though the story never ends

Somewhere Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it's a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it's a way of making contact with someone else's imagination after a day that's all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.


--Nora Ephron

Celestial Soundtrack

Sunday's Song: Advent Flash Mob

Wopila!

Sunday's Song

Veterans Day

“All we wanted to know was who the bad guys were. But nobody knew. We were getting picked off one by one and we couldn’t find the bad guys. Some guy who was helping you during the day might kill you at night. The enemy didn’t wear uniforms. Far more innocent people got hurt than anyone else. It wasn’t malicious. It was just legitimately confusing situations. When you’re driving to a meeting and a car bomb explodes, suddenly every car looks like a bomb. And you’re surrounded by cars. And anybody could have a suicide vest. And you’re surrounded by people. It was threat overload. And it was mentally exhausting."


There are nearly 2.5 million post-9/11 veterans in the United States.




In August,  Humans of New York partnered with Headstrong project and shared stories of American veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 





The HONY series is here.




And this is where you can learn more about Headstrong.
It's a veteran founded organization whose mission is to cut the red tape and give top notch care to those who seek it. 
Free of cost, free of bureaucracy. 
If you are looking for a way to give back today, this is a great organization to support. 

Loveliest Leonard

Go ahead Mr. Wendell

To treat life as less than a miracle is to give up on it.



--Wendell Berry

da Mudder and da Fadder and a breadroll and some Nutella

If Olympic coverage is overwhelming you, just watch the important parts.


This, for example:

Food, Water, Mountains

“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”


--John Muir, Our National Parks

Be Here Now(ish)

Sunday's Song with Super Seniors!

Precepts

"We carry within us the wonders we seek around us."


--Thomas Browne, Sir

a conversation on imagined satisfaction

There is the conversation between Bill Moyers and Pema Chodron, and then there is the conversation that Pema has with herself. 


So much beauty in how she uses herself as both teacher and student. 


Ever learning and ever teaching what she learns. 

firefly

Float

Sun's Up

Relearn astonishment
                          stop grasping for knowledge
                                                    lose the habit of the past.


Elias Canetti



(First instruction takes care of needing the other two.)

murmuramazement

Blaising through time

We think very little of time present; we anticipate the future, as being too slow, and with a view to hasten it onward, we recall the past to stay it as too swiftly gone. We are so thoughtless, that we thus wander through the hours which are not here, regardless only of the moment that is actually our own.


--Blaise Pascal

Sunday's Song

NW

Walking through produce, pass 5 men in blue pants, white shirts, standing in front of empty shelves. 
The are discussing the new Natural Foods section that is going to be implemented.
One man says, "What color do you think we should make it?"


Another answers, "Blue?"


There is a silence.


"Blue is good." 


A general shrugging, nodding. 


NW. 

NW

In line to check out, holding three things.  There are two lanes open.  Side by side.


Both lanes are empty. 


I place my three items on the belt.  The cashier in this lane is in a conversation with the next cashier.  About her break.


Cashier #2 is leaning back and talking with her.


My three items remain on the belt.
 
There is a pause in the conversation.  Cashier #1 turns toward me, moves her hand as though about to scan my items.   Has another thought.  Turns to relay it to cashier #2, as her hand drops.  I just got faked out.  She was like, I'm about to scan your items.  Psyche!


"Hi," I say.


The cashier sighs.  I have interrupted her.


NW. 

Not Wegmans

It was recently confirmed that Wegmans is Queen Ruler of the Universe. 


Publics Publix came in second. 




There is another grocery store that will never make the rating scale.  Ever.  It just will never happen, but I feel they need some attention. 


I have vowed not to shop there because they are so deeply Not Wegmans, but still, due to location location location, I sometimes run in for a loaf of bread, a bottle of milk, a stick of butter.


And every single time, I leave with an experience.  No two the same. 


And every single time, I think, "This would never happen at Wegmans." 


Tonight, while passing the produce department, a woman was loudly telling a man, "If I was straight, I'd get with you.  But it's just not that way."


The man pulled out his wallet, opened it, starts to take out a bill.


The woman said, "Get the #@&! out of here!"


The man quickly put his wallet away, saying, "I'm just playing, you don't have to get all mad."


NW.

Sunday's Song

Midwinter spring is its own season

Although I'm thinking that technically, if T.S. Eliot lived in Western NY, it would have been titled Midspring Winter...for that poetic time when the Spring Equinox has passed, the winter boots are set aside to be stored (not so pompous as to store them yet )  the thick gloves exchanged for thin ones...and then a week into April, a fresh blanket of white covers everything, and then two more down comforters of white are added, and the boots are back and the thick gloves too and hope does not spring eternal, but Spring Hope is eternal. 


This is not about eternal winter though.  This is about an obituary I read titled The Meaning of Meaning, and it brought to mind the oft quoted line:  And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started  /And know the place for the first time


 Or as a friend once said, "When you are 80 or older, you'll look back and see exactly how one thing led to another and everything will make perfect sense."  And I thought GollyDarn that is a long time to wait for things to make sense.  And anyway, what if that is just wrong? 


Perhaps instead of looking back to see where one experience feeds another and grows us this way and that, it is safe (and maybe pompous ) to say that purpose is beyond the end we figured:


If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured


Back to The Meaning of Meaning:  this man got past 80 and I daresay, he circled and learned and grew and taught all in a life's work.  Lovely piece. 

Sunday's Song, and Anna's Dream

An adaptation of Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, sung by Ben Harper





I dreamed marvellously. I dreamed there was an enormous web of beautiful fabric stretched out. It was incredibly beautiful, covered all over with embroidered pictures. The pictures were illustrations of the myths of mankind but they were not just pictures, they were the myths themselves, so that the soft glittering web was alive.  There were many subtle and fantastic colours, but the overall feeling this expanse of fabric gave was of redness, a sort of variegated glowing red. In my dream I handled and felt this material and wept with joy....
And now I was standing out in space somewhere, keeping my position in space with an occasional down-treading movement of my feet in the air....
I was too sick and dizzy to look down and see the world turning. Then I look and it is like a vision - time has gone and the whole history of man, the long story of mankind, is present in what I see now, and it is like a great soaring hymn of joy and triumph in which pain is a small lively counterpoint. And I look and see that the red areas are being invaded by the bright different colours of the other parts of the world. The colours are melting and flowing into each other, indescribably beautiful so that the world becomes whole, all one beautiful glittering colour, but a colour I have never seen in life. This is a moment of almost unbearable happiness, the happiness seems to swell up, so that everything suddenly bursts, explodes - I was suddenly standing in peace, in silence.


---Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook

Saturday's Song: Below my Feet

Reading of this year's washing of the feet brings this song to mind.
"Keep my eyes to serve, my hands to learn..."

Friday's Song

speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world

This little boy recites the poem Litany, by Billy Collins, in a whole new way.

He is not only the sound of rain on the roof; he also happens to be the shooting star.

Sunday's Song

Wonderful Wednesday

To Edmond, Wherever You Are

Earlier this week I was cleaning out the garage because there is no task more enjoyable when it is -6. As I moved a few boxes, I noticed a pink and purple heart made of construction paper. It was on the ground, next to a frozen footprint. The construction heart read


BE MINE.



The reverse side held a message inked in red marker.

I brought it in and added it to what my daughter calls The Hall of Hearts. Which is exactly what it sounds like.

When she got home, she immediately noticed the new heart, read one side, flipped it over, read the other side, then asked, "Who's Edmond?"

"I don't know."

"Well who's Christina?"

"I don't know that either."

I told her where I found it and we speculated on how it got there, and whether Edmond had ever received the heartfelt message or if he wandered the world unaware.




Edmond,
Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
You are sometimes annoying,
but that's what I love
about you!
Happy Valentine's Day.
Love,
Christina

Sunday's Song

Onederful

Ten minutes with a 2 year old

And you'll be coming up with answers you didn't even know were possible to questions you hadn't pondered in years.

A lateetee tie tee-tie tee-tie!