Dreaming

Thinking of the philosopher who did "not know
whether he was then a man dreaming he was a butterfly,
or whether he is now a butterfly, dreaming he is a man."
Zhūangzi (c. 369 BC – c. 286 BC)
For more on this theme see
TODAY'S FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST:
~ Am I Dreaming? ~

Thanks for reading
The QUOTIDIAN KIT and
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

Floor Mosaics, here and above,
at the Wynn / Encore, Las Vegas

Rosh Hashanah: Serious Redemption

You'd Like a Shot at Serious Redemption

You'd like a shot at serious redemption,
Only, like us all, you have no clue.
Mostly satisfied, you leave your pew
Knowing that you've satisfied convention
Instead of being some more painful you.
Perhaps there is no other truth than this;
Perhaps the yearning must be unfulfilled.
Unredeemed, you pay your debts as billed,
Returning to a bliss that dreams of bliss.

Nicholas Gordon

My friend Jacquie says, "What an iconic picture of home."
Thanks Jacquie!

Another kind of redemption:
loving the World, fully and completely:

Equinox

The Garden releases its last
radiance, not as something failed,
but as its full reason for being: to give
continually, to its last bit of energetic being.
Its giving is its beauty. It is a smile,
it is the heart of love.

So the birdsong that surrounds me
is given, not away, but into the world.
It is given as rain, as sunlight, as snowfall
and autumn leaves. It falls on our ears
as what it is, with no deception,
the complete truth of being.

Even the smell of decay, drifting from
the deer, dead by the side of the road, says:
“This is what I am and no other. I do not
pretend to be. Even in death I speak
without deceit, even unto my flesh,
my very bones.”

Be tolerant of these songs,
my musings on the way these things are.
For I cannot give up this Summer except by
giving myself as well, fully and completely,
into the praise of our mutual beauty,
our total loving of the World. [emphasis added]

Richard Wehrman

Homecoming Photo by Ben McCartney
"Home for the first time in 2014!"

Equinoctial and Inscrutable

Inscrutable Houses drawn by Ben & Sam

Sestina
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)
Poet Laureate of the United States, 1949 to 1950
Pulitzer Prize Winner, 1956

A Page From
My Grandmother's Old Almanac

More about Elizabeth Bishop on Previous Posts:
The Inner World of the Dream Character
Elizabeth Bishop: Painter & Poet
Open the Book

Dolls in Literature
The Miniature & The Gigantic

Lost & Found
The Art of Losing

Barely There

New Yorker Cartoon
from the fabulous Roz Chast

"For small creatures such as we
the vastness is bearable only through love."
~ Carl Sagan ~

For more about our place on the planet:
see my current FORTNIGHTLY blog post:
~ Safe Home ~

Dawn or Doom?

This Week at Purdue University

"We humans govern the future
not because we're the fastest or strongest
creature but because we're the most intelligent.
When we share the the planet with creatures
more intelligent than we are,
they will steer the future."

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008
British Science Fiction Writer

Schedule of Events

For more on human weakness and lack of speed:
see my current FORTNIGHTLY blog post:
~ Safe Home ~

***************************
PS. More about the Dawn or Doom Summit:

I attended sessions given by various faculty in agronomy, linguistics, nanotechnology, and visual arts who were all voting Dawn. However, at the end of the day, the keynote speaker, James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era could not be dissuaded from his conclusion of Doom!

Barrat quoted Woody Allen: “Mankind is facing a crossroad -- one road leads to despair and utter hopelessness and the other to total extinction -- I sincerely hope you graduates choose the right road.”

We also watched several movies leading up to the conference -- Transcendence, A.I., Jurassic Park -- and Barrat pointed out that "Hollywood has inoculated us from thinking seriously about the risk of Artificial Intelligence because we've had too much fun letting the humans always win."

