a little Presbyterian boarding school

One walks into the sagging halls of a school that houses students as it has since the early 20th century. These chosen few hundred are Spanish speaking, yet not all from Mexico City alone. Grown children of many an adventurous parent, the eyes of these students give back silent pictures of glimmering hope, of glassy un-revealing, of dim but steady willingness to try--so many brown pools of livliness asking common ancient questions with a vision to know a brilliant future.
I tutor these boys and girls, though we have yet to understand one another.

why are you writing?

Anne Lamott tells the tale of her reasons for writing: ideas grow out of a need, as if necessity really were the mother of Invention. We mainly need a sense of belonging, she says, and to know that everything is going to be okay. She writes to give a fellow human being the sense of wholeness, connected to the other characters who feel the same things as that reader and the peace that comes from knowing you're not alone. Not peace only, but a levity of pleasure in the laughter she invokes in a reader is a sort of sacred gift to be exercised to the soul satisfaction of both reader and author.

Notes on Bird by Bird

One writes to tell the truth. The truth is best told by starting with short assignments and writing bad first drafts. Stories are the most common way in which we tell the truth, which one might carry to the extreme of saying the message of truth is held in the medium of story. Stories are about characters, people who live and breathe with eccentric habits and chronic self centredness.
To tell stories, one must be observant and read and practice writing as diligently and as hopefully as a music student aspiring to mimic Mozart.

At Heaven's Gate

Not much heavenly occurs in the Murdock family. Both Sue and Hammond, Bogan Murdock's offspring, are resentful and bitter towards their father, though they take it out in opposite manners. Ham works for his father's investment company; Sue quits university to ride horses in the open fields of her fathers' land, yet only to leave and live on her own in town. Gerald Calhoun and Slim Sarret are both in love with Sue, at different and intermingling times, only to be rejected for yet another.

Each of these persons has a complicated history and falls into the rut of self-knowledge from which they must find a way to climb or else sink forever. In between, though out of sight of the circle of Murdocks, is the story of Ashby Wyndham. Ashby is the uneducated poor man who is destined to carry the torch for all, but must first suffer personal hardships to see that light at the end of the tunnel.

good habits gone awry

Mr. Darcy says in his list of essentials for an accomplished lady that she must improve her mind with extensive reading. Mr. Bennet reads every day, constantly and consistently, yet his household crumbles in ruin around his library. No sensible woman wishes destruction upon her house in making time to read. How is one to strike a happy medium? To read or not to read, in due season.

To Lady Havilah:

Greetings and rich favour,
bestowed by all the gods,
be upon you this fey-eternal day
as in the twenty seven hundred years past,
since your descent to the terrestrial sphere--
with love from the Garden fairies.

Do unto Others

The question of the day is: how do we love ourselves like we love our neighbours? What does that mean and how can I do it?

hitchikers

The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy is a funny movie, in a peculiar sort of way. It's based on a real book, written by a man who fell asleep tipsy in a field when he couldn't find a cheap place to stay as he was travelling Europe. Some see it as nihilistic in philosophy. Enough random things happen to the characters as they wander the galaxy to keep one wondering what and why and realise it doesn't really matter after all.

for starters

Lsiten to this, from Penny, telling how she (of all people) got into Christianity:
"...We would eat chocolates and smoke cigarettes and read the Bible, which is the only way to do it, if you ask me...The Bible is so good with chocolate. I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing...but it isn't. It is a chocolate thing."
~Blue Like Jazz

The Ya-yas continue

Little Altars was not the last installment. There are Ya-Yas in Bloom. I'm not sure if it's worth reading until I get into it.

From the Dust

Is it foolish or admirable to love a bit of land so much that you cling to it in spite of famine, even when it's beating you and giving nothing in return? Why does a farmer keep faith that the rain will come--next Spring? What happens to families attacked by dust, wind, and fire?

Out of the Dust is a story in verse form about the dust bowl in 1934. The poetry stands tall on its own roots; the story is the fruitful branches. Karen Hesse is the story teller.

"Sometimes, while I'm at the piano,
I catch her reflection in the mirror,
standing in the kitchen, soft-eyed, while Daddy
finishes chores,
and I stretch my fingers over the keys,
and I play."

afterwards

It's a rough movie. Artistic, yes. Strange, very much, but highly interesting usage of Time. Not a pretty ending, but neither is it all about the story. Great build up of details to capture the questioning mind. Very good to watch alone. Recommend a cloudy, stormy day.

I'm watching

It's raining. And growing cold. I'm watching a film called Tesseract, in the middle of the afternoon.

part 2

Never give in, never let go, they said,
Hold fast to the life-giving spring,
The family name, the parent stream
Source of all desire, giver of good fish.

Morning passes into day, sun bright shining,
Reveals every shadow in the child's shades of mind,
Now to stumble over the Rock of Offense--
Make way, give up the devious ideas;

The words of men oft repeated
Become form and semblance of truth,
Streams of thought a rioting river,
Carry the child to imagined realms of utopia.

(incomplete and undone)

Morning came quickly with transitory light
Questions slept on wake clothed in shape
Seeking answers over cantalope and tea
In the problem with me.

The grip of manmade affection
Woven round our frame by name,
While self love in the marrow of our bones
Uses the power of anger kicking at birth.

All in the fall

When diving off a boat, in the drop from a tree, by a misstep from sidewalk to subway, men make leaps every day. Of both good and bad effect, he risks his life limb by limb to achieve a common good of work for wages, work for the job's sake, working to lift up those who can't help themselves. Whether we enjoy it or not, the work must go on; the services must be rendered that satisfy our coffers and fill our neighbour's need.

Fasting or Feasting

What matters the body to the man except for the fact that the one cannot walk the earth with out the other? The fasters wax eloquent upon their personally experienced fact of health and longevity from their controlled regimes, while the feasters run for the full taxing of every cell in the sacred name of pleasure, and neither the worse for trying. We try to gain life, or we try to lose it. Either way, we fail in the bold attempt to catch the best of life. The reward of the dutiful eludes his grasp; the pleasing of the hedonist endures upon repetition. For what do we seek, but to be repaired like the well worn shoe? The body, it renews while dying every day; the heart, it mends from every blow while softening from the impact. We don't really want to lose self--but to remake a new one out of the best of the old.

Adding to the Family

Two adoptees from an unknown Enidian's discard pile today: Oscar Wilde, a biographical tome by Richard Ellman and the burgundy hardbound edition of World's Classics: Tennyson to Whitman.

But who hath seen her wave her hand?
Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
............................The Lady of Shalott?
Lord Tennyson

talk

The queen of Sheba and I were discussing hummingbirds yesterday. She has a passion for spices and herbs, which gardens attract glittering flocks of the miniature birds. They are like her other love: gem stones, and precious as gold. The more one sees of the birds, the more one wants to capture one to hold and speak to and learn its language. She must now find out how to keep the birds alive and well, if the taming of them is possible.

Morning muse

The dawn comes slowly, lingering over nightly dreams in a dark sky. At the quarter hour before seven, still the hint of light comes in a sulky dark grey mood. This in a Western sky that always begins this way, only to give way to light that steals across her broad face like a smile. The sun sends out his first piercing rays before she can say no and soon the morning breaks through the grey and the whole sky glows rosy for one momentary glance at the rising sun.