Relentless Rain

and mixed with snow... 40 degrees and miserable for two days. 

Vincent Van Gogh    Wheatfield in  Rain   1839



I've been away for four days, working at our college reunion, and also enjoying the company of my classmates and the other immensely interesting women who went to my little college in the country so many years ago.

Our delight in each other's company kept us from too much complaining about the miserable weather, but I am complaining about it now.  I got home soaked and chilled. 

Here's a good rain poem from Robert Frost:

A Line-Storm Song

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,
And the hoof-prints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea’s return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when after doubt
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.

 

 

Robert Frost

A Line-storm Song

  by Robert Frost

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,  
  The road is forlorn all day,  
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,  
  And the hoof-prints vanish away.  
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
  Expend their bloom in vain.  
Come over the hills and far with me,  
  And be my love in the rain.  
  
The birds have less to say for themselves  
  In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,  
  Although they are no less there:  
All song of the woods is crushed like some  
  Wild, easily shattered rose.  
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
  Where the boughs rain when it blows.  
  
There is the gale to urge behind  
  And bruit our singing down,  
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind  
  From which to gather your gown.     
What matter if we go clear to the west,  
  And come not through dry-shod?  
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast  
  The rain-fresh goldenrod.  
  
Oh, never this whelming east wind swells    
  But it seems like the sea’s return  
To the ancient lands where it left the shells  
  Before the age of the fern;  
And it seems like the time when after doubt  
  Our love came back amain.       
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout  
  And be my love in the rain. 

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19446#sthash.yW674XEI.dpuf

A Line-storm Song

  by Robert Frost

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,  
  The road is forlorn all day,  
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,  
  And the hoof-prints vanish away.  
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
  Expend their bloom in vain.  
Come over the hills and far with me,  
  And be my love in the rain.  
  
The birds have less to say for themselves  
  In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,  
  Although they are no less there:  
All song of the woods is crushed like some  
  Wild, easily shattered rose.  
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
  Where the boughs rain when it blows.  
  
There is the gale to urge behind  
  And bruit our singing down,  
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind  
  From which to gather your gown.     
What matter if we go clear to the west,  
  And come not through dry-shod?  
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast  
  The rain-fresh goldenrod.  
  
Oh, never this whelming east wind swells    
  But it seems like the sea’s return  
To the ancient lands where it left the shells  
  Before the age of the fern;  
And it seems like the time when after doubt  
  Our love came back amain.       
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout  
  And be my love in the rain. 

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19446#sthash.yW674XEI.dpuf

A Line-storm Song

  by Robert Frost

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,  
  The road is forlorn all day,  
Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,  
  And the hoof-prints vanish away.  
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
  Expend their bloom in vain.  
Come over the hills and far with me,  
  And be my love in the rain.  
  
The birds have less to say for themselves  
  In the wood-world’s torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,  
  Although they are no less there:  
All song of the woods is crushed like some  
  Wild, easily shattered rose.  
Come, be my love in the wet woods; come,
  Where the boughs rain when it blows.  
  
There is the gale to urge behind  
  And bruit our singing down,  
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind  
  From which to gather your gown.     
What matter if we go clear to the west,  
  And come not through dry-shod?  
For wilding brooch shall wet your breast  
  The rain-fresh goldenrod.  
  
Oh, never this whelming east wind swells    
  But it seems like the sea’s return  
To the ancient lands where it left the shells  
  Before the age of the fern;  
And it seems like the time when after doubt  
  Our love came back amain.       
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout  
  And be my love in the rain. 

- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19446#sthash.yW674XEI.dpuf

How I Write: A Round Robin Blog Tour

 This is an English Robin.  A round one at that! 

  This was taken by missfortune11, and more of her lovely photographs may be found at Deviant Art.

 This post is part of a Round Robin Blog Tour.

Step One:  April Lindner involved me in the blog tour this year. If you didn’t see her contribution, you can read it at:  www.aprillindnerwrites.blogspot.com

Step Two   My writing process:

1.     What am I working on?   Just a few days ago I sent off a newly polished manuscript.  Now I am working on a relatively new manuscript… would be book eight, maybe…  poetry . The working title is  To Wake to Full Daylight.

2.     How does my work differ from others of its genre? 

 This particular manuscript will contain many religious poems.  I hope that my way of writing religious poems is unique to myself – the images and forms.  Also, some of these poems spring from my teaching work on “Women of Faith” in the Catholic tradition.  I’m writing about some women who haven’t appeared in poems ( that I know of )  like  Saints Macrina  and Perpetua  and Appollonia, and the Old Testament women Hagar and Leah… among others.