Summer Home

On last year's annual walk through the British Pine Forest,
we stumbled upon this little lean - to, or as Ben entitled this photo:
"Summer Home" ~ May 2013
from Chapter 2, "House and Home" (p 29)
in Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World
by Scott Russell Sanders
[see previous excerpt from Hunting for Hope]

The word house derives from an Indo-European root meaning to cover or conceal. I hear in that etymology furtive, queasy undertones. Conceal from what? From storms? beasts? enemies? from the eye of God?

Home comes from a different root meaning 'the place where one lies.' That sounds less fearful to me. A weak, slow, clawless animal, without fur or fangs, can risk lying down and closing its eyes only where it feels utterly secure. Since the universe is going to kill us, in the short run or the long, no wonder we crave a place to lie in safety, a place to conceive our young and raise them, a place to shut our eyes without shivering or dread."

These selections and more on
TODAY'S FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST:
~ Safe Home ~

Thanks for reading
The QUOTIDIAN KIT and
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

Back Before 9 / 11

Ben's 3rd grade field trip to NYC ~ back before 9 / 11
Ben has been a good photographer since he was 8 years old!
He took this one from the Empire State Building in Spring 1999.

Ben & Mom, visiting Ellis Island & Statue of Liberty

Comment from Tanuja Sheth:
A lovely picture and memory of what once was
and also about how much has been taken away. . . .
Innocence lost . . .
Now You Know the Worst

~To my granddaughters
who visited the Holocaust Museum
on the day of the burial of Yitzhak Rabin

Now you know the worst
we humans have to know
about ourselves, and I am sorry,

for I know that you will be afraid.
To those of our bodies given
without pity to be burned, I know

there is no answer
but loving one another,
even our enemies, and this is hard.

But remember:
when a man of war becomes a man of peace,
he gives a light, divine

though it is also human.
When a man of peace is killed
by a man of war, he gives a light.

You do not have to walk in darkness.
If you will have the courage for love,
you may walk in light. It will be

the light of those who have suffered
for peace. It will be
your light.

by Wendell Berry
in This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems

A few years later, Ben's class had another New York City
field trip -- this time to The Cloisters . . .

and a couple of years after that, a visit to The Holocaust Museum,
but I don't have a picture from that trip.

*****************
Previous 9 / 11 Posts

2009: Not a Normal Day

2010: Poem for Today and Tomorrow

2010: 9 / 11 Retrospective (Fortnightly)

2011: Alabaster Cities

2012: My Country's Heart

2013: On the Eve of that Other Perfect Day

2014: Back Before 9 / 11

2016: The Twain

2019: Who Knew?

Sean or Sam?

Six years ago, we took our elderly neighbor along to Sam's confirmation. A bit behind the times when it came to gender roles and clergy, she kept asking me during the service if the bishop was the priest's assistant. I don't think I ever did get her to understand that the Bishop was actually the boss! That is not to say, however, that the Bishop is infallible. For example, when she was blessing Sam, she called him "Sean." Outrageous!

I wrote to ask my friend Nancy Tiederman, herself a priest, who remembers Sam from the day he was born: 'Does this mean that in the eyes of God, his name has been forever changed?'

Nancy sent the following amusing reply: "It means that you and Gerry misunderstood the voice of God when you named him originally and that God has always thought of him as Sean (John) and not Sam-u-EL. Well, so much for dream interpretation. Wouldn't it have been great if Sam had said, 'Excuse me, ma'am, my name is Sam'?

"Since that's the name he was baptized under, I think you are safe in spite of fallible bishops at confirmation. Aren't those three good looking young men! May God and the angels watch over them."

2009 Confirmation Class: Brendan, Sam, Ben

. . . and related posts . . .

July 10, 2011: Good Shepherd

August 28, 2011: Back to School

PS. HAPPY 21st BIRTHDAY, SAM!

