Fat Poets Society…
It's the Moon's Day … hiding behind cloud cover over TulseyTown. Easy Southerlies forecasted to bring increasing rain chances throughout the day and guaranteed tonight by the weatherfeather .
The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little. – Jon Kabat-Zinn.
Joyce Vance offers cookies for The Week Ahead, in Civil Discourse.
Norman Maclean was born on this date in 1902 Clarinda, Iowa. He authored the exquisite novel A River Runs Through It.
Today is the birthday of one of the great champions of poetry, Harriet Monroe. She was the founder of Poetry magazine (still in publication), and was born in 1860 Chicago.
Two of my top fave (not five) poets share birthdays today.
Dame, professor and poet laureate of Great Britain, Carol Ann Duffy was born in 1955 Glasgow, Scotland. She is the first female poet laureate, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold Britain's Poet Laureate position in 300 years.
Poet, essayist, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement, Robert Bly was born in 1926 Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota.
Only Bly could write a poem about “The fat old couple whirling around.” Hear him as you read it to know him.
The drum says that the night we die will be a long night.
...It’s all right if Bach keeps reaching for the same note.
...Even if you are a puritan it would be all right
If you join the lovers in their ruined house tonight.
It’s good if you become a soul and then disappear.
– Robert Bly, “The fat old couple whirling around,” from My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, HarperCollins Publishers Inc, 2005.
Remembering the singularity . . .
It's Sol's day . . . and warming trend is settling over TulseyTown. Forecasters say it's likely to last ten days, anyway.
SUNDAY SERMON 12.22.24
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
… with cracked hands that ached
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him
...I'd wake and hear the cold splintering,
when the rooms were warm...
I'd rise and dress.
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know? What did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices.
--Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays,” Collected Works, Liveright Publishing 1966
If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars … we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are. – Maria Popova, in The Marginalian, 12.22.24.
Circling the woods in vain . . .
It's the Satyr's day … and the Winter Solstice is settling over Okieland. Today will be a full one second longer than yesterday.
Winter Solstice
The longest night.
The shortest day.
Giving birth
to the light of the world.
– jab
In the Northern Hemisphere, today is officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest-known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale.
On this day in 1620, the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on the shores of Massachusetts.
It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It’s gratefulness that makes us happy. – Br. David Stendl-Rast
Navigating the disruptions in the flow as threatened by Der Trumpenfurher.
It can get really cold in Minnesota this time of year. – Garrison Keillor
To Wen Tingyun On a Winter's Night
How unbearable, rummaging for poems
to read aloud beneath my lamp
on this long sleepless night
with my bedding so frighfully cold.
A bitter wind rises in my courtyard
filled with twigs and leaves.
I peek through the curtains
and pity the sinking moon.
Relaxed now,without retraint
my hopes finally fufilled –
in the emptiness I see original mind.
Living in seclusion, I dont just
nest in the phoenix's tree –
as the sun goes down,
chirping sparrows
circle the woods in vain
– Yu Xuanji (843 C.E. - 868 C.E.), “To Wen Tingyun On a Winter's Night,” in Yin Montain, Poems in Correspondence, Translated by Peter Levitt and Rebecca Nie, Shambhala, 2022, ppg 140.