  Hagar and Ismael, by Francois Joseph Navez

icon of Saint Appollonia

    3. Why do I write what I do?

Because I love words, and love making poems. Because these subjects have caught my imagination.  Because I have a voice.

4.     How does my writing process work?

I am ashamed at how undisciplined I am, and how I get mired in writer’s block.  But once I get going, I write the way Dylan Thomas described in comments about his own poetry to his friend Henry Treece: 

In answer to the criticism that his poems are diffuse, the poet replies : ... a poem by myself needs a host of images, because its centre is a host of images. I make one image,?though "make" is not the word, I let, perhaps, an image be "made" emotionally in me and then apply to it what intellectual and critical forces I possess?, let it breed another, let that image contradict the first, make, of the third image bred out of the other two together, a fourth contradictory image, and let them all, within my imposed formal limits conflict. Each image holds within it the seed of its own destruction, and my dialectical method, as I understand it, is a constant building up and breaking down of the images that come out of the central seed, which is itself destructive and constructive at the What I want to try to explain and it's necessarily vague to me is that the life in any poem of mine cannot move

concentrically round a central image; the life must come out

of the centre; an image must be born and die in another…

 ( p.434 in “Unsex the Skeleton: Notes on the Poetry of Dylan Thomas” by Marshall W. Stearns)

Obviously I am not the genius that Thomas was,  and never will be… but some of that same process is at work, and his description is the best I’ve come across.

I am sorry to say that this thread of the Blog Tour ends with me.  I asked one poet, who declined because of previous commitments, and two others, who never replied back. And I didn’t have the gumption to go searching for more.  So sorry.  But I know this isn’t the only thread.  So if you go back to April’s entry, you can follow the tour through Bernadette McBride, or though the poet who invited April,  Ann E. Michael.  Please do check them out!

The Hint Half-guessed,

John Collier



 The Hint Half-guessed,
 the gift half-understood,
is Incarnation.                    ( T.S.Eliot)


Today's feast -   nine months before Christmas -  celebrates the angel's announcement to Mary.

So many artists have had a go at depicting this encounter:

Fra Angelico

Henry Tanner




Here's a wonderful poem about it by Denise Levertov:

Annunciation

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’
From the Agathistos Hymn,

Greece, VIc

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.

       Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.

       The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.

         God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

                  ____________________

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

         Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments
      when roads of light and storm
      open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from

in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.
                                 God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

                  ____________________

She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child–but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,

  only asked

a simple, ‘How can this be?’
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power–
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.

                     Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love–

but who was God.

This was the moment no one speaks of,

when she could still refuse.

A breath unbreathed,

                                Spirit,

                                          suspended,

                                                            waiting.

                  ____________________

She did not cry, ‘I cannot. I am not worthy,’

Nor, ‘I have not the strength.’

She did not submit with gritted teeth,

                                                       raging, coerced.

Bravest of all humans,

                                  consent illumined her.

The room filled with its light,

the lily glowed in it,

                               and the iridescent wings.

Consent,

              courage unparalleled,

opened her utterly.

 He-Qi

What I Learned from Watching Law & Order: SVU

 

 

I have been watching that TV program for about four years. It's been on much longer, but that's when I began to watch it.  It's a police show that deals primarily with sex crimes. I don't know if it is deliberate or not, but the stories and dialogue have raised my consciousness about a number of related issues. The primary one is human trafficking. I'm talking about humans, mostly women and children, abducted and sold into slavery in this time. 

Our sisters have become active in anti-trafficking activities with public policy initiatives, but also with joining groups to provide safe houses for women and children who have been victims of human trafficking.

 So, this newspaper article really struck me today: 

 

Catholics, Anglicans, Muslims unite against human trafficking

According to the Vatican Information Service (www.vis.va) on March 17 an unprecedented interfaith agreement was reached to eradicate modern slavery and human trafficking across the world by 2020. It is a call to Catholics, Anglicans and Muslims, all governments and people of goodwill to join the movement against modern slavery and human trafficking.
Called the “Global Freedom Network”, this is an agreement between the representatives of these great world religions in collaboration with the Walk Free Foundation based in Perth, Australia.
The speakers at the conference were:

• Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, chancellor of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and Social Sciences, on behalf of Pope Francis;
• Mahmoud Azab, on behalf of the Grand Imam of Al Azhar, Egypt;
• Rev. Sir John Moxon, on behalf of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby,
• Andrew Forrest, founder of the Walk Free Foundation.

