A cold and sunny end of November

 I once wrote a poem where the first two lines were:

The wind blows Novemberly

to the finger-snap of season change...

( I forget the middle of the poem, but it ends with)

The creek,

a ribbon of tinsel

through the leaf-gone trees.

How sad is that that I can't remember the rest of the poem, and can't find it anywhere in my piles of paper?

But here is a gorgeous photo from Tina Giaimo, of Cape May:

Pity of the Leaves

Edwin Arlington Robinson 

Vengeful across the cold November moors,
Loud with ancestral shame there came the bleak
Sad wind that shrieked, and answered with a shriek,
Reverberant through lonely corridors.

The old man heard it; and he heard, perforce,
Words out of lips that were no more to speak—
Words of the past that shook the old man’s cheek
Like dead, remembered footsteps on old floors.

And then there were the leaves that plagued him so!
The brown, thin leaves that on the stones outside
Skipped with a freezing whisper.
Now and then
They stopped, and stayed there—just to let him know
How dead they were; but if the old man cried,
They fluttered off like withered souls of men.

 

and I've found this treasure:

Where I've Been and Who I've been with

 Not correct grammar, but the correct form seems pretentious this morning...

It's the feast of the Foundation of the Company of the Daughters of Charity today.  Since 1633.

Presently, 

12855

Sisters throughout the world,

1572

                                                        Communities,

                                                                                    96

                                                                Countries.

In the 43 years I have been a member of the Daughter of Charity, I have lived in these local communities in these locations::

1. Petersburg, Virginia

2. Charleston, South Carolina

3. Seton High, Baltimore

4. Seton House, (Alto Road), Baltimore

5. Bladensburg

6. All Saints, Baltimore

7. Bethany , Emmitsburg

with short stays  - mostly summer assignments, in

8. St. Ann's Hyattsville

9. Ward, South Carolina

10. Canton, South Carolina

11. Portsmouth, Virginia ( as a postulant)

Here are some photos of some of the groups of sisters in these local communities, not in any particular order:

1984

1988

1992

2021

1981

                                                                          2014

I thought Advent would never get here

 

I love this poem by Jane Kenyon:

Mosaic of the Nativity (Serbia, Winter 1993)

by Jane Kenyon

 

On the domed ceiling God
is thinking:
I made them my joy,
and everything else I created
I made to bless them.
But see what they do!
I know their hearts
and arguments:

“We’re descended from
Cain. Evil is nothing new,
so what does it matter now
if we shell the infirmary,
and the well where the fearful
and rash alike must
come for water?”

God thinks Mary into being.
Suspended at the apogee
of the golden dome,
she curls in a brown pod,
and inside her the mind
of Christ, cloaked in blood,
lodges and begins to grow.

 

 

Twelve Stars

 

On this day in 1830, Jesus' mother, Mary, appeared to one of our sisters in the chapel at our Motherhouse in Paris.  
In the course of the long conversation between the two,  Mary showed Sister Catherine an image, which you see above.

Here is the description from the Motherhouse /Shrine website:

On November 27, 1830, the Blessed Virgin appeared to Catherine again in the chapel.  This time, it was at 5:30 pm, during meditation.  First, Catherine saw something like two living paintings, one fading into the other… In the second image, beautiful rays of light stream from the Blessed Virgin’s open hands, covered with jewelled rings.  At that same moment St. Catherine heard a voice saying, “These rays are a symbol of the graces that I pour out on those who ask them of me.” Then an oval formed around the apparition, and Catherine saw in a semi-circle this invocation: “O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you,” emblazoned in gold letters. She then heard a voice saying, “Have a medal made according to this model. For those who wear it with confidence, there will be abundant graces.” Finally, the image turned, and Catherine saw the reverse side of the medal: the letter M surmounted with a little cross and two hearts, one crowned with thorns and the other pierced with a sword, below.

The writer of the website goes on to comment: 

"Her feet are planted on a half-sphere and crush the head of a serpent. This half-sphere is the globe.  For Jews and Christians, the serpent personifies Satan and the forces of evil. The Virgin Mary is herself engaged in a spiritual battle, the battle against evil, and the battlefield is our world.  She calls us to enter with her into God’s way of thinking, which is not the way of the world.  This is the true grace of conversion that Christians should ask of Mary so that they can in turn pass it on to the world.

"Her hands are open and her fingers are adorned with rings, decorated with precious stones. These jewels emit rays of light, becoming increasingly bigger as they beam toward earth. The radiance of these beams, like the beauty of the apparition described by Catherine, calls forth, justifies and strengthens our trust in Mary’s faithfulness (the rings) towards her Creator and towards her children, in the efficacy of her intervention (the rays of grace that fall on the earth), and in the final victory (the light), since she, as the first disciple, is the first saved.

"On the back of the medal, a letter and drawings introduce us to the secret of Mary. The letter “M” is surmounted by a cross. The “M” is Mary’s initial; the cross is the Cross of Christ.  The two interwoven signs show the inseparable relationship that connects Christ to his Holy Mother.  Mary is associated with the mission of human salvation through her Son Jesus and, through her compassion, participates in the very act of the redeeming sacrifice of Christ. There are two hearts at the bottom, one encircled by the crown of thorns and the other pierced by a sword. The heart crowned with thorns is the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  It recalls the cruel episode of Christ’s Passion before He was put to death, as recounted in the Gospels.  It represents His passionate love for humanity. The heart pierced by a sword is the Immaculate Heart of Mary, his Mother.  It recalls Simeon’s prophecy the day Mary and Joseph presented Jesus in the temple, as recounted in the Gospel.  It represents the love of Christ that dwells within Mary and her love for us: for the sake of our Salvation she accepted the sacrifice of her own Son. Depicting these two hearts close together indicates that Mary’s life is one of intimacy with Jesus.

"Twelve stars are engraved around the medal’s edge. They represent the twelve apostles and thus the Church. To belong to the Church is to love Christ and to participate in his passion for the salvation of the world. Each baptized person is invited to become a part of the mission of Christ by uniting his heart to the hearts of Jesus and Mary.
The medal appeals to our conscience so that each one of us might chose, as did Christ and Mary, the path of love even unto the total gift of self."

 

 I love this picture and quote .   

Recently, on Instagram,  writers have posted some quotes about Boundaries which really struck me.

I have come to realize that my personal boundaries have been , what shall I say?  Very thin throughout my life, due to my child hood upbringing.  Not that I was neglected!     Anyway, this list really got to me:

What do boundaries feel like?

*  It is not my job to fix others

* It is okay if others get angry

* It is okay to say no.

* It is not my job to take responsibility for others

* I don't have to anticipate the needs of others

* It is my job to make me happy.

* nobody has to agree with me.

* I have a right to my own feelings.

* I am enough.

It got to me because I have done all of those.  And continue to do some of them, and feel guilty about the ones I don't do anymore.

It takes a whole lifetime to understand the mysteries of my own self.

Thanksgiving

 One big thing I am thankful for is the Internet, and all the ways it enables me to take in and give out my gifts and the gifts of others.

Today we had a big wifi outage here at my house, which is still largely unresolved. It showed me the level of my addiction to this blog, to my Mount email, to Facebook, and to Instagram, and to YouTube and to Hallow.  I have to be careful about that, and how much my "thought time" is taken up there. There it is.

I am also thankful for the TV series The Chosen.  I began watching it at Easter time this year --- April of 2021.  Time is very skewed for me this year; the past April seems like ten years ago.  But this series has renewed my relationship with Scripture, and especially with Jesus.   Here are some photos from the show:

Jesus ( Jonathan Roumie) and some of his disciples.

Atticus

Matthew

John

The spirits of the air

 

Here's a poem by William Blake:

 

"The spirits of the air live on the smells

Of fruit; and joy, with pinions light, roves round

The gardens, or sits singing in the trees."

Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;

Then rose, girded himself, and o'er the bleak

Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load."

-   William Blake, To Autumn

 

and here's one from Muriel Rukeyser which popped up on my Instagram page this morning, and which I took as a message from the other shore:

Then     by Muriel Rukeyser

 

When I am dead, even then,

I will still love you , I will wait in these poems,

When I am dead, even then

I am still listening to you.

