Estherogen (Hormonal Rhapsody in E)

to a Child dancing in the Wind

2020-04-16T09:51:00.001-04:00

1.
DANCE there upon the shore;
What need have you to care
For wind or water's roar?
And tumble out your hair
That the salt drops have wet;
Being young you have not known
The fool's triumph, nor yet
Love lost as soon as won,
Nor the best labourer dead
And all the sheaves to bind.
What need have you to dread
The monstrous crying of wind?

2.
Has no one said those daring
Kind eyes should be more learn'd?
Or warned you how despairing
The moths are when they are burned,
I could have warned you, but you are young,
So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever's offered
And dream that all the world's a friend,
Suffer as your mother suffered,
Be as broken in the end.
But I am old and you are young,
And I speak a barbarous tongue.

// W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) Responsibilities and Other Poems, 1916.

Expecto matronum

the past 7 and the next 7 years
labor & love

Hans said you're like a bird, and your thought/decision process like firecrackers.
"... but while you're there we appreciate the beauty of your flight, and the delicacy of the wings that ... soar aloft, and we can continue the metaphor much further than it should go, allows you to go places that we can't follow but we can appreciate the fact that you're enjoying the flight... (hilarious, I receive that) We do enjoy the momentary aligning when you perch on our shoulders and the song that you sing while you're there, and then we just hope it's not too long before you land again..."

I thanked Seda for pointing the middle way 13 years ago, and holding my sights, from the beginning to love and honor and be satisfied with the length of that life. She had said butterfly ... And when there's two middle ways? Choose the harder of the two ways (E.E.).

The NYC years will always be precious -- for the gift of separation and self-hood that entered me into the freedom of self-giving, long and deep and wide, of love for neighbor, the fun, the feasts, the revelry, the Church.

thank You for wings. Yours and mine.

Further Up the Stream of Consciousness

2019-03-24T16:29:00.003-04:00

it is not the past as such that produced the present or poses the conditions for the future . . . but the way we think about it. Or even more pertinently, the way in which we deal with it in language.

(Brink, 1998: 33)

Dancing

2019-03-21T08:33:00.002-04:00

out of the dark
dust off the earth
swarming in the sunbeam
murmurating miracle
kissed to life
my happy feet

Hineni:. behold, Me!

2019-03-08T13:49:00.000-05:00

Where You Are
Is sacred

Attention
transfigures
the profane

NDA's are a tool of oppression

2019-02-27T10:08:00.004-05:00

silencing, and erasure.

they are against public policy.

displaceable tenants in a vapidly vanishing world
assimilate
martyr
erase
sweep
dis-member
walking tightropes through histories not our own
permitted to leave no trace, take up no space

they've bound you to an altar
fuel for their falsehoods

sacrifice and offering you do not desire,

but You have given me an open ear

burnt offering and sin offering

You have not required.

where is the book of life?
attendance is taken. your name is pronounced,
as if for the first time.

then i said, Here i am;

in the scroll of the book

it is written of me.

where are you remembered? where is your heart re-corded?
gather me into your story and tell truly of your handiwork.

psalm 40

many days i would rather
be a done deed
a dying sacrifice
than a living offering
work in progress
with sealegs off
the ark bringing all
your heart soul mind strength
to look again

Behold, I Am

making all things Now

Horeb

2018-12-16T10:35:00.002-05:00

whetstone sisyphus thrusts

for gods to sharpen and smooth

mountain sages tongues

holy heyoka

2018-12-16T10:26:00.000-05:00

I am
infinite jest, garrulous with silence.
My heart is a wound
from battering through prison walls
called rib cages
guarding red herrings
called hearts.

// Gary McGee

Die

2018-12-04T16:13:00.000-05:00

the top of the earth the gamblers spin
a dreidle is loaded for eastern light

the game from birth burns blood and oil
bellies get bloated their haste to indict

grasping at mirth the chaser crawls
toward ash, and so did the rest of her might

Calypso or Persephone?

