Breaking my silence

 Silence was due to my preoccupation with the courtyard garden and my addiction to my phone.  Sad.

In June, after I returned from Cape May on the third, I did a lot of planting: Bee Balm, Phlox,Blue Lobelias, White Lantanas, a line of colorful snapdragons and 2 petunias in the center circle.  I also suffered with the heat and humidity that all here are enduring.

I watered the garden when the grounds guys weren't . 

I had my own silent 8 day retreat  here June11-19, with twelve or so other sisters.  The retreat master was an 80 something Vincentian priest who is a legend in the community for his leadership and service both here and in China and Taiwan, and his theological writings.  Many of the sisters loved his homilies, but I thought they were way too long.  

Finally the retreat was over, and I continued sweating it out in the garden.

I was also watching Season 4 of "The Chosen" which  was finally released to tv.  It was just as moving as the previous 3 seasons. Jonathan Roumie, the actor who plays Jesus,  is truly wonderful.   He has become even more invested in his relationship with Jesus and prayer, and it shows in his work.

June was also occupied with the unpleasant tasks of visits to the dermatologist, the dentist, and the podiatrist.

June 27 , there was a Presidential Debate on TV.  Donald Trump and President Joe Biden. It was a catastrophe for Joe Biden.  He is 81 years old and is really a shadow of his former self, especially regarding his ability to think on his feet.  Trump jumped all over him. Everyone I know ( at least those who are not Trumpers) were devastated and depressed. A few days later, President Biden announced his withdrawal from being the Democratic presidential candidate.  A few days after that, he endorsed his vice-president, Kamala Harris, to take his place a the Democratic candidate for the presidency.

I welcomed this news, as did everyone but Trump!  Then Kamala named Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota to be her running mate. I think he is an excellent choice.

So, as the weeks have gone on, and July arrived, she is rising in the polls.   I pray for her every day!

Mary vVincent and I drove out to Evansville for the July 19-24 retreat.

More later.  I HOPE I get the energy to return!

Dangerously high heat for days

 So It's been a whole month since I've written here.  No excuses.

Cape May was wonderful as usual.  I can't do the long walks through the nature trail anymore, but I do know the regular visitors I would see if I could:  the yellow warblers,  the yellow-breasted Chat, the Common Yellowthroat, to name a few.

Then I was in my annual 8 day silent retreat, this time back home in Emmitsburg.  It was a "preached retreat" which means we were hearing a conference from a Vincentian priest every day.  He talked way too long, though the content was very good.

Again I became aware how irritated I get with the extroverts.  More on that another time.

Then I was sleeping in the afternoons and getting up early to tend the garden, which is the best it's ever been.

I have to go out there now and water.  Here are some photos from the garden, and some other neat pictures.

Things Time has Taught me

 another quotable from a Facebook post:

 THINGS TIME HAS TAUGHT ME.
1. Most of our life is spent chasing false goals and worshipping false ideals. The day you realise that is the day you really start to live.

2. You really, truly cannot please all of the people all of the time. Please yourself first and your loved ones second, everyone else is busy pleasing themselves anyway, trust me.

3. Fighting the ageing process is like trying to catch the wind. Go with it, enjoy it. Your body is changing, but it always has been. Don’t waste time trying to reverse that, instead change your mindset to see the beauty in the new.

4. Nobody is perfect and nobody is truly happy with their lot. When that sinks in you are free of comparison and free of judgement. It’s truly liberating.

5. No one really sees what you do right, everyone sees what you do wrong. When that becomes clear to you, you will start doing things for the right reason and you will start having so much more fun.

6. You will regret the years you spent berating your looks, the sooner you can make peace with the vessel your soul lives in, the better. Your body is amazing and important but it does not define you.

7. Your health is obviously important but stress, fear and worry are far more damaging than any delicious food or drink you may deny yourself. Happiness and peace are the best medicine.

8. Who will remember you and for what, become important factors as you age. Your love and your wisdom will live on far longer than any material thing you can pass down. Tell your stories, they can travel farther than you can imagine.

9. We are not here for long but if you are living against the wind it can feel like a life-sentence. Life should not feel like a chore, it should feel like an adventure.

10. Always, always, drink the good champagne and use the things you keep for ‘best’. Tomorrow is guaranteed to no one. Today is a gift that’s why we call it the present. Eat, Drink & Be Merry.

Donna Ashworth

 

Art by Grace Slick -  White Rabbit

Artist: Vicki Sawyer

I don't get old, I get wise

 This came to me today on Facebook:

AGING....

You grow old, they told me, you are no longer you, you become distant, sad and lonely.

I didn't answer...

I don't get old, I get wise.

I stopped being what others like me to become, but what I like to be.

I stopped seeking the acceptance of others and accepted myself.

I have left behind the lying mirrors that deceive mercilessly.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I just become more selective with places, people, customs and ideologies.

I have let go of attachments, unnecessary pain, toxic people, sick souls and rotten hearts... bitterness and unhappiness are not for me, I release them for my health.

I'm ditching party nights for learning and embracing insomnia.

I stopped living stories and started writing them, I threw aside the imposed stereotypes.

I no longer carry eyeshadow in my bag, now I have a book that beautifies my mind.

I exchanged wine glasses for coffee cups, forgot to idealize life and started living it.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I carry freshness in my soul, innocence in my heart, and it discovers me daily.

I have in my hands the tenderness of a cocoon that, when opened, will spread its wings to other places unreachable for those who seek only the frivolity of the material.

I have that charming smile on my face when I observe the simplicity of nature.

I carry in my ears the chirping of the birds that delight me and accompany the walk.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I become selective, betting my time on the intangible, rewriting the story I've been told, rediscovering worlds, saving those old books I've forgotten half open.

I'm becoming more cautious, I've stopped the outbursts that teach me nothing, I'm learning to talk about transcendent things, I'm learning to cultivate knowledge, plant ideals and falsify my destiny.

- No, I'm not getting old.

I begin to live who I really am........

Bianka Luz

artist"  Catrine Weitz-Stein

artist:  Jen Norton

Didi and Gogo -   I each "Waiting for Godot"  in my Modernity class.  

 

We're never alone

 Here's a passage from an essay by Tobias Wolff:

"The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never.

" Each of us here tonight has known something like what I describe. We are all the beneficiaries of others’ gifts of knowledge and talent, patience and time. And those gifts never stop coming, not as long as we can read a book—for a book is made of just those gifts.

As I said, we’re never alone."

Wolf Woman    Luci Campbell

And another thought from another poem,  related:

Poem by Mário Raul de Morais Andrade

(Oct 9, 1893 – Feb 25, 1945)

Brazilian poet, novelist, musicologist, art historian and critic, photographer

I counted my years and found that I have less time to live from here on than I have lived up to now.

I feel like that child who won a packet of sweets: he ate the first with pleasure, but when he realized that there were few left, he began to enjoy them intensely.

I no longer have time for endless meetings where statutes, rules, procedures and internal regulations are discussed, knowing that nothing will be achieved.

I no longer have time to support the absurd people who, despite their chronological age, haven't grown up.

My time is too short:

I want the essence,

my soul is in a hurry.

I don't have many sweets

in the package anymore.

I want to live next to human people,

very human,

who know how to laugh at their mistakes,

and who are not inflated by their triumphs,

and who take on their responsibilities.

Thus human dignity is defended and we move towards truth and honesty.

It is the essential that makes life worth living.

I want to surround myself with people who know how to touch hearts, people who have been taught by the hard blows of life to grow with gentle touches of the soul.

Yes, I'm in a hurry, I'm in a hurry to live with the intensity that only maturity can give.

I don't intend to waste any of the leftover sweets.

I am sure they will be delicious, much more than what I have eaten so far.

My goal is to reach the end satisfied

and at peace with my loved ones

and my conscience.

We have two lives.

And the second begins when you realize you only have one.

Spring Comes on the World

 

art by Lizzie Speights

Spring comes on the World
By Emily Dickinson

Spring comes on the World –
I sight the Aprils –
Hueless to me until thou come
As, till the Bee
Blossoms stand negative,
Touched to Conditions
By a Hum.

We had a lovely Easter Sunday, followed by days of endless rain and cold -- until today.

So happy to see my little plants beginning to emerge!

Pearly Everlasting!

Woodland Phlox

Golden Alexander

Each day they get a little bigger.