I will still be making poems for you

out of silence;

silence will be falling into that silence,

It is building music.

 

Evergreen Cemetery, Gettysburg     photo by Christine Muldowney

First Boy I Loved

 Here are some of the lyrics to a song by Judy Collins :

First boy I loved,
Time has come I will sing you
This sad goodbye song,
When I was seventeen, I used to know you
Well, I haven't seen you, many is the short year
And the last time I seen you
You said you'd joined the Church of Jesus
Well me, I remember your long red hair falling in our faces
As you kissed me

And I want you to know, I just had to go
I want you to know, we just had to grow
And you're probably married now
House and car and all
And you turned into a grownup male stranger...

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Robin Williamson

First Boy I Loved lyrics © Warner-tamerlane Publishing Corp.

Web results

I received word this morning from his wife that Jim died yesterday, November 22, 2021.

Over the years, I have included references to him in at least three poems:

Hymn to Longwood Gardens

 

How is it that I was born five miles from you,

born to walk your three hundred acres for twelve years?

 

Now, thirty years later,

in the satiny iced lawns of February,

I dream of your sumptuous beds

of lavender

glowing luminous in  summer twilight,

your solitary fountain

stumbled upon in  deep shade,

of thrush revealing her speckled breast in the mulch

behind the Italian water gardens.

 

I dream of my first love

plucking my hand into his,

a young, thin, fine, freckled hand,

the first holding of hands

as we entered the garden

for a fountain display

on a starlit July evening.

 

In those days, you were free.

Now, you have flourished,

and your entrance fee is costly.

and this one:

Locator

 

 

At the intersection of throat and breath,

my voice clots.

At the intersection of verse and prose, grunts

a beating drum

I can feel in my gut

between stomach and spine.

 

In the town of my childhood,

at the intersection of High and Gay streets,

a store sold me black marble copybooks.

At the intersection of Union and Wayne, a red convertible turned toward me.

From a window near the corner of Market and Everhart,

I could see him coming a block away.

 

At the intersection of Barclay and Vineyard lane,

where July met the garbage strike,

the rats ran the streets.

 

At the intersection of Bull and Rutledge,

a woman stepped off the curb

on her way to the river.

At the intersection of Franklin and Center hill,

the sirens met the soldiers.

At the intersection of Laurel and Eastern,

I fell in love with geography.

 

 

At the intersection of sense and syntax,

I visit the house of silence.

Where paradox crosses paraphrase,

I write.

 

 

 and this one:

  To Live By Mistakes and Perfumes

 

 

Sound of July crickets blends with

Trumpet, echo chamber,

 Electric guitar, soft cymbals, clarinets,

harmony of the Fortunes singing

“Now just like you I sit and wonder why

You’ve got your troubles, I’ve got mine.

And it don’t seem so long ago….

That we were walking and we were talking

The way that lovers do…”

Parked in your father’s enormous Cadillac

In the moonlight

By the children’s playground on Nields Street.

Why did we love that song?

 

Today I notice that

My ghost smells like Shalimar,

honey and cinnamon, with a hint of gardenia,

a shade of wisteria,

disturbing the cold March air,

knife of aroma

where the spring peepers croak.

 

 

 

 

 

In the Summer of His Years

 

November 22, 1963    Just before President Kennedy was shot and killed

How is it that 58 years have passed since that day?

I was in the 10th grade.  I will never forget it.

Here's a song that came out just afterward:

In the Summer of His Years

Connie Francis

A young man rode with his head held high
Under the Texas sun
And no one guessed that a man so blessed
Would perish by the gun
Lord, would perish by the gun

A shot rang out like a sudden shout
And Heaven held its breath
For the dreams of a multitude of man
Rode with him to his death
Lord, rode with him to his death

Yes, the heart of the world weighs heavy
With the helplessness of tears
For the man cut down in a Texas town
In the summer of his years
The summer of his years

And we who stay mustn't ever lose
The victories that he won
For wherever man look to freedom ?
His soul goes riding on
Lord, his soul goes riding on

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: David Lee / Herbert Kretzmer

holding decades within us

 

artist:  Ron Stenberg

Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan wrote this when she turned 60:" How can people walk around holding this much of the past inside them? How do they possibly add in another two or even three decades of experience? I’m topped up! I’m going to have to start erasing the larger files. Maybe I already have and don’t know it."

