Light takes the tree, but who can tell us how?

One of my all-time favorite lines, from Theodore Roethke's villanelle   "The Waking"

It’s 5:13PM on Wednesday, November 21. The darkness will continue to grow for another month, until the Winter Solstice of December 21.

I love this time of the day in the late fall, love to have the time to sit by the window and watch the sky wash out from blue to pink to peach, to see the darkness grow. I love to watch the tree branches become silhouettes, and then disappear into the night.  I especially love the twilights when the sky is aflame with sunset.

One of the places I lived was a house on Alto Road in Baltimore, right on the edge of the city, on the edge of Leakin Park, in a very hilly neighborhood of hundred year old houses, including ours.  I loved my room there, on the corner with a window facing west and another two facing north. A great old red oak tree grew right at the edge of the porch roof by that north facing window.  The west facing window had a view of a crowd of younger trees, among them a tall and skinny maple.  So often I was treated to that flaming sunset sky on these November evenings.  The world outside the house was redolent with the smell of trees and leafmold, a high cold forest smell.  

The world outside my window here has some of that smell, but not quite the same.  I smell autumn earth and leaves, but more of a cold country air. It is the smell I always associate with Emmitsburg, with the days of my youth when I was a girl in college here, walking in this evening delight, smelling this earth smell.  Very different from the smell of suburban West Chester… partly because I wasn’t out walking in the dark very much when I lived in West Chester. Partly because I just didn’t notice the world the way I did when I came to Emmitsburg.

Halloween

 ( art:  Barn Owl Full Moon by Angela Jayne Barnett)


It's a very chilly night. About 4:30PM, when I left school, the sky was roiling with grey and white clouds to the west, and in the east, deep indigo backlit by a strange sun . Thinks are trying to settle down after Hurricane Sandy.  We had rain and wind, and some without power - though nothing compared to New Jersey and New York.  We lost 19 trees on our property.

The chilly night reminded me of all the trick-or-treat nights of my childhood. How I loved that!  That was in the days of the 1950's when people feared the communists, not serial killers and child abusers and poisoners of candy.  I loved the Walt Disney annual showing of  "Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman"  and  the "Night on Bald Mountain" episode from Fantasia.
"Night on Bald Mountain" reminds me of something I read somewhere
 somewhere that on  Halloween night, the veil between the two worlds is very thin.  I was spinning a poem out of that... haven't gotten too far:

Thin places...

Places where the veil between this world

And the other world

Is thin..

Truth abides stays lives in thin places

Raw, hard-to-face truth...

I found these thoughts on a website about Celtic Spirituality called  "Thin Places"
 http://www.thinplaces.net/
on that site, the author, Mindie Burgoyne - Walking Through Thin Places, says

"Yet the comfort, safety and strength to face that truth also abides there. 

We become very small there,

Know something much bigger than us

a place where one feels that mysterious power , God...

"The place itself calls you, draws you into itself, transports you into the presence of the world beyond this world.  The thinness of place moves you into the presence of the mysterious power.  There, all things you perceive through your senses are charged, electrified, illuminated with the presence of that power...

The meditation room at Carmel is a thin place

The crypt at Chartres is a thin place

The grotto at Lourdes is a thin place

The Sanctuario de Chimayo is a thin place

Crater Lake is a thin place

quoting Mindie Burgoyne some more:

“once you’ve been in a thin place and allowed your spirit to absorb  that which transcends the senses, all need for definition ceases.  Our spirits learn differently than our minds.  All through our lives we walk through these places.  Some people notice the thinness.  Some do not.  Yet the idea of "thin places" is not new.  Memorials - made by humans  - have been marking thin places for thousands of years.  Ancient people, especially in Ireland and Britain were forever marking spaces as sacred and worth remembering, as if to say, "something special happened here."

They are often marked by human spirits that have gone before, felt the thinness and been changed by it.  Thin places not only transcend the senses, but transcend the boundaries of time and space.  While you’re there, time seems to stand still, and there is a communion with the human spirits that have walked there before and are yet to walk. Thin places are all about connection -  with God, with the Other world and with all who have lived, are living and will live in generations to come.”

October's Bright Blue Weather

Gorgeous day outside

 

I took this picture about a week ago. The colors are even more vivid now.

Since I last wrote, we had Fall Break from the college.  I managed to get the papers graded, and then spent several days at the ocean.  Wonderful birdwatching!

Trying to get back into writing , but having a difficult time. I've been escaping into murder mysteries and various thrillers. Read and loved Louise Penny's  A Rule Against Murder.  She's very good portraying the inner conflicts of her characters as well as the intricacies of the plot.  Also read Minette Walters'  The Chameleon's Shadow. Very different from the Perry book, but also very good.

Today I finished reading Jean Vanier's wonderful Harvard lecture  From Brokenness to Community.

This is more of what I should be reading!  Not to mention that it's a reading for my freshmen.  It's a very powerful essay on those two words, on their deep, inner meaning.  He's talking from his long experiences living in the L'Arche Community, but it applies to my own experiences in my own religious community.

Get this:  "Community is a place of conflict: conflict inside each one of us. There is first of all the conflict between the values of the world and the values of community, between togetherness and independence... The next source of conflict is in learning to give space to others so that they may grow, rather than competing with them and lording over them... The third source of conflict  is the conflict between caring for people and caring only for oneself.... The fourth source of conflict is between being open and being closed... In order to have greater security, people can sacrifice their personal growth, freedom and becoming, to the god of belonging - belonging which gives security and power... A community which is called to keep people ope is a vulnerable community that takes risks." ( Vanier 33)    I could go on and on.  Very thought provoking, very much calling me to reflection on my own ways.

Posting Problems

I've been trying to post on this blog for about two weeks, and it kept blocking me and giving me an error code.

Grrrrr

I sent about ten help messages to every place I could find to send them.

Nothing

Then, tonight, I noticed a fellow blogger with posting problems say that he could post on his blog when he used the Firefox . 

So I tried that, and bingo!

Whew.

It's been a busy few weeks; lots of preparation of lessons for this new freshman course.

The weather has been humid and stormy, with morning fog that burns off by noon.  The view from my bedroom window has been ghostly:

It's been way too long...

How have three weeks gone by?  Actually, it seems longer than that.  The answer:  school has started, and my level of busy-ness has risen exponentially.  Also, my need for rest and downtime has risen.
I attribute this to the energy expended in teaching and also to the allergy medicine I've been taking.
We have a new prescription drug plan, and it won't pay for my old medicine, Singulaire.  I will need to jump through many annoying hoops to get this done, and instead I've resorted to taking Benadryl, which I had on hand.  It works on the hay fever symptoms, but it also makes me very tired. I am taking an untoward number of naps.  I look forward to the first frost.

This semester I am teaching three courses:  Christian Spirituality, Intro to Short Fiction, and
Veritas Symposium ( the replacement for Freshman Seