Showing posts with label The Gift Outright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Gift Outright. Show all posts

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Hushed October Morning

Tina & Alastair's Backyard Paradise
See the little heart hanging in the lower right corner?
October 2016


Robert Frost has given us so many unforgettable lines of poetry,
including this beguiling invocation to October . . .

"O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know."


. . . which appears on my

Current Post ~ "Bright Blue October"

@ The Fortnightly Kitti Carriker

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Previous Frost Posts

"A Time to Talk"
~ "No, not as there is a time to talk . . .
I go up to the stone wall / For a friendly visit."

"After Apple Picking" ~ "But I am done with apple-picking now. . . .
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight . . . "
[See also: "Harvesting" & "Ten Thousand Thousand"]

"Gathering Leaves" ~ "But a crop is a crop,
And who's to say where / The harvest shall stop?"

"Christmas Trees" ~ "A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell . . . "

"Departmental" ~ "Go bring him home to his people. . . . Lay him in state . . . Wrap him for shroud in a petal. / Embalm him with ichor of nettle."

"The Gift Outright" ~ "Something we were withholding made us weak / Until we found out that it was ourselves / We were withholding . . ."

"Mending Wall"
~ "Something there is that doesn’t love a wall . . .
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'"

"Nothing Gold Can Stay" ~ "Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold."

"Fire and Ice" ~ "Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice."

April 2017

Tuesday, November 8, 2016

No Quandary

Wearing my sterling silver "Duke" earrings,
except today they stand for "Democrat." Thanks Ben

On "America's Choosing Day,"
everyone should read Walt Whitman & Robert Frost.

How to decide?

First of all, I do not think of Hillary Clinton as the "lesser of two evils." I think Donald Trump is vile (an anagram of evil). Hillary Clinton is neither of those things. No contest in my mind. However, even if one is of the "lesser of two evils" position, what is the quandary? Has there ever been any nobility in choosing the greater of two evils?

Second, as adults, every day, our lives are filled with a series of choices for lesser evil. (E.g., killing all the ants on the kitchen floor feels kind of evil, but allowing them to continue living there seems even worse.) Many of our beloved and well respected Presidents have made choices for lesser evil when presented with two or more imperfect choices.

Except in the world of cartoons, we are rarely granted the luxury of a choice for perfectly good vs pure evil. In real life, and even in good fiction, the choices and conflicts are always more complicated and problematic than that.

My well - respected brother,
The Rev. Bruce Carriker, agrees:

So, here's the decision some people are still wrestling with:

A distrusted, dislikable individual who, despite some really questionable judgment, has been cleared not once but twice of wrongdoing by the FBI; and has been investigated eight times by her political opponents in Congress for her actions as Secretary of State, without a single charge being filed;

or

A serial adulterer; racist, misogynist bully who threatens to jail his opponents; banishes the press from his campaign events if he doesn't like their coverage; admires political despots in other countries; says he may turn his back on our allies; wants to cut taxes for his rich friends; doesn't pay taxes himself; boasts about what certainly sounds like sexual assault; mocks the disabled; operates a fraudulent "charitable foundation" for his own personal gain; bribes at least two states attorneys general to drop investigations of his fraudulent "university"; says the judge in his "university" fraud case is unqualified simply because of his race; questions the patriotism of Gold Star parents because of their religious faith; calls Latinos rapists and murderers; and wonders, if we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?

How this is even a decision seemingly reasonable people have to think about is simply beyond me.
[Click for further thoughts]

And if you don't believe us,
how about Hadley Freeman,
writing for the Guardian:

" . . . the media promoted false equivalencies throughout this campaign to a degree never before seen.

On Tuesday, the Times headlined its editorial about the election “Tough Choice”, as if the decision between a woman who used the wrong email server and a racist, sexist, tax-dodging bully wasn’t, in fact, the easiest choice in the world. Clinton’s private email server was covered more ferociously than Trump’s misogyny. That Clinton had talked at Goldman Sachs was reported as a financial flaw somehow analogous to his non-payment of tax. However much people want to blame the Democrats, their voters or Clinton herself, the result of this election is due at least as much to anyone who pushed the narrative that Clinton and Trump were equally or even similarly “bad”.

Shame on them. The most qualified candidate in a generation was defeated by the least qualified of all time. That is what misogyny looks like, and, like all bigotries, it will end up dragging us all down."


A Vision for Election Day!
Thanks for the bulletin page Good Shepherd ~
Chapel of the Good Shepherd!

"And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision,
and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it."

Habakkuk 2:2, KJV
Pride was not made for men, nor furious anger for them that are born of a woman. They that fear the Lord are a sure seed, and they that love him an honourable plant: they that regard not the law are a dishonourable seed; they that transgress the commandments are a deceivable seed. Among brethren he that is chief is honorable; so are they that fear the Lord in his eyes. The fear of the Lord goeth before the obtaining of authority: but roughness and pride is the losing thereof.
Ecclesiasticus 10: 18 - 21, KJV

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Mardi Gras: Don't Hold Back

Sam's Multi - Dimenionsional Mask Project, 3rd Grade

“You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world,
that is something you are free to do
and it accords with your nature,
but perhaps this very holding back
is the one suffering you could avoid.”

Franz Kafka

"Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding . . ."

Robert Frost

These cautionary words against withholding seem to be true in so many ways: personal communication, relationships, growth, ambition, dreams and desires. Or how about my life - long To - do list? What I withhold from it all is what makes me weak, and the biggest weakness of all is how long it takes me at every single juncture to realize that indeed it is myself I am withholding. When will I ever learn to live and let live, to "give myself outright"?

The Gift Outright
The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.


Robert Frost, 1874 - 1963

Sadly Frost's poem only works at the National level if we suspend for a moment the painful knowledge that in fact the land, when we arrived, was not entirely "unstoried, artless, unenhanced." But that is another story.

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And one more thought from Kafka, 1883 – 1924:
"You may not destroy someone's world
unless you are prepared to offer a better one.
"

"And what you are withholding from the world
is what you are also withholding from yourself
."
Thanks Natasha!
~
More Tolle ~