She's a cancer survivor , or , rather, she's living with cancer, and so she observes this:  "One thing that doctors don’t tell you about cancer is that even if you get lucky, there’s a price: The treatments add up in your body. I don’t look sick. But things have gone wrong inside me that have nothing to do with the cancer itself. The obvious symptom is that I’m tired. “Everyone’s tired!” other people my age tell me."

She says more, but those sentences apply to me, too.  And I am way past 60: 73 this year, when I've read on Facebook that a number of famous poets and writers have died at my age.   

But I live with four other sisters who are in their middle eighties. I observe their various abilities and disabilities, and wonder about myself. 

And how much of the past we hold inside us?

I marked when the weather changed

 

photo by Tommy Peters

Here's a poem by Thomas Hardy:

 

A Night in November

I marked when the weather changed,
And the panes began to quake,
And the winds rose up and ranged,
That night, lying half-awake.

Dead leaves blew into my room,
And alighted upon my bed,
And a tree declared to the gloom
Its sorrow that they were shed.

One leaf of them touched my hand,
And I thought that it was you
There stood as you used to stand,
And saying at last you knew!

photo by Tommy Peters

 

Is  changes a noun or a verb in this phrase?

I know that Richard Wilbur was using it as a verb in his poem:

The Beautiful Changes

BY RICHARD WILBUR

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   

In such kind ways,   

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

 

Richard Wilbur, “The Beautiful Changes” from Collected Poems 1943-2004. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Wilbur. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc. This material may not be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Source: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)

I am thinking about how the beautiful - or - the faces or images or objects that I called beautiful have changed over my seven decades.

Not ready to answer that right now.

The genius of Andrea Kowch

 

Andrea Kowch      Wind of November

I love this woman's work!  I hope to write some poems in response to some of her paintings!

I'm copying this from the website Escape into Life:

 https://www.escapeintolife.com/artist-watch/andrea-kowch/ :

Artist Bio

Andrea Kowch (b. 1986) was born in Detroit, Michigan, where she earned her BFA at the College for Creative Studies. Throughout the past few years, Andrea has won numerous regional, national, and international honors for her art, placing her on the stages of Washington D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center and New York City’s Carnegie Hall. As a result, she has had work exhibited in places such as Washington D.C.’s Capitol Hill and Corcoran Gallery of Art, New York City’s Diane von Furstenberg Gallery, and Miami’s Margulies Collection, to name a few. As a 2005 award winner and alumnus of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, Andrea ranks in America’s top 2% of young American talent.

Largely self-taught and influenced by the work of American Masters and the Old Masters of the Renaissance, Kowch’s paintings and illustrations are best known for their rich symbolism, mood, and control of medium, leading her art to be described as a “powerful voice emerging, demonstrating a highly sensitive consciousness that informs a culturally laced symbolism.”

To date, she has illustrated two books, and has had work featured in CMYK Magazine and Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art international art annual, volumes 15 and 16. Many of her works hang in collections across the United States and Canada. She credits life as her muse, where experiences old and new, give her the power to speak visually.

Artist Statement

The stories and inspiration behind my paintings stem from life’s emotions and experiences, resulting in narrative, allegorical imagery that illustrates the parallels between human experience and the mysteries of the natural world. The lonely, desolate American landscape encompassing the paintings’ subjects serves as an exploration of nature’s sacredness and a reflection of the human soul, symbolizing all things powerful, fragile, and eternal. The real yet dreamlike scenarios I create serve as metaphors for the human condition, all retaining a sense of vagueness because I wish to encourage viewers to form their own conclusions, despite the fact that my main idea will always be present.

As a people, we share a common thread, and as active participants in an ever-changing modern world, the purpose of my work is to remind viewers of these places that we feel no longer exist, and to recognize and honor them as a part of our history that is worth preserving. Symbolic explorations of the soul and current events concerning our environment are expressed through the incorporation of animals and other elements of the natural world to transform personal ideas into universal metaphors.

Andrea Kowch    Myth and Moor

Andrea Kowch       In the Hollow