6 skills I retain after 11 treatments of Chemo:
1. Putting on or taking off a turtleneck without losing the toothpick in my mouth.
2. Driving a car with my knees under the steering wheel. (On private farm property. Chemo pain meds keep me off public roads.)
3. Sleeping in any position: prone, supine, curled, sitting.
4. Writing light verse, and sometimes poetry.
5. Helping folks laugh.
6. Praying.
Once again Dennis Aubrey’s writing and photography on Via Lucis Photography of Religious Architecture offers a rare jewell worthy of wider circulation.
Beziers has fallen!
They’re dead.
Clerks, women, children:
No quarter.
They killed Christians too.
I rode out,
I couldn’t see nor hear a living creature.
I saw Simon de Montefort.
His beard glistened in the sun.
They killed seven thousand people!
Seven thousand souls who sought sanctuary
In St. Madeline’s.
The steps of the altar were wet with blood.
The church echoed with their cries.
Guiraut Riquier, troubadour (Translated by Martin Best)
In 1130, the master builder Gervais built a Romanesque cathedral in the thriving episcopal town of Béziers. Built eighty years before Notre Dame de Paris, it had a comparable nave height as that Gothic masterpiece and was 50 meters long. Evidence given at the time indicates that it was a truly remarkable structure but it lasted only 79 years. The Cathedral of Saint Nazaire was burnt to the ground on July 22, 1209.
We went to Béziers in…
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No kneeling after knee replacement,
But can still sit and bow my head–
So not yet
Prayers unanswered for another:
Disease, decline, and death–
But not yet
Aged, depressed, diminished,
But want to see tomorrow’s sunrise–
Still not yet
But when cancer has taken body and mind,
Life is lifeless, no pleasures are left:
Please pray for my peace, not my life.
INTRODUCTION: Views from the Edge posted this piece on April Fools Day, 2016. Perhaps something like this will happen at the presidential town hall meeting tonight.
Orange hair and rude speech are colorful. When a presidential candidate speaks off the cuff in street language, he’s colorful. Like the class clown in junior high school, he’s entertaining. In class, or under the big tent of the three ring circus, the clown captures everyone’s attention. You never know what he’ll do next. He’s colorful.
But sometimes clowns go too far; they push the boundaries of propriety. When a clown offends the crowd, he becomes not only colorful but odoriferous, and nothing can empty a room like an offensive odor. When a clown pretending to be a world leader, wise and substantive, declares that women who have abortions should be punished, but he’s not yet sure how, everyone in the crowd – pro-life and pro-choice alike – is offended by the flatulence.
Today Donald Trump announced the end of his campaign for the GOP nomination. Speaking from the steps of the State Capitol in Madison, WI this morning at 8:30, he took off his “Make America Great Again” hat, brushed back his orange hair, put on his New York Yankees hat, puckered his lips, and declared he never wanted to be president. He just wanted to shake things up. “I’m a businessman,” he said. “The Presidency is for liars and Losers!”
Happy April Fools Day!
The best kind of hug you can find,
Is not from the front, but behind.
Your hands can just squeeze
Whatever they please,
That is if your friend doesn’t mind!
-Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, March 28, 2016
Yesterday Bernie Sanders won big time by over 7o percent in Washington, Alaska, and Hawaii. The bird that alit on Bernie’s podium was not afraid of Bernie. Watch the video.
If I were still healthy and lived in North Carolina, I swear as a 6′ 8″ male, I would put on a dress and high heels and on Easter Sunday go to the biggest Baptist Church in Raleigh and wobble down the center aisle asking for the Ladies’ Room…
If Steve were still healthy and we both lived in North Carolina, I swear as a 5’8″ male, I’d put on a dress and high heels and on Easter Sunday to the biggest Baptist Church in Raleigh to hold Steve’s hand wobbling together down the center aisle asking for the Ladies Room…
On Holy Saturday, the day between Good Friday and Easter, we experience the silence of nothingness.
The sounds of hammers, taunts, and screams, and the sight of three dead men very different in life but equal now in death leave us face-to-face with all that is cruel, hopeless, meaningless – the deep darkness of despair.
This Holy Saturday the world is on full alert. Dread and fear spread. We who live in the aftermath of the latest terror in Brussels experience Holy Saturday – the day between Good Friday and Easter, knowing that only a resurrection can redeem a Good Friday world.
Good Friday is good
not because of the betrayal,
the abandonment,
the suffering and death,
(the denial),
but because of the result:
Easter Sunday.
President Obama’s decision to visit to Cuba and his call to end the U.S. embargo bring me joy. It’s time to “normalize” relationships between our two countries.
But what does normalizing mean between the capitalist super power and tiny island socialist republic 90 miles from the Florida coast? A return to normal or a new kind of normal?
The President’s speech this morning is disappointing. I couldn’t help thinking of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States when he poked the President in the eye in a speech aimed at the American people. This morning Barack Obama did the same in Havana.
The President says he knows the history. He may. But the history he knows is different from the one the Cubans know. When he talks about opening up Cuba, opening up Cuban markets so that Cubans can buy goods and have 21st century jobs, he ignores the reason for the Cuban revolution. The Batista regime was a U.S. puppet. Havana and Veradero Beach were playgrounds for North American capitalists, elites, and businessmen who gambled in the casinos and vacationed on the white sands few Cubans – except for the table-servers, maids, bartenders – ever got to touch.
Cuba was not a democracy under Batista and his predecessors. It was a dictatorship – AND its economy was free-market capitalism with egregious disparities of income and wealth. The majority of Cubans were as poor as the masses in other Latin American banana republics.
An article in The Independent provides the history of the challenges and successes of the post-revolution Cuban government’s literacy campaign and Cuba’s highly praised universal education system.
Will normalizing relations return Cuba to the pre-socialist inequalities that caused the revolution in 1959? Will it mean a return to “normal” – in which the superpower calls the shots while the little brother watches our president embarrass him from center stage?
Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, March 22, 2016
Views from the Edge 