- a poem by Rudyard Kipling
Cities and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time’s eye,
Almost as long as flowers,Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,The Cities rise again.
This season’s Daffodil,She never hears,
What change, what chance, what chill, Cut down last year’s;
But with bold countenance,And knowledge small,
Esteems her seven days’ continuance To be perpetual.
So Time that is o’er-kind To all that be,
Ordains us e’en as blind, As bold as she:
That in our very death, And burial sure,
Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith, “See how our works endure!”
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Education-a haiku by me
Four years of high school,
eight semesters of college,
and fewer answers.
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N.T. Wright on reclaiming furniture and renewing lives.
April showers bring Mom flowers - a haiku by me
Now, as for Mother,
she was always making Home,
and filling it full
at my death I pray,
not known as religious, but,
a Christ follower
Miss Haviland: Is there any point that you would like to make, aside from the questions that have been brought up to you before and which you’ve answered again tonight?
Mr. Sendak: I love my work very much, it means everything to me. I would like to see a time when children’s books were not segregated from adult books, a time when people didn’t think of children’s books as a minor art form, a little Peterpanville, a cutsey-darling place where you could Have Fun, Laugh Your Head Off. I know so many adult writers whom I would happily chop into pieces, who say, “Well I think I’ll take a moment and sit down and knock off a kiddy book! It looks like so much fun, it’s obviously easy…” And, of course, they write a lousy book!
It would be so much better if everyone felt that children’s books are for everybody, that we simply write books, that we are a community of writers and artists, that we are all seriously involved in the business of writing. And if everyone felt that writing for children is a serious business, perhaps even more serious than a lot of other forms of writing, and if when such books are reviewed and discussed, they were discussed on this serious level, and that we would be taken seriously as artists.
I would like to do away with the division into age categories of children over here and adults over there, which is confusing to me and I think probably confusing to children. It’s very confusing to many people who don’t even know how to buy a children’s book. I think if I have any particular hope it’s this: that we all should simply be artists and just write books and stop pretending that there is such a thing as being able to sit down and write a book for a child: it is quite impossible. One simply writes books.
– Questions to an Artist Who Is Also an Author: A Conversation between Maurice Sendak and Virginia Haviland (a public interview at the Library of Congress held in 1971)
Maurice Sendak, a great inspiration… you will be missed.
I was making breakfast, and then I walked into the den, and Amy said,
“Did you know that today is National Star Wars day?”
“No.”
“May the Fourth be with you.”
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It is very sad when people die, when all people die. To choose to not be sad over the death of some while choosing to be sad over the death of others seems to me tragic, and flawed, though I myself have done so on a number of occasions.
The reason why it is sad is that every time it happens it rings a solemn, menacing bell of victory for Death itself. How can that ever be unsad?
For no matter what a person has done—perhaps they themselves have helped Death by donating others to its cause—that person’s own death, the good they have left behind notwithstanding, seems simply to say, quietly or with much shouting, “Death has won again.”
I think that is how sometimes we can be okay with people dying; we think that Death’s victory over a bad person simply saved other people from that same victory. Which isn’t true, because it seems everyone faces the Defeat at some point or another. Well then, perhaps that person’s death saved the untimely or cruel deaths of innocents. But who can be assured of that? Is not Death the most formidable of opponents?
And anyway, why would we rejoice in Death for any reason at all? There is no lesser of two evils because it represents the basest of them all, no matter whom it chooses to claim, and when.
Consider the words of Simone de Beauvoir:
There is no such thing as a natural death. Nothing that happens to Man is ever natural, since his presence calls the whole world into question. All men are mortal: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
It is an unjustifiable violation. It isn’t right—not physical death, not emotional death amongst relationships, not the mini-deaths that come upon us and that deceive us into thinking they are actually life-giving—none of it is right. It is a curse that must be broken, or else we live as organisms most of all to be pitied. Those who have the capacity to understand the inequities of death more than any other being, and yet still hopeless.
And, though I barely know how to put into a couple of sentences what has been the most incredible victory, the most altering event ever to take place in history—the curse has been broken!! Though it still has power, though it still causes sadness and weariness, it has no ultimate power, and it will be once and for all abolished some day.
When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:
“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?”The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.
remember that time
you cut your finger real bad
and photographed it?
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Washing others’ feet
Humility in practice
Your service today?
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Country store, short stop
hoop cheese and saltine crackers
Manna understood
A fascinating story and the best thing you’ll read today is a story on Homeboy Industries, the passion project of an L.A. priest, who has brought life reboots to hundreds of former criminals.
Excerpt:
It occurred to Boyle during those rides that the biggest problem facing his community…
Dangerous Summer Job - a haiku by me
I was seventeen
almost cut my finger off
accidentally
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I have an issue which is somewhat bizarre, the origins of which are completely lost on me and which causes me much amusement.
There are times when I have trouble making conversation, and in an attempt to do so, I try to think of a cool story to tell from my childhood in order to spark some interesting dialogue. And herein lies the problematic issue aforementioned: Every time that I start to think of a story to tell, the first four words that come to my mind are, “When I was seventeen…” Invariably.
The problem with this is that the the year of time during which I was in fact seventeen does not hold many interesting stories. And thus I rarely have cool stories to tell from my childhood when I am having trouble making conversation, because my thought trail pretty much always ends in frustration and confusion as to what actually happened during that year.
Just this morning I realized that the story that birthed today’s haiku happened when I was seventeen.
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Guest Submission
failure confuses
demoralizes, defeats.
Struck down, not destroyed
A Haiku about Ethnocentrism - by me
Poor foreigners, see,
paid no attention by me,
they are different
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Some flowers wake up
under the moon and the stars
to practice beauty.