Joint Statement

St. Mary’s School, Mallow,
partners of APT

The joint statement made by the signatories underscores the “searing personal destructiveness of modern slavery and human trafficking” and calls for “urgent action by all other Christian Churches and global faiths”.
According to the Joint Statement, “Modern slavery and human trafficking are crimes against humanity. The physical, economic and sexual exploitation of men, women and children condemns 30 million people to dehumanisation and degradation. Every day we let this tragic situation continue is a grievous assault on our common humanity and a shameful affront to the consciences of all peoples. Any indifference to those suffering exploitation must cease. We call to action all people of faith and their leaders, all governments and people of goodwill, to join the movement against modern slavery and human trafficking and support the Global Freedom Network”.
Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, have personally given their backing to the newly-formed Global Freedom Network.

Plague on a Vast Scale

According to the Nairobi-based news agency, CISA, the network has the resources it needs to carry out a five year plan. As Director of the Anglican Centre in Rome, Archbishop David Moxon has been closely involved in the negotiations which have brought about this landmark in church cooperation.
He said: “Human slavery is a plague on a vast scale in many countries across the world today. This situation is not improving but is probably deteriorating. To quote Pope Francis, ‘We must unite our efforts to free the victims and stop this increasingly aggressive crime which threatens not only individuals but the basic values of society.’ Today representatives from our Churches have made an agreement to act together: one Church for one world – God’s world – where everyone can walk free.”
Archbishop Moxon said that the Anglican Centre in Rome would support this new network in every way and would integrate its own time and energy into the cause as an example of practical mission-based ecumenism, where Anglicans and Roman Catholics working in good faith together with many others, will coordinate their efforts to challenge one of the world’s worst evils and greatest forms of suffering. Mission would drive ecumenism in this way: “We will find that as we walk together on the pathway of Justice, that our talking together will improve, and on this Emmaus journey we will meet the risen Christ who falls in step between us. This Christ is not divided, so neither will we be. The Emmaus journey led to a deep and abiding communion when Christ was recognised in the midst.”

Poster by pupils of
Castletownbere
Community
School, Co. Cork

The Global Freedom Network has some of its earliest roots in the deep concerns about modern slavery shared when Archbishop Justin Welby visited Pope Francis in June 2013, followed by a conference held at the Vatican in early November on the initiative of Pope Francis, the Pontifical Academies of Science and Social Science (PASS).

Bishop Sanchez Sorondo, Mr Andrew Forrest, John McCarthy, Australian Ambassador to the Holy See, Archbishop David and Antonia Stampalija, a faith-based strategic planner from Western Australia, helped facilitate the process that led to the Network being created. The Revd Rachel Carnegie, co-director of the Anglican Alliance Network is a member of the new Global Freedom Network Council. The Network has a Muslim representative partner on its Council and will seek to include other faiths over time, as there needs to be a multi-faith approach to this multi-national tragedy.

Statistics

According to the Vatican Information Service, it is estimated that between 12 and 27 million people worldwide are enslaved into forced labour and sexual exploitation. Each year, about 2 million people are victims of sexual trafficking, 60% of whom are girls. Human organ trafficking is rife: annually around 20,000 people are forced or deceived into giving up an organ (liver, kidney, pancreas, cornea, lung, even the heart).

“Modern slavery and human trafficking are crimes against humanity. The physical, economic and sexual exploitation of men, women and children condemns 30 million people to dehumanization and degradation. Any indifference to those suffering exploitation must cease. We call to action all people of faith and their leaders, all governments and people of goodwill, to join the movement against modern slavery and human trafficking and support the Global Freedom Network,” said the network.
“The Global Freedom Network will take up the instruments of faith – prayer, fasting and almsgiving. There will be a world day of prayer for the victims and for their freedom. Everyone of faith and everyone of goodwill will be requested to join in reflection and action. Dedicated prayer networks will be formed in all parts of the world,” the network concluded.

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Bad Sinus

It's the first lovely Spring day; still cool but sunny.  I wanted to go out to the garden to battle the weeds, but my body had other plans. 

 

My desk, chair, bedroom floor, and trash can are littered with used tissues. My nose ran for hours, and then all night my sinuses ached ached ached. Then to the cemented up feeling.

This type of sinus infection has happened to me three times in my life.  The first and second times were due to smoke inhalation:  bad venting of a huge fireplace at a retreat house I stayed in with the students,  and a few years later,  sitting in the sanctuary at a St.Joseph's Day Mass and celebration with the seminarians at the Mount, and being almost smothered by the incense, clouds of which kept rolling in throughout.   This time it's due to dust inhalation: we are in the midst of demolition/reconstruction of the wings where I live.  The workers have done everything possible to protect us from the noise and dust, but it still got me.  It hadn't even occurred to me that the dust would give me a sinus infection.  Nothing for it but to try every home remedy, rest, and suffer through it.

