then
you knowthough there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do.— W.S. Merwin, from Opening the Hand, Atheneum. 1983.
Something better if not bigger
It's Satyrs' day in Okieland (albeit not everywhere). In the mailbox this morning:
Shakespeare's sonnets were first published on this day in 1609.
The English-born poet W.H. Auden became a U.S. citizen on this date In 1946. A prolific writer, two of his most recognized poems were Funeral Blues (also named Stop all the clocks) and The More Loving One.
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well / That, for all they care, I can go to hell, / But on earth indifference is the least /
We have to dread from man or beast. / How should we like it were stars to burn / With a passion for us we could not return? /
If equal affection cannot be, / Let the more loving one be me. /
Admirer as I think I am / Of stars that do not give a damn, / I cannot, now I see them, say / I missed one terribly all day. /
Were all stars to disappear or die / I should learn to look at an empty sky / And feel its total dark sublime, /
Though this might take me a little time.
Yesterday (19 May) was the birth date of Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, in 1925 Omaha, Nebraska. Published after his assassination in 1965, his autobiography continues to sell, now well past ten-million copies.
The Way is about change. Consciously experienced it refocuses the mind from probabilities to possibilities – from measuring the past in order to allow for a future as an immeasurable moment amid the manifesting possibilities of Creation.
Sonnet #60 Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
The Watercourse is the mother and father of Ways that only accurately can be termed “ SO, SOOO BIG.”
So, how else to characterize “SO, Soo, Big!?” check out Roberta Peters description of the giant in Act II of Into the Woods. It’s short, from 1:26:15 to 1:28:20
Celebrating quiet miracles . . .
In Freya's mailbox: Spring in Okieland, so, naturally, it is raining just after having tended to the lawns yesterday.
“Adults are content to walk the same way, hundreds of times, or thousands...Perhaps it never occurs to adults to step off the paths, to creep beneath rhododendrons, to find the spaces between fences. – Neal Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013).
In America, The gap between the rhetoric of family values and the reality of poverty and solitude is clearly wide...By contrast, Swedish society operates with an elegant (existential) contradiction: true love and friendship, indeed any authentic relationship, is built not on mutual dependence, but on equality, freedom of choice and autonomy.
What to do while in an eddy of The Watercourse: Take time to take time.
Take time to celebrate the quiet miracles that seek no attention. – John O'Donohue
When it rains, it should be raining
There are at least ten-thousand things
and most all have a voice of some kind.
Most of them, tho
can't be specified or enumerated with
by or on a spread-sheet. That said,
it was you I heard
this morning just at sunrise.
There were 17 of you
but you flew as one overhead
all of us headed for the Heron pond,
talking, it seemed, about the day ahead:
Wonderments about your cousins
– the frogs – barking like
the neighborhood dogs
at your graceful, noisy, arrival.
Sometimes you whisper
in the leaves and grasses, and
once, all at the same time,
your thunder
announced that rain
was about to speak.
jb