********************************

AND THANKS TO NANCY
FOR BEING MY SPIRITUAL ADVISOR

Commonplace Book

"It smells good here," she said.
It did. It had the indefinable smell of a perfectly - kept,
well - loved American home; the smell found nowhere else on earth.
A smell of cleanliness and polish and Ivory soap and potted plants
and baking bread -- the sweet warm smell of simplicity and abundance.
. . . everything in the room felt kind and gentle and safe."

~ Marcia Davenport ~
from The Valley of Decision, 407
[More on my Book Blog]

Regular as clockwork, yet another Fall Semester has arrived, with all the excitement and promise of course descriptions and syllabi! Risking repetition, I thought the beginning of the academic year would be the right time to provide
a thorough outline of my fortnightly initiative on my
CURRENT FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST:
~ "Commonplace Book" ~
Why? Because a blog is a digital journal or Commonplace Book that will be unique to whatever its keeper finds of interest, e.g., the clean metallic lines of the graceful leaves above (photographed earlier this summer at the at the Wynn / Encore in Las Vegas) and Marcia Davenport's blissful description of early twentieth homemaking. How are these apparently random items related? The blogger gets to impose the pattern! That's the beauty of blogging!

Thanks for reading
The QUOTIDIAN KIT and
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

Handed My Own Life

University of Glasgow Coat of Arms

VIA ~ VERITAS ~ VITA
WAY ~ TRUTH ~ LIFE
MENTORS ~ HEROES ~ FRIENDS
[Thanks to Peter Bunder & Good Shepherd for this photo & caption]
In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard vividly describes her initiation into the world of natural science, her early discovery, years before college, "that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself." I love her scenario of revelation, though the indifference of her privileged parents fills me with some misgiving:

“Mother . . . gave me to understand that she was glad I had found what I had been looking for, but that she and Father were happy to sit with their coffee, and would not be coming down [to check out her biology experiment in the basement]. She did not say, but I understood at once, that they had their pursuits (coffee?) and I had mine. She did not say, but I began to understand then, that you do what you do out of your private passion for the thing itself. I had essentially been handed my own life” (148 - 49, emphasis added).

In Homegrown Democrat, Garrison Keillor writes of his education in very similar terms, describing himself as an undergraduate "with no money to speak of and no clear plan for the future but . . . teachers who engage him with gravity and fervor and that's enough. That was the true spirit of the university, the spirit of the professors who loved their work. That was the heart and soul of the place . . . ." He enumerates half a dozen of his most inspirational professors, concluding with a visit to the library where "that Niagara of scholarship holds you in its sway, the deluge and glory of learning, and you begin to see where work and play become one. And imagine working at something you love. And that was how the University of Minnesota gave me life" (94 - 96, emphasis added).

These selections and more on my
RECENT FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST:
~ Handed My Own Life ~

Thanks for reading
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

Paradise

Even lovlier than the Tree of Paradise is the Pomegranate Tree!
Beautiful E-card from Jacquie Lawson

"There is nothing to beat this solace...of reaching age in the company of the other; of speech shared and divided bread smoking from the fire; the unambivalent bliss of going home to be at home -- the ease of coming back to love begun. When the ocean heaves sending rhythms of water ashore...they will rest before shouldering the endless work they were created to do down here in paradise."

~ Toni Morrison
American novelist, b. 1931
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1988
Nobel Prize in Literature, 1993
[see also: Emily Dickinson ~ Eden]

HAPPY 25th ANNIVERSARY ~ to GER from KIT

Twenty - five Years Ago ~ 2 September 1989

The Cake Picture

New Home

Ice Bucket Challenge

Ice Bucket Challenge
ALS Association

PS. HAPPY LABOR DAY!

~ Previous Posts for Labor Day or Thereabouts ~
"Labor Day" ~ 2009
"A Clear Path" ~ 2010
"September Morn" ~ 2011
"DYFJ" ~ 2012
"Don't Work Too Hard" ~ 2013

August Sabbatical

SEE YOU IN SEPTEMBER!