2018-11-12T16:27:00.002-05:00

required is a shibboleth

2018-11-07T12:39:00.002-05:00

if you had no hands and could not see
what kind of artist would you be?

and if you lost your voice entirely
how would you reply the necessity

but obey her with your dying breath

when your faves hang out and talk education in Jacobs, A. (2018)

2018-11-07T11:49:00.003-05:00

I have suggested that the cultural health of Europe, including the cultural health of its component parts, is incompatible with extreme forms of both nationalism and internationalism. But the cause of that disease, which destroys the very soil in which culture has its roots, is not so much extreme ideas, and the fanaticism which they stimulate, as the relentless pressure of modern industrialism, setting the problems which the extreme ideas attempt to solve. Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.
—T. S. Eliot, 1944

To all of us, I believe, in the middle of the twentieth century, the Roman Empire is like a mirror in which we see reflected the brutal, vulgar, powerful yet despairing image of our technological civilization, an imperium which now covers the entire globe, for all nations, capitalist, socialist, and communist, are united in their worship of mass, technique and temporal power. What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash but that . . . it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth or hope.
—W. H. Auden, 1952

1943

Jacques Maritain, age fifty-six, philosopher and theologian, is in Paris, embroiled in a heated dispute with his fellow Catholic Paul Claudel over Maritain’s support for the leftist rebels in the Spanish Civil War.

Thomas Stearns Eliot, age fifty, poet and editor, is in London. He continues his work for the publisher Faber & Faber; he signs up to serve as an air-raid warden in Kensington, where he has a flat.

Clive Staples Lewis, age forty, Fellow of Magadlen College, Oxford, is in Stratford-upon-Avon to give two lectures on Shakespeare, though the second is canceled after the news comes that Germany has invaded Poland.

Wystan Hugh Auden, age thirty-two, poet, having left his native England for New York earlier in the year, is in a trashy dive bar, Dizzy’s Club, in Manhattan.

Simone Weil, age thirty, thinker, is ill with pleurisy—she is often ill—and taking a kind of rest cure, with her parents, in the mountains near Nice.

speak for your servant

2018-10-30T23:09:00.004-04:00

Leaning on you for understanding
I fell out the window of mine
And was it that I fell so ill
That I lost your voice?

2018-10-11T17:19:00.001-04:00

It was the word avant la lettre...

the grand forgery

2018-08-08T05:05:00.002-04:00

For Mandela's centenary, a Penn prof writes that for South Africans,

His struggle was our struggle, his imprisonment was our imprisonment, his freedom was our freedom, his equality was our equality, his justice was our justice. He did it in the name of us all.

And it makes me think that all the things I ask in Jesus' name turn on all that He did in the name of us all. A grand forgery that restores my true name, being, humanity.

-----

My days in South Africa are drawing to a close. In 13 days I leave this beloved country. I dread returning to the pace and pressure of not Philly, but Penn. Fieldwork – wherein my sole professional and academic responsibility is to be fully present to and immersed in human interaction, to transcend cultural partitions, to observe deeply and finely, and to inscribe the full humanity of myself and others... Well, this has been rehumanizing and restorative.

Just wandering through.

green pasture eyes don't lie

2018-05-27T09:58:00.003-04:00

She looked frail. She looked scared. She did not look like she does now.

Those looks were deceiving. A boat that has been battered by a storm, sails torn, taking on water, yet still afloat and refusing to sink looks weak and frail. But the reality is that were it not strong, well made, and resilient it would have sunk a long time ago. She is stronger than the eye can see or the mind can understand.

Of the four principle virtues -- courage, generosity, kindness and resilience, one can make a strong case that the most important is resilience. It is the virtue that makes it possible for one to lean into the wind hard enough to continue to demonstrate the other three.

// Steve Edwards

2018-04-18T07:40:00.002-04:00

who is this priest of the muses?

Sythia knew the sun delighted in her

2018-03-28T11:54:00.001-04:00

חבצלת

with sun salutations
she springs awake to day
stands to greet someone
with palms outstretched
she bows and beams

was brown and bare in sleep
now cloaked with eastern light
the desert lotus lily
of the shadow valley light
has returned to rain

yesterday distending underground
light bursts forth from sticks and stone
the doorman sees his crown
in tomorrow

and Sythia wonders how
she ever questioned would
Monsieur stay if she left
in vigil if she slept

why
for sake of love
be buried
crushed
a seed
a rose
seeing the light in her
He, a rose
forgot her not

She, recomposed in love
blooms but soon
will be leaving
again

then
will be falling
again
a sleep

this one is for Sythia
who had him at yellow
forsythia is an "You're Asian!" shrub that arrests my afterwinter gaze

next up in #fakeeytymologies #realnews #flowershavepowerstoo, "Hello, Boris!" ??

home for the weekend

2018-03-20T13:44:00.000-04:00

the leaving behind was hard...

hard prunings dead weight
toxic faucets freezing pipes

kitchen privileges family tables

i went to nyc this past weekend to be a daughter, a sister, an auntie, a mother.