 

Writing and Revising

First day of Spring, and a blustery March day.  I am hoping for good weather on Saturday, so I can get out in the garden and weed.  So I can come back in, smelling like dirt!

Today I spent many hours revising my manuscript of poetry.  It's called  Reconnaissance , which for me means both  spying - ie, a reconnaissance mission --- and the literal meaning, to know again.

I took it from Magritte's painting,  Reconnaissance without End.

I am haunted by this painting, and then again I don't like it because it's up in the air... and I need to be down to earth, and my poems do, too.   But I have a whole section of poems in this manuscript which came from looking at Magritte paintings.

Anyway, I worked  - really, reworked several that have been bothering me, and then sent the manuscript off to a publisher who gave me a little bit of encouragement.  Keeping my fingers crossed.   This manuscript has been rejected at least four times before this, but this time I think it is better.

Before Semiotics

 Jean-Francios RAuzier, Escalier de l'Hotel de Ville



For years, I've been trying to wrap my head around this. 

Right now, I am reading an article in the March 24, 2014 issue of The New Yorker on Literary Theory and a professor named Paul de Man,  of whom I have never heard.  That shows my level of knowledge of literary theory.

Back in 1996, when I was in transition from one place in my community to another, my provincial superior told me I could "study to teach college." She had no idea what this meant, and neither did I.

I had earned my Masters in Liberal Arts in 1977 from the Johns Hopkins University - a program involving evening and summer courses over three years.  As I came to understand in 1996, that was
"before Deconstruction."   Deconstruction is a term and a state of being in literary theory that I still don't have much ability to define, having missed any education in it.   My literary education came from the school of "Form Criticism" which preceded Deconstruction.

Anyway... as I read this article about Paul de Man, I begin to grasp some of the mysteries of Literary Theory.   I do remember, that in 1996, when I began to read the course requirements for the Ph.D. in English from Catholic University, the first course I would have had to take was "Introduction to Semiotics."  I remember my first reaction to the title ( as a poet):  I recoiled!  "I don't want to study Semiotics," I said to myself, "I want to study Yeats' poetry!"  That pretty much sums it up.

In the end, when the woman I talked to at George Washington University told me that it would take me at least seven years to get this Ph.D., because my previous education had been "Before Deconstruction," my provincial superior concluded that I shouldn't do it.  "We can't put on you on the shelf for that long!" I remember her saying.  Especially after I told her that there was no guarantee that I would get a job after all that.

So things worked out differently for me, by the providence of God and the luck of the Irish.

So I have been teaching at the college level since 1996, and at my present university since 1999.
As an adjunct.  That's no problem for me, though working as an adjunct is very difficult for many of my poet friends, young men and women who have no other means of financial support.

So I am reading now about this crisis that literary theory went through 25 years ago, which was 1989.
In 1989, I was teaching high school English full time:  World Literature, Freshman English, and AP English, and not having a clue about this crisis in Literary Theory.  Just let me teach the literature:
Gilgamesh,  Borges'  "The Garden of Forking Paths,"  Pride and Prejudice,  A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch,  Candide...  what a diversity and richness of literature!

Back to this article on Paul de Man...apparently his reputation as a mind-blowing literary theorist was marred by the revelations that during WWII , he was a Nazi collaborator and also a bigamist! 
Somehow these less that theoretical  realities did something unpalatable to his reputation...

Anyway, the article goes on to review this biography of Paul de Man, with all the ups and downs of his life.  A page or so later, it gets to the arrival of Jacques Derrida - the king of Deconstructionism - in America.

I'm not ready to go any further into this tonight.  Hopefully, I will come back to it.

Earlier in the day,  after class and before board meetings,  I was writing a sonnet.

Irish Songs

For the Great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.

G.K.Chesterton,  "The Ballad of the White Horse"

Galway Bay

If you ever go across the sea to Ireland,
then maybe at the closing of your day,
you can sit and watch the moon rise over Claddagh,
and see the sun go down on Galway Bay.

Just to hear again the ripple of the trout stream,
The women in the meadow making hay,
just to sit beside the turf fire in a cabin,
and watch the barefoot gosoons as they play.

ooooh...

For the breezes blowing o'er the sea's from Ireland,
Are perfumed by the heather as they blow,
And the women in the uplands digging praties,
Speak a language that the strangers do not know.

Yet the strangers came and tried to teach us their ways,
And they scorned us just for being what we are,
But they might as well go chasin after moon beams,
or light a penny candle from a star.