Crossing the Kankakee River at dusk, July 30, 2014,
riding Amtrak from Chicago, IL, to Lafayette, IN.

Front Porches: The Innocence Lost

Detail from The Old Checkered House, 1944
by renowned and unique American folk artist
Grandma ~ Anna Mary Robertson ~ Moses (1860 - 1861)

"All this was before the big supermarkets
and shopping centers and affluent subdivisions
with no sidewalks and the monster highways
and the innocence lost.
It was even before there was television,
and people would not close their doors and shut
their curtains to watch the quiz games or the comedy
hours or the talk shows where everybody talks at once.
We would sit out on our front porches in the hot,
serene nights and say hello to everyone who walked by."
[emphasis added]

from My Dog Skip (p 6 - 7)
by endearing American author and pet - lover
Willie Morris (1934 - 1999)

These selections and more on my
CURRENT FORTNIGHTLY BLOG POST:
~ The Front Porch of My Life ~

Thanks for reading
The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker:
A Fortnightly [every 14th & 28th] Literary Blog of
Connection & Coincidence; Custom & Ceremony

Purdue Snazzy

Photo by Shelley Sacia Ayres ~ Thanks Shelley!
A few years ago, on the invitation for a campus reception, down in the corner where it would usually say something like "Black Tie," it said "Suggested Dress: Purdue Snazzy." I just loved that! Now, whenever we have to get dressed up for a Purdue event, we always say, Purdue Snazzy!

Hail Purdue!
[more fight songs with lyrics!]

To your call once more we rally,
Alma Mater, hear our praise;
Where the Wabash spreads its valley,
Filled with joy our voices raise.
From the skies in swelling echoes
Come the cheers that tell the tale
Of your vic'tries and your heroes,
Hail Purdue! We sing all hail!

Hail, Hail to Old Purdue!
All hail to our old gold and black!
Hail, Hail to Old Purdue!
Our friendship may she never lack,
Ever grateful, ever true,
Thus we raise our song anew,
Of the days we've spent with you
All hail our own Purdue.

When in after years we're turning,
Alma Mater, back to you,
May our hearts with love be yearning,
For the scenes of old Purdue.
Back among your pathways winding,
Let us seek what lies before,
Fondest hopes and aim e'er finding,
While we sing of days of yore.

The Purdue Fight Song, Copyrighted 1913
Music by E. J. Wotowa, Class of 1912
Lyrics by J. Morrison, Class of 1915

P.S.
Purdue's very own Compliment Guys
who rose to national fame back in 2009:

More Compliment Guys ~ National Tour ~ New York Times

*************

My Friend Victoria Amador . . .

. . . knows a thing or two about Purdue Snazzy!

**********

Vickie as a Boilermaker, back in the day!

A Pie For Your Thoughts

Thanks someecards! ~ So many funny choices!
Pie Poem #16

"...the God who shows me unfailing love." Ps. 59:17

Before the hello I was almost without yearning,
yearning for what never was.
Leaving family, so no family, leaving husband, so no
husband, leaving babies, so no babies.

I watch my Gaura plant, pink flowers on long green stems.
two others killed in these harsh winters but this one,
oh this one is taller then I am, strong, swaying, blooming on and on,
It ignored the ninety-eight inches of
snow this year. With mercy,
I kill the aphids on it by
squeezing them to death.

And you,
You have all those things.
It's not for me to ask what do you cherish.
because I already know family and time.
Now I yearn. My Buddha says no yearning.

I look at old poems and I see
drunken illusion more then once.
Excused myself for love.
drop everything love
know nothing love
The Buddha within is not the
Laughing Buddha
sitting in my kitchen window,
watching and waiting for my blueberry pie, or
joy, my peace, my yearning less ness.

The Buddha in the living room says
yearn no more. Is there a weeping Buddha?
No. Effexior stopped the Buddha from any weeping.
He says make a pie to give away.
Give.
Yearning will go.

