Inspirations from a Day of Meetings

Yesterday was both tiring like I thought it would be and invigorating in ways I hoped it would be.  The morning meeting consisted of various school officials speaking to us all about issues they thought affected us all.  The afternoon faculty development sessions covered interesting territory that left me engaged and inspired.

Highlights from the day:

--The morning food was better than usual.  Or maybe because of our last several years' of worker lay-offs, we simply had more of it.   I've often arrived in time for crumbs of pastry and dregs of coffee.  Yesterday we had actual choices.  They looked delicious, but I was not fooled.

--Let me be honest.  I was fooled.  I took a slice of something that looked cinnamony but tasted like something bought from a box.  Once, I would have loved an Entenmanns coffee cake.  Yesterday, I took two bites and left the rest.  I got the plate off the table since I knew I would eat it all, nibble by uninspiring nibble, if I kept it by me.

--The morning meeting was full of news of renovations and art festivals and graduate hiring and pleas that we all be more empathetic.  It seems wise not to blog further about those things here--not terribly interesting to most of the world.

--Our lunch was a happy surprise.  I was expecting the typical sandwich-chips-cookie boxed lunch.  Instead we got pizza from a local brick oven restaurant, the best Caesar salad dressing I've ever had on top of a refreshing salad, Italian dessert bite treats, and a variety of beverages including Perrier.  I shouldn't be so influenced by food, but I went into the afternoon feeling so happy about being pleasantly surprised by lunch.

--We had 3 faculty development sessions.  The first one talked about using TED talks in our classes.  Lots of good ideas.

--The presenter talked of her dream of being asked to give a TED talk.  If you were asked to give a TED talk, what would it be about?

--The second presenter talked about climate change and how it will affect the industries where our students will be working.  Lots of interesting ideas on sustainable design.

--Would you want to be made into a diamond when you die?

--Our last presenter talked about color and its influence on us.  We had cups of jello in different colors, cups of pudding in different colors.  I knew the experiment, having seen her do something similar in class.  But I gave myself over to the process. 

--My friend said she has nightmares that smell like brown.

--We're all carbon based carbon sinks.  Lots of fun word play in that sentence.

--And I have poem ideas!

First Week of January Gratitude List

Today is a day of many meetings and faculty development sessions.  Unlike some years, we don't have competing faculty development sessions going on at the same time--and I'm glad, because the sessions sound interesting.

Still, it's likely to be a long-feeling day.  So, to keep myself grounded, let me remember some of the delights of the past several weeks, along with some hopes I have for January and February.

--I've been in a great writing period.  I've been getting some work on the memoir done each week, along with poems.  Now it's time to start sending poems out into the world.

--After finally admitting defeat after spending over an hour looking for the poems that were supposed to be in my online class shell, I wrote to the course developer.  They were there, but not where I expected them.  The course developer was very nice about it.  And I'm glad I wrote, because if I couldn't find them, I'm sure students, at least a few, will be confused.

--On Monday morning, my mom and I watched a man on the bank of a lake.  He had a bubble wand which blew huge bubbles.  The bubbles were magical to watch.  I'd like to have one of those to help me restore the wonder whenever I need to recharge.

--We had a great visit with my parents.  We've been to various parts of south and central Florida and had a great time exploring together.

--Today my spouse starts his music theory class.  I hope he learns a lot and teaches it to me!  But more importantly, I hope he has a good experience, full of knowledge and new friends and new opportunities.

--My brother-in-law is making progress towards his dream of relocating to Florida.  Much the way buying a house has changed radically since the last time we bought a house, so has renting a house.  Now the process is full of background checks and credit checks and realtors and references.  But the process is underway for him.

--I'm surrounded by friends who have good publishing news.  It leaves me inspired.  If one--or more!--of us can make it, there's no reason why we can't all make it.

--We are approaching the 1 year anniversary of my spouse's successful back surgery.  I'm grateful for all kinds of things, but this one tops the list.  Every list.

--I will spend time during today's meetings thinking about what great colleagues I have and how lucky I am to spend my work life surrounded by good people.

--I'm ready for a new year with my new laptop.  I love my laptop.  I regret that I had it for several months before I used it, but I'm forgiving myself for that.  I wonder why I think of myself as bad with technology, when I'm really not.  Why should I fear technology?  My experiences have been mostly good.

--It's time to start living more intentionally, to think about my assumptions, to make sure they're still working for me here at midlife.  What writing projects are most important?  What subjects really interest me?  What am I good at?  What should I let go of?

Traveling with Pomegranates and Other Companions

Greetings from one of the only places on the eastern side of North America that's not under some sort of cold weather warning.  It's chillier than normal with a howling wind, but it could be much worse.

I spent the last few days reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor.  It's an interesting joint memoir by a mother and a daughter, each one writing alternate chapters, and it chronicles a time when both of them are at loose ends in terms of what to do next with their lives.