And if there's gonna be a life here after,
And faith somehow I'm sure there's gonna be,
I will ask my God to let me make my Heaven,
In that dear land across the Irish sea.
 

Come by the Hills

Come by the hills to the land where fancy is free.
And stand where the peaks meet the sky and the loughs meet the sea,
Where the rivers run clear and the bracken is gold in the sun;
And the cares of tomorrow can wait till this day is done.

Come by the hills to the land where life is a song.
And stand where the birds fill the air with their joy all day long,
Where the trees sway in time and even the wind sings in tune;
And, the cares of tomorrow can wait till this day is done.

Come by the hills to the land where legend remains.
The stories of old, fill the heart and may yet come again,
Where the past has been lost and the future is still to be won;
And, the cares of tomorrow can wait till this day is done.

And, the cares of tomorrow can wait till this day is done.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Irish Songs are sad... full of yearning.   The first one I posted here, "Galway Bay" is on the schmaltzy side; the Irish tend to be sentimental, I have noticed.  

The second song, "Come by the Hills" is a real favorite of mine.

I'm half Irish. My father's parents both came from Ireland.  It's only when I am with my Higgins cousins that I realize how much of that Irish heritage has come down to us... on us, I might say.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

I visited Ireland for almost four weeks in August and September of 1970.  I hitchhiked around Ireland and had a wonderful time.  I didn't see half of what I could have seen, but I still had the experience of a lifetime. 

In one part of it, I spent a day or so in Sligo, and oared out on Lough Gill with another young American I had met there.  We roamed around on Cottage Island, not knowing how close we were to Innisfree,  the island of Yeats' poem.   Here I am, in a photo taken with my paltry little Brownie camera:

Another place I loved was St.Stephen's Green , in Dublin:

and I took the bus out to Sandycove, to visit the Martello Tower which figures in Joyce's novel Ulysees:

 

 The scene was just as dramatic as it is in this photo ( which was clearly not taken with my Brownie!)

Here's the one of me on top of that tower:

How I have yearned to go back to Ireland.  I turned the pages of the photograph album tonight, and some of the pages are so brittle and yellow that they crumbled in my hand... forty-four years since that trip!   I thought I would get back there...now I think I never will.  But I'm enormously glad I got there once in my life.

Did Louise Read Teresa?

 ( violets are ST. Louise's flower --- don't know why!)


Today, in the Vincentian family, is the feast of St.Louise de Marillac, co-founder of the Daughters of Charity. She was a 17th century widow and mother who teamed up with St. Vincent de Paul to address the urgent needs of poor people in Paris, especially the orphans and the foundlings.

I'm not going to give a full biography here, but she was a remarkable woman - creative , energetic,
flexible, organized... deeply in love with God... but still a big worrier. She worried about her son Michel, her new community, all the administrative headaches, Vincent's health, on and on. It's evident in all her letters.

Then, on this day, I was also thinking about St. Teresa of Avila, another great woman, of the century before Louise.  I was thinking of her because of her poem/prayer that I have loved for a long time,
and am just learning in Spanish:

Nada de Turbe

                                       Nada te turbe, nada te espante;
                                        quien a Dios tiene nada le falta.
                                      Nada te turbe, nada te espante:
                                                           sólo Dios basta.

1. Todo se pasa, Dios no se muda. La paciencia todo lo alcanza.

2. En Cristo mi confianza, y de Él solo mi asimiento, en sus cansancios mi aliento, y en su imitación mi holganza.

3. Aquí estriba mi firmeza, aquí mi seguridad, la prueba de mi verdad, la muestra de mi firmeza.

4. Ya no durmáis, no durmáis, pues que no hay paz en la tierra. No haya ningún cobarde aventuremos la vida. No hay que temer no durmáis, aventuremos la vida.


(Teresa v. Ávila)

 

in English:

Let nothing trouble you.

Let nothing scare you.

All is fleeting.

God alone is unchanging.

Patience

Everything obtains.

Who possesses God

Nothing wants.

God alone suffices.

From The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila Volume Three translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriquez (c) 1985

I wonder if Louise knew Teresa's prayer, and if she prayed with it.

I downloaded a wonderful CD by the Taize Community today, called 

Bendecid al Señor,  with many psalms and prayers sung beautifully in Spanish.

I'm hoping to sing along, and improve my Spanish along the way.

here is a photo of the Taize Community:

 

I'm also hoping Teresa's prayer will help me with my worrying. I am not a big worrier, but right now I have been sick twice in the last thirty days with a bad stomach upset, and that makes me worry about cancer recurrence, because I can't really figure out why it happened twice.   Can one catch two stomach viruses in such a short time?  I hope so.