An Inclusive Border

Our front deck is 35 years old.  It’s been rained on often enough over the years to penetrate the paint and sealant and cause rot.  We considered how to repair and replace it, and talked with local carpenters over the past two years.

Into Sure Wood

(The best Robin Hood in movies was Errol Flynn’s, performed in 1938.)

I grew up loving stories about Robin Hood.  Were these tales based on the exploits of a real outlaw?  There might have been a number of Robin Hoods in the original region, including some women.  It’s an open question if he really lived or not, but what an inspiring symbol.

Jenniconography

WordPress’ latest updates have somehow blocked my ability to comment on other people’s blogs, so although I would have preferred to pass this reaction on directly at http://becomingjennie.wordpress.com/ , I’ll have to do it here. Perhaps those of you who appreciate photography and design will enjoy this kind of analysis.

I don’t know Jennie personally, but the care and craft she puts into her highly confessional blog was instrumental in making me want to start writing again, after a 30-year pause.  Her memoir “I Am Jennie” will be out July 10^th.  The book’s cover portrays her in a manner that says a lot to me.  Have a look:

The Leavening

An extraordinary, miraculous effect occurs as one calendar year begins preparing an exit and the next one prepares for birth.  There’s a lightening of mood.

Shapeshifting

La Belle et La Bete (1946)

There’s a tension that exists between natural and artificial order.  You can be creative by playing that tension as if it was a tuned string.  If you continue to play, you will undergo a transformation that unifies art and nature.  You merge with everything.

Here Are More Reasons

I like to leave my back yard wild.

My Point Is…

Table for four – just enough.

At one extreme is meat.  At the other is cake.  I consume neither.  Plants sustain my body.  They are in the middle.

As it Appears

My pastor during childhood was a man called Father Elmer.  Toward the end of winter he visited the Sunday school classes to teach the children something about the concept of resurrection.  Little kids aren’t interested or equipped to analyze holy texts.  We wanted to know how Jesus could die, but not stay dead.

Too Much Love

The Red Roofs by Camille Pissaro (1877)

Many published posts about LOVE around Valentine’s Day.  Love is always important. It’s also possible to have too much to handle.

Deep River

The Fisk Jubilee Singers in 1877

The musical song form known as spirituals began as a beautiful union between American slaves’ desire for freedom, their identification with Old Testament stories, and a post Civil War embrace of European choral harmonization in Black colleges like Fisk University.

The Power of RE

My energy was down.  My moods had grown dark as I empathized with current news stories.  I was upset from looking at the hole ripped out of the Earth next door.  I’m turning it around by meditating on all the wonderful aspects and symbolic depth of the single syllable “re”.

Carpe Deum

“The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between this profusion of matter and the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness.”

— Andre Malraux, from Les Noyers de l’Altenburg

The Grid

In the past five weeks I’ve helped assist five people in their conversion from one form of energy into another.  All of them were dear to me, and each was unique and interesting.  Because I did not meet them until they entered dementia care in the last chapter of their lives, I knew them in simplified form compared to their former selves.

Everything Becomes Art

The Item Under Discussion

Even though the missus and I do not currently hold job titles that indicate we will be paid for creativity, we remain artists.  We are used to using our intelligence to take everything we go through and everything we own and trying to turn it into some form of creative expression.

Technical Difficulties

The world’s most famous television test pattern was introduced by RCA in 1939 and was still in use until the 1970s.

Sisyphus and Me

One of my favorite authors I have not written about in this space is Albert Camus (1913-1960), a Nobel laureate (1957) who was both a superb novelist and an influential philosophic essayist.  In Camus’ view, life is an unsolvable situation which we (being what we are) will nonetheless die trying to solve.  This is not a condition which must lead to despair.

The Best Unturned Stones

La Liseuse (The Reader) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard

It’s a holiday weekend, but I’m going to be working my tail off pulling extra shifts.  I won’t have time to visit with you lovely people for a few days.  Just in case you’ll miss me, here are my picks of FIVE GREAT EARLY POSTS

Eight Miles High

It’s raining so hard the rhododendrons are losing their petals.  When I was little I didn’t like rain, but I’ve changed.  My desert-born wife loves rain.  It rained like this on our wedding day, one of the luckiest days of my life.

From Here to There

We exist within our bodies.  Our bodies allow us a means of expression and communication.  We are not, however, our bodies.

Free Electric Service

There were several responses to yesterday’s post that touched on BIG ISSUES.  That’s one of the things I like best about the interactivity of blog-world.  It is sometimes an extended issues panel dedicated to the exploration of essential philosophical questions.  I’m going to ask some of you to suspend disbelief willingly for the sake of examining a question.  Let’s assume God exists, just as a hypothetical construct, in order to frame this examination.  Why would God allow all the terrible, unjust, unfair things that happen to innocent people?