~ Cate DeLong

Gaura: "Siskiyou Pink"

Further Thoughts From Cate's Nature JournalOut this morning looking at my garden and my neighbor informed me that the bunnies have been eating geranium leaves. We have more bunnies this year because the red tailed hawk moved. He was huge and sometimes when I spotted him watching me (really watching something else) and I got a close up I was amazed of his innate power and how beautiful he was. Saw a Golden Eagle three years ago here also on his way to CVNP (Cuyahoga Valley National Park). That blew me away. There are so many places around here to see wildlife, woods, waterfalls. I can walk to a huge gorge forest with rock caves edging the Cuyahoga River. I can walk to one of the best local yarn stores in the country. I can walk to the donut shop (never have, really) or the library or the river center or the Natatorium and swim. It's pretty perfect: Perfectville. Only us city kids would call it that. And you know how I love the snow.

Grilled corn from my past life, yes, but I've forgotten about it. I don't grill just for me but I think of the Thermidor huge grill we had in my last kitchen. A flick of the grill, a flick of that big fan and grill city. We had a grill vent on the side of the house that was restaurant size. Make grilled corn chowder next time, but use half and half, don't skimp.

Just now I put together a set of storage shelves on wheels that I've been staring at for weeks getting ready to do it. Not at all as hard as I thought it would be --what is? Now finished, and found out why a Philips screwdriver tip is magnetized. Cool. I bought a set of screw drivers last year because I was tired of not having the correct driver.

Back to work. No pie. Making a peach crisp.

P.S.
"We must have a pie.
Stress cannot exist in the presence of a pie."
~ David Mamet ~

See also
"Kiss Pie!" & "Do I Dare To Eat A Peach?"

Water Jar

Woman with Jar by He Qi
[artist's bio / previous post / fortnightly]

*****

We are the sweet cold water,
and the jar that pours. . . .

Those who don’t feel this Love
pulling them like a river,
those who don’t drink dawn
like a cup of spring water
or take in sunset like supper,
those who don’t want to change,
let them sleep

Rumi (1207 - 1273)
Persian Spiritual Sage

*****

Bedouin Women Carrying Water Jars
by John Singer Sargent, 1891

P.S.
Not forgetting Water Jar Boy!
I have loved this story ever since I first read it, many years
ago in Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Thunderbird

Spring Break 1976: This fuzzy photo of me and my friend Joni
is the only one I have that includes a view of my dad's 1956 Thunderbird.
Today would have been my father's 91st birthday, so in honor of the occasion, here is a little story about one of his prized possessions, the peacock blue Thunderbird, seen above, to the right, under wraps. Believe it or not (even now, I can scarcely believe it myself), I was actually allowed to drive the Thunderbird one time in my life, when, for some reason that I can no longer recall, my dad was picking me up late after school instead of my taking the bus. He was driving the T-bird, which in itself was quite out of the ordinary, and although I surely did not have my license yet -- I must have just turned sixteen and had my learner's permit -- he slid over and said, "Why don't you drive home?"

Unlike the girl in the Beach Boys tune, this did not sound to me like "Fun, Fun, Fun." I was honored but puzzled by my dad's unfounded faith in my driving skills, and terrified of causing an accident. Petrified yet anxious to enter into the spirit of the enterprise, I gripped the steering wheel with all my might, having always held the flawed but firm belief that this is the best way to control a moving vehicle, and away we went!

Somehow we managed to arrive home safely with no harm done to the prized car! That afternoon is a happy memory for me now, but I've often wondered if Daddy regretted his offer, especially when I took the left turn from Highway 94 onto Highway N without slowing down, a technique unrealized by me at the time. I bet he was hanging on for dear life and doing a quick mental review of our auto insurance policy while I tried to keep it straight which was the brake and which the gas!

Whew! Crisis averted . . . for a time yet . . .