...but the reaping/inheritance are overwhelmingly safe and rich. matthew 19.29

wait, of glory

2018-02-27T06:58:00.000-05:00

easy i'm choked
by the portent
the fright

cede to the surgeon
cross the beam
in my eye

carry your burden
like an oxen
carries flies

take up his yoke
it is laden
with light

heavenly gates

2018-02-20T11:41:00.003-05:00

pointed finger
nails
spears
pierce

the Penetrated

come
in,

He said I'll
give you shelter

in my side
splayed wide

of making many books

2018-02-14T09:19:00.000-05:00

just another Philly mummer
daily getting dumber

King Thamus, to Theuth, on literacy:

"This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."

// Socrates, Phaedrus

languid days, so dull

2018-02-08T07:59:00.001-05:00

but hey, look on the night side
the flask is half full

gargoyles

2017-11-10T20:55:00.001-05:00

Recently my writing was described by a pastor as "...something like gothic architecture—intricate, strong, thematic and it keeps the gargoyles hidden unless you know where to look for them."

I have always found comfort (and mirth) in the shelter of flying butt-resses.

this split second of sweet sovereign Catalonia

2017-10-28T17:19:00.000-04:00

Dolça Catalunya,
pàtria del meu cor,
quan de tu s’allunya
d’enyorança es mor.
...
Adéu, germans;
adéu-siau, mon pare,
no us veuré més!
Oh, si al fossar
on jau ma dolça mare
jo el llit tingués!
el vent que me’n desterra,
que em fa sofrir!
Estic malalt, més ai!,
torneu-me a terra,
que hi vull morir!

Stanzas 1 and 3 of ‘L’emigrant’ by Mossèn Jacint Verdgauer, 1888

Translation by David Block below:

Sweet Catalonia.
Homeland of my heart,
to be far from you
is to die of longing.
...
Good-bye, brothers and sisters;
farewell, my father,
I shan’t see you again!
Oh, if in the graveyard
where my sweet mother lies
I had my bed!
Oh mariners,
the wind that banishes me,
that makes me suffer!
I am sick, and more!,
return me to land,
for I want to die there!

God our Mother

2017-10-18T08:24:00.001-04:00

to be a mother is to suffer
to travail in the dark, stretched and torn
exposed in half-naked humiliation
subjected to indignities
for the sake of new life

to be a mother is to say,
this is my body, broken for you
and in the next instant
in response to the created's primal hunger
"this is my body, take, and eat"

to be a mother is to self-empty
to neither slumber or sleep
so attuned you are to cries in the night
offering the comfort of yourself
and assurances of "i'm here"

to be a mother is to weep
over the fighting and exclusions
and wounds your children inflict on one another
to long for reconciliation and brotherly love
and when all is said and done
to gather all parties– the offender and offended
into the folds of your embrace
and to whisper in their ears that they are beloved

to be a mother is to be vulnerable
to be misunderstood, railed against, blamed
for the heartaches of the bewildered children
who don't know where else to cast
the angst they feel over their own existence
in this perplexing universe

to be a mother is to hoist onto your hips
those on whom your image is imprinted
bearing the burden of their weight
rejoicing in their returned affection
delighting in their wonder
bleeding in the presence of their pain

to be a mother is to be accused of sentimentality
one moment and injustice the next
to be the receiver of endless demands
absorber of perpetual complaints
reckoner of bottomless needs.

o be a mother is to to be an artist
a keeper of memories past
weaver of stories untold
visionary of lives looming ahead.

to be a mother is to be the first voice listened to
and the first disregarded
a mender of broken creations
and comforter of the distraught children
whose hands wrought them

to be a mother is to be a touchstone and the source
bestower of names, influencer of identities
life-giver, life-shaper, empath, healer
and original love.

// from Alison Woodward's poem read aloud on The LiturgistsOctober 17, 2017 episode "God our Mother"