All schools in Minnesota will be closed Monday out of concern for children’s safety. Governor Dayton wants no child left behind freezing at a bus stop. The prediction is 50 degrees below zero with wind chill. Meanwhile, seven-month old Barclay is practicing for his first trip outside in booties. He’s a champ, despite the slur in the narration. He’s attending his first obedience class Monday night in New Germany, MN. Unless they call school off.
The acid smog in the air
rains into rivers
and joins factory sludge
and field chemicals
on their way to the sea.The obscene slime
spreads from ocean
to ocean and from coast
to oily coast.The air cannot wash its
hair because trees and shrubs
have not been replanted
most places by most people.Wood and coal and oil burn on,
rivers are damned, mostly
unfresh water remains
turning a blue planet brown.We humans might see
our world changing,
but we see screens
and windshields more
than we see our skies.
[Thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for her
two recent New Yorker articles
reporting on the research for this.]
Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, January 4, 2014
Tillich Park – “Man and nature belong together…”
Our hearts in the West are well-trained in possessing, controlling, and cajoling reality, bending it to suit our wants. The spiritual culture that accompanies “free market” economics is the drive to acquire and possess. Could our training in the culture of acquisition and possession be like the wall through which the flower breaks in Tennyson’s poem “Flower in the Crannied Wall”?
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson, 1863
The flower lures him. Yet seeking to possess it, he destines its death. Having to possess it, analyze it “root and all”, he destroys the magnificent beauty that had drawn his eye.
Having and being are not the same. Only being is filled with wonder. Perhaps that is why Christmas Eve Candlelight services are packed with people who otherwise are not drawn there. There is a beauty to the story and the natural light which lifts yearning hearts from the wintry chill of an having into the warmth of wonder beyond our control or possession.
A sonnet is made up of fourteen lines
With just ten syllables in each of them–
Which means for people reading on their phones
Some lines are split–which really is a shame.Almost all of old sonnets had a rhyme
On every other line for the first twelve.
Which works just fine almost all of the time,
But sometimes words are very hard to melve…The first four lines of this end with “half-rhyme.”
This is a trick that helps a poet make
More choices–not repeating all the time
The same old rhyme… A sonnet may then takeAn image to go far beyond the words–
Though some seem quite forced: two flying birds!
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, New Years Day, 2014
New Year’s Eve.
Every calendar with its years is a culture’s invention, a way of breaking the eternal rolling of sunrises and sunsets into an order that suits our needs for what?
For celebration? For budgets? For control? For forgiveness? For hope?
All of the above and more?
Between the passing of one year and the dawning of another we sense a shifting, the movement of something that does not exist: time, the human way of marking turf in the eternal rolling of the spheres.
The tides of time pay no attention because, like time itself, the tides are timeless. They know nothing of us. They ebb and flow in ceaseless rounds of who knows what. And we, standing on the shore’s edge between two tides awaken again to the sense of wonder before what we do not control.
Perhaps Isaac Watts had something like that in mind when he paraphrased Psalm 90:
Before the hills in order stood,
or earth received its frame,
from everlasting thou art God
to endless years the same.A thousand ages in thy sight
are like an evening gone,
short as the watch that ends the night
before the rising sun.Time, like an ever rolling stream,
bears all its sons away;
they fly forgotten as a dream
dies at the opening day.Our God, our help in ages past,
our hope for years to come,
be thou our guard while life shall last,
and our eternal home.
– Isaac Watts, 1719
Since the middle of the 19th century, Watt’s paraphrase has been sung to the tune of St. Anne, named after the London parish where Watts was organist. Click HERE for more on Sir Isaac Watts.
Have you recalled the fun we had
All those long years ago? So young,
Poor, ignorant a girl, a lad–
Perhaps our song would not be sung,
Yet we would gather, drink, and play.Not caring what the hours were,
Enjoying ourselves every day,
We danced and laughed our fears to cure.Years have gone by and yet we know
Each time we meet our smiles will show
Awareness of what they forgave:
Real kindness, all our lives to save…
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, December 30, 2013
Shopping is getting dangerous in America. Okay. So. “How do you know?” you might well ask.
Mark Andrew before beating at the Mall
Mark Andrew after shopping at the Mall of America
2) An old college classmate wrote today on a popular social media venue that ends in ‘k’ that she stopped in at the local Walmart because she knew they would have the plastic product she wanted. A fight broke out in the Walmart among four people – two guys and two women – yelling and going after each other while store’s employees tried to break it up. She was afraid someone was going to pull out a gun when someone yelled “Police!” and the culprits ran for the exits. – Dec. 28, 2013.
Responding to my friend’s Walmart shopping experience on a popular social media site, her friends all but mugged her in cyberspace for shopping at WalMart, which, by the way, is pretty much against my friend’s own principles.
Conclusions
1) It’s gettin’ ugly out there at WalMart and the Mall of America. We want stuff. We want it fast and cheap, even at others’ expense. As if that weren’t enough, sometimes the fights break out on our own computer screens about who’s been naughty and who’s been nice.
2) Shopping is bad for our health. Next time I shop some place that violates my conscience or someone else’s and a fight breaks out, I’m not posting it on the social media site that ends in ‘k’. Besides, I’m a coward; the next time someone steals my out-of-date cell phone, they can have it. I’m leaving the Mall and WalMart for the locally-owned shops, if only I can find one.
“Just as the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say ‘thou shalt not’ to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills.” – Pope Francis, TIME Person of the Year, Nov. 29, 2013
The economic disciples of Ayn Rand’s “virtue of selfishness” – many of whom attend Mass or other Christian worship services on Sunday only to act on Monday as though they never had – have met their match in Time‘s Man of the Year. Economics is a spiritual matter – first, last, and always. Thank you, Pope Francis for speaking the truth with clarity.
Yes, Race Street went from north to south
in front of my high school. I’d drive
each day from home and risk the wrath
of Mr. Rice when I’d arrive
five minutes late because I’d wait
for both the Larson twins who lived
with three more brothers down the street.
No, that was fifty years ago
and now I live a half mile east
of Race Street, but each day still go
that way to town. I drive right past
the football field where we would cheer
and hold the hands of those we loved.
How did we get from there to here?
– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, December 28, 2013
Views from the Edge 