Now you likely know Sue Monk Kidd as the woman who wrote The Secret Life of Bees, but at the time covered by this memoir she has yet to write the book.  She has a desire to be a novelist, but she's doubtful that she can pull it off. She's gone to a writer's conference where she had a famous author dismiss her idea and an agent ask for the manuscript when she writes it.

The two women travel to sacred sites in Greece and France and wrestle with life's big questions.  The mother has just turned 50, while the daughter is in her early 20's, just out of undergraduate school.  They meet interesting people, and they learn interesting history--but what I found most interesting was the process by which Sue Monk Kidd found the courage to write the book that called her name.

She listens to her intuition and offers prayers--both techniques are instrumental to her success.  But she also finds the courage to begin writing, to keep writing, to find a belief in herself.  And it's fascinating to see how the various ideas about Mary and earlier goddess images help her to do that.

If you've been reading this blog, you know that I've been collecting stories of people who come into their own after midlife.  I'm less interested in people in their 20's who find their way--the world is set up for them, although I do remember that time and wouldn't want to go through it again.  No, I want to be assured that it's not too late for me.

I remember falling in love with The Secret Life of Bees and researching Kidd to see what else she had written.  I was puzzled by her spiritual writings and by her unconventional path to fiction publication.  Now I am heartened. 

I must confess, I turned to this book because I really wanted to be reading her latest novel.  I picked up Traveling with Pomegranates as a bargain book when I made an Amazon order.  I thought it sounded interesting, but the price was what persuaded me.

I'm grateful to have traveled with these two women.  I'm grateful for a sense of spirituality that infuses this book.  I'm grateful for its positive messages and its truthful look at the fact that the hard won truths may take time to root in us.  It's not a relentlessly sunny book:  we see these writers wrestle with their fears of aging and death and their feelings of inadequacy.  They don't solve these problems in a page or two.

It's a compelling book for anyone who needs a push to make a change.

A Poem for Epiphany

A Facebook post led me to this poem that I'll post below.  A friend wrote:  "Thinking of the Holy Family's exodus to Egypt and wondering how poorly / how well they slept on the journey."  I immediately thought of refugees of all sorts, of the desert Southwest of the U.S., of T. S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi."

"Journey of the Magi" is quickly becoming my favorite T. S. Eliot poem.  I must confess, there's not much competition for that title.  My undergraduate and grad school self loved Prufrock, My older self is haunted by "The Hollow Men" and enchanted by "Journey of the Magi."

To read that poem, or better yet, to hear Eliot read it, go here.

And here's my take on it all.


Flights of the Family

                     

“A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey”

                                    “Journey of the Magi” by T. S. Eliot

A cold coming we had of it,
the desert floor like an abandoned
sea bed, the cactus hobbling
our efforts, a murderous dictator behind
us, uncertainty ahead, only vague
warnings by an angel to serve as a guide.

We moved by night with a foreign sky
stretched above us, all celestial navigation
useless.  We detoured around hostile
cities and dirty villages, angels singing
their songs to hurry us forward.
A hard time we had of it.

We stayed several summers amidst the alien
people clutching their gods.  We learned
new ways of foretelling the future
in that temperate valley smelling of vegetation.

But we had to return to the kingdom of Death,
that old dispensation.  I have seen birth
and death, so much death, the nails,
the pieces of silver, the thirty betrayals
that come before every daybreak.
I would be glad of another birth.

Epiphany Eve

Tomorrow is the feast day of the Epiphany, the day that celebrates the arrival of the wise men who come to meet the young Jesus.

Of course, in literary terms, epiphany means something different, although related.

If you want to spend today thinking about epiphanies in literature, we might take a moment and read some of the masters of epiphany, like Flannery O'Connor or James Joyce. Here's what Garrison Keillor says about Joyce and epiphany on The Writer's Almanac:

"Around the time that Irish writer James Joyce was defecting from the Roman Catholic Church, he was investing secular meaning into the word "epiphany." In his early 20s, he drew up little sketches, sort of like "prose poems," in which he illustrated epiphanies. He explained to his brother Stanislaus that epiphanies were sort of 'inadvertent revelations' and said they were 'little errors and gestures — mere straws in the wind — by which people betrayed the very things they were most careful to conceal.' He also wrote that the epiphany was the sudden 'revelation of the whatness of a thing,' the moment when 'the soul of the commonest object ... seems to us radiant.'

It was a literary device that James Joyce would use in every story in his collection Dubliners (1914), a technique that he would become known for and that many modern writers would emulate. Joyce's Dubliners ends with a story set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany, 'The Dead,' and the story ends: 'His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'"

I tend to think of the use of epiphany as limited to fiction or essay writers, but I'm sure I'm wrong.  Could it be a poetic device too?

Or maybe we're tired of living in our heads.  Maybe it's time for some bread dough!