At Pere Lachaise

Read more about Paris & Pere Lachaise on my
latest Fortnightly blog post,
one of several Summer Travelogues . . .

At Pere Lachaise ~ Steven, Victoria, Kitti, Gerry

Click to see more photos from Steven's album:
Paris Graves

Oscar Wilde's Grave
Thanks to Victoria Amador for Parisian travel tips!

************************

Two Poems by Jim Barnes
from his book ParisVandals

Sitting beside Wilde's
solid block of sandy stone,
I recall two things:

he was earnest and Gide would
not stay where he once had stood.

Flowers at the tomb
are never fresh: today there's
graffiti I see

the first time in all the years
that I have been coming here.

Down and to the right, there Gertrude and Alice lie,
a date and place cut

wrong, another graffitied stone,
and I recall other wrongs

too many artists,
dead, still suffer from; the words
that fools have sprayed on

stone not so much as the words
from the learned living dead.

***********

Finding Oscar Wilde

After the riot in Pére Lachaise, streams
of teenage tourists flood the gates. Shadows
of the plane trees gray their faces. It seems
as if they want to mourn but cannot go
beyond the nervous laughter of rock dreams
and Coca-Cola days. Few drink Nouveau
Beaujolais now: it's just not chic enough.
Two green-haired girls smoke Gitanes and act tough.
We see two others writing Morrison
lives beneath Balzac, in chalk. Our map takes
us past more famous lines and past the sun,
where we pause to grab our breath and then shake
the summer sweat from our hair. Somewhere down
the hill, Abélard and Héloïse wake
again to try to free themselves from the stone
bed they have lain in centuries too long.

All Paris is stone, and there are those graves
everywhere as lonely as Oscar Wilde's
broad tomb. Rioting Morrison fans behaved
as a herd behaves, coming in droves to mill
round redundancy. No solitaire to save
the senseless crowd the agony of hell
showed up. There will never be a crowd round
the other slab where Oscar Wilde kneels down,

the tall wings booked by his writing hand.
Nor need there be. The legend of his life
is not his work. The work, the art, remains.
We lean relaxed upon his stone. At five
we hear the whistles blow for our return,
a prelude to the closing gates and evening
song of sparrows. Leaving we touch a fast
farewell to his high brow and what may last.

You can find more poems of Paris on my post:
"Paris: Ferlinghetti, Fenton & Forche"

And more poems by Jim Barnes on these previous posts:
Quinton Duval, Tomatoes & Gravy,
Missouri Poets, Parallax, No One With a Nose
Penelope, Shakespeare & Co.

A Stemless Flower

Tonight's moon, viewed from my driveway
and looking as pink as the April Moon!

July Moon ~ Full Moon Calendar
#629 ~ I watched the Moon around the House

I watched the Moon around the House
Until upon a Pane—
She stopped—a Traveller’s privilege—for Rest—
And there upon

I gazed—as at a stranger—
The Lady in the Town
Doth think no incivility
To lift her Glass—upon—

But never Stranger justified
The Curiosity
Like Mine—for not a Foot—nor Hand—
Nor Formula—had she—

But like a Head—a Guillotine
Slid carelessly away—
Did independent, Amber—
Sustain her in the sky—

Or like a Stemless Flower—
Upheld in rolling Air
By finer Gravitations—
Than bind Philosopher—

No Hunger—had she—nor an Inn—
Her Toilette—to suffice—
Nor Avocation—nor Concern
For little Mysteries

As harass us—like Life—and Death—
And Afterwards—or Nay—
But seemed engrossed to Absolute—
With shining—and the Sky—

The privilege to scrutinize
Was scarce upon my Eyes
When, with a Silver practise—
She vaulted out of Gaze—

And next—I met her on a Cloud—
Myself too far below
To follow her superior Road—
Or its advantage—Blue—

Another mysterious moon poem by Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886)
Reclusive, prolific American poet (see also)

The Moon Tonight