Here's another Easter/ Spring poem:

Holy Spring
By Dylan Thomas

O
Out of a bed of love
When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe
The curless counted body,
And ruin and his causes
Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
And swept into our wounds and houses,
I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
That one dark I owe my light,
Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
To glow after the god stoning night
And I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun

No
Praise that the spring time is all
Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
Out of the woebegone pyre
And the multitude’s sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
My arising prodgidal
Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
But blessed be hail and upheaval
That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing
Alone in the husk of man’s home
And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
If only for a last time.

 

 

Art by Anna Baartz

The Senior Citizen as Driver

I passed my Driver's test yesterday!

The group to which I belong requires its members to undergo a driving assessment when one becomes 75.

So I am happy and relieved to report that I passed, and can drive for at least another five years.

The assessment lasted almost three hours, and was given by a trained occupational therapist at a company office.  It was both cognitive and operational.  I thought it was interesting .  The only areas I flubbed were the ones concerning short term memory. That didn't surprise me.

ahhh, the rotary!

Violets at sunset.  Photo by Julia Carter

Almost the first day of Spring!

 Here's a wonderful poem by   Amy Shutzer:

WHAT TO DO ON SPRING EQUINOX

Compost this poem.

Take out all the words that remind you of winter,

words that slip frozen into the heart,

bare limbs of words that stick into the sky and shake.

Prune out dead wood;

rough ragged never gonna fruit,

done is done!

Pay attention to what is here,

not what isn't.

Send your roots into another row or field or bed.

Mow. Rake up all the grass.

Layer, as if you're expecting hail or a deep frost;

the end of winter is always unpredictable.

Add manure, plenty of manure

and call in the flies, the dung beetles, the worms.

Soon, there will be heat. Steam.

The pile will soften, break down, give in, let go.

Compost winter into spring,

take off those old clothes you've been wearing,

the despair like a hat on your head,

dig into the pile,

into the heat and the heart of what matters.

Plant your garden and remember, each year,

everything will be different;

compost what you can.

Luci Grossmith

"I heard a wood thrush in the dusk

Twirl three notes and make a star —

My heart that walked with bitterness

Came back from very far.

Three shining notes were all he had,

And yet they made a starry call —

I caught life back against my breast

And kissed it, scars and all."

Sara Teasdale - Wood Song, 1884-1923.

Heinrich Vogeler - Frühling - Porträt von Martha Vogeler, 1897

Major Facebook trouble all over the place

 I can log on to mine on the phone,but not on the laptop.  Very weird and frustrating. But at least I know I'm not alone in this craziness.  Facebook users all over the country and probably the world are struggling.

However, some weren't affected at all.

I mind because I can't post the beautiful artwork or photos or reallly anything.

Sigh. A first world problem.   It will get fixed eventually.

full moon over the Inn of Cape May

 

"March is the month of expectation,

The things we do not know,

The Persons of Prognostication

Are coming now.

We try to sham becoming firmness,

But pompous joy

Betrays us, as his first betrothal

Betrays a boy."

-  Emily Dickinson, XLVIII

 

 

Sparrow... art by Elena Selena

"This hill

crossed with broken pines and maples

lumpy with the burial mounds of

uprooted hemlocks (hurricane

of ’38) out of their

rotting hearts generations rise

trying once more to become

the forest

 

just beyond them

tall enough to be called trees

in their youth like aspen a bouquet

of young beech is gathered

 

they still wear last summer’s leaves 

the lightest brown almost translucent

how their stubbornness has decorated 

the winter woods"

-  Grace Paley, A Walk in March

The Rose-breasted Grosbeak won't arrive for another month or more.  I wait for him.

Harshness vanishing

Early Spring

•  

  by Rainer Maria Rilke

   

  Harshness vanished. A sudden softness

  has replaced the meadows' wintry grey.

  Little rivulets of water changed

  their singing accents.

  Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth

  from space, and country lanes are showing

  these unexpected subtle risings

  that find expression in the empty trees.

   

   

 

Michael Cheek    Robin

"February made me shiver..."

 "with every paper I'd deliver,

Bad news on the doorstep,

I couldn't take one more step..."

( from "American Pie" by Don McLean)

Art by   Laivi Poder

Truly, being in my middle seventies has turned my mind to nostalgia, or memory, and hopefully not regret.  In the month of Valentine's Day, I have been remembering the men I've loved in my rash youth.  I connect them all to songs from my youth, which now I can access through itunes, and can download and save and play on my ipod.  Those are words that didn't exist in my youth, though the songs certainly did.   Here are a few:

Angeles   (Enya)

A Summer Song   (Chad and Jeremy)

Try to Remember   (Harry Belafonte)

You've got your troubles, I've got mine  ( the Fortunes)

Yesterday ( Beatles)

I'll follow the sun ( Beatles)

We'll sing in the sunshine  (Gale Garnett)   

Here comes the sun (Beatles)

Stranger on the shore

Ventura Highway (Simply Red)

Waiting for Snow (Gordon Lightfoot)

Song for a winter's night  ( Gordon Lightfoot)

MacArthur Park (Richard Harris)

Come to my bedside my darling  ( Eric Anderson)

I'll always be beside you

Fields of Gold ( Eva Cassidy)

I'll be seeing you  ( Judy Collins)

Miles ( Richard and Mimi Farina)

One time only ( Tom Paxton)

Greenfields (Brothers Four)

The green leaves of summer  ( Brothers Four)

The Promise ( Tracy Chapman)

All that you have is your soul  ( Tracy Chapman)

The good times we had     ( Peter Paul and Mary)

Friends   ( John Denver)

Last month I found out that Frank Reilly has died in Florida. He was 82, and had Alzheimers.  Sixty years ago I had an enormous crush on him, though our relationship was strictly platonic.  I had an email from him, out of the blue, in April of 2017, and we corresponded until 2020. Then, I imagine , his mind began to go,.

Others have passed away:  Jim Wambold, Pat Finnegan, John Whelley, Barney Galvin...

Now occasionally they show up in my dreams. 

insights from writers in The New Yorker

 

  Tufted Titmouse      artist: Diaga Dimza

The last few issues of The New Yorker have been filled with articles I really loved reading, and which provoked my own thoughts.

In this latest one, from February 26, Adam Gopnik had an essay called  "Four Years Later,"  about "What we can't learn from 2020 "--- the COVID Pandemic. He says "when normal life stopped  in mid march of 2020. He reminded me that a million Americans died before a vaccine was accessible . 

He says  "What if the Pandemic, rather than knocking us all sideways and leaving us briefly unrecognizable to ourselves, showed us who we really are?"

"KLINENBERG'S own figure on the pandemic ground is that America's exceptionally poor handling  of the crisis exposed   the country's structural selfishness:     tell people that they are on their own."  

I need to say more on this, but glare on the pages got to me tonight. 

our country's structural selfishness.... that really hit me.

"The pandemic exposed the geological faults in American society, which now threaten to split the earth and plunge us inside."

Then he asks: "Did 2020 change everything? Perhaps those big, epoch-marking years

are tourist traps of a kind. The year 2001 may, in historical retrospect, be remarkable first as the year when, at last, more American homes had Internet access than did not.

A life spent online is a permanent feature of our modernity."

No narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis

 

A Memoirist Who Told Everything and Repented Nothing

no narrative is more marketable than metamorphosis   Hilary Kelly

talking about writer  Diana Athill

How did I get this way?” is one of memoir’s primary questions. 

“I believed,” she writes, in “Somewhere Towards the End,” “and still believe, that there is no point in describing experience unless one tries to get it as near to being what it really was as you can make it, but that belief does come into conflict with a central teaching in my upbringing: Do Not Think Yourself Important.” 

Photos of her (Athill), with her snow-white hair and velvety, folded skin, fomented interest in a nonagenarian who would “run through all the men I ever went to bed with” instead of counting sheep.

"She watches her own diminishment with a sharp eye. “We tend to become convinced that everything is getting worse simply because within our own boundaries things are doing so,” she writes. “We are becoming less able to do things we would like to do, can hear less, see less, eat less, hurt more, our friends die, we know that we ourselves will soon be dead. . . . It’s not surprising, perhaps, that we easily slide into a general pessimism about life, but it is very boring and it makes dreary last years even drearier.” This isn’t callousness or delusive optimism but, rather, a rebellion against the suffocating expectation that the elderly have foreclosed the possibility of joy."

She was still writing when she was in her nineties.   I hope I'm dead by the time I am ninety.