Many cultures celebrate Three Kings Day with a special bread.  Many families have charms that are baked into the bread that signify what will come in the new year.  Even if you don't have special charms, you could use things you do have:  a nut, a foil wrapped coin, a dried cranberry, a piece of frozen fruit.

This blog post gives you a recipe, with photos, for a simple, no-knead 3 Kings Bread.  Why not bake it for tomorrow?

As you bake the bread, you might ponder the word "epiphany" and all its variants.  What epiphanies do you need/knead for the coming year?

From Lumbering to Limbering

It has been a strange week.  My cold has reasserted itself.  Yes, for the 3rd time in a month.  The second time was just more of a bother, but this 3rd time has come with hacking and muscle aches.  I think I'm about done with this round.  Hopefully it will be the end.  Time for more nutritious living and more water and more exercise--the things which I hope keep the diseases at bay.

Let me note some other highlights and low points of the week.

--The printer that has been most reliable ran out of ink.  But that ended up being a good thing.  We discovered that the other printer, the one that is supposed to be wireless but has only been working the old-fashioned (wired) way since we moved, can communicate with the laptops wirelessly.  I'm not sure what's going on with the desktop computer, but it's quickly becoming a huge storage unit, a back-up drive that's not portable or small. 

--I didn't have to do anything to let my new laptop know of the existence of the wireless printer.  It just introduced itself.

--Oh, to be a laptop, with no fears that one will be rejected, no knowledge of better machines, no anxiety about inabilities.

--I have this vision of my laptop as a puppy of sorts. 

--While I'm thinking of technology, let me remember a moment from yesterday at the office.  I had about 20 PDF files open.  A line drifted through my brain:  "All your PDFs cannot save you now."  I hope it's just a line and not a premonition.

--I've had a great week of poetry writing.  May it be a foretaste of the feast to come.

--The holiday lights are slowly disappearing from the neighborhoods.  I'm trying not to be sad about that.

--It feels strange getting back to work.  It's time to start thinking about my online classes too.  My work brain feels creaky.

--Yes, it's time for a limbering up of all sorts.

--Today at spin class, we do "Jump Fest 2014."  We'll do 2014 jumps before it's all over.  I don't mind the jumping; the spin class move I hate the most is sprinting.  No, I could jump all day long; it's the counting of the jumps that drives me crazy.

--May 2014 be a limbering of all sorts!

Eliot and Coleridge: Mash Up and Erasure

On Wednesday, after I wrote this post about my experimenting with mashing Eliot's "Journey of the Magi" and Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," I decided I wanted to experiment with erasure.

I've been following Dave Bonta's experiment with erasing the journal entries of Samuel Pepys.  At first, to be honest, they puzzled me.  I didn't like the poems that resulted as well as I liked the poems he had been writing about tools or the banjo.  I wanted him to return to writing original poems.  But over time, the erasure poems intrigued me more and more.

So, on Wednesday, I turned to his blog for guidance.  I read this blog post of his, and decided to give it a try.

Below are the two poems, two lines at a time, from the end of both poems.  I started with Coleridge.  Below you can see the original words and what I chose to keep. A note:   I've got spaces in there between lines that I can't get rid of.  And then, below this, you'll see the lines I kept written in a more standard poem form.

 

 

For he on honey-dew hath fed
And drunk the milk of Paradise

With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation

And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!

But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,

That with music loud and long
I would build that dome in air,

This set down
This: were we led all that way for

Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down

Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me

And arriving at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you might say) satisfactory

It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued

A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The milk of Paradise

With an alien people clutching their gods.
Weave a circle

in the old dispensation
this Birth
Hard and bitter agony for us,
music loud and long
symphony and song,
revive within me
a miracle of rare device,

--------------------------------------------------


What have I learned from this experiment?  I'm still unsure.  But it was fun, and it will be interesting to see if they lead to other interesting poems as they percolate in my brain.

In my goal to write more poems this year, do I count these experiments as poems?  Not really.

I decided to try to write a new poem, which I did, a poem I probably wouldn't have had, if I hadn't spent time playing with "Journey of the Magi" and "Kubla Khan," plus a reading of Eliot's "The Hollow Men" for good measure and a nod to Prufrock.

Discernment


The old dispensation cannot save
you now.  Hard and bitter agony.
Eat stones for breakfast,
crack your teeth before sunrise,
it makes no difference.
Suckle the camels who cannot eat cactus,
wait for the silken girls with their sherbert,
no one will sing to you.

You must listen for a different song.
Plug your ears against the angel chorus.
Put away the mandolin and fiddle.
Listen for the stars' quiet plainsong.
Follow the single note.

Leave death's twilight kingdom.
Enter the deep midnight,
a land you hoped
would be a temporary sojourn.
Learn the new landscape with only
your fingertips for navigation.

Is any of it good?  The older I get, the more I shrug.  I'll let others decide.  Does it have potential?  Sure.  Every piece of writing has potential.  Will it live up to its potential?  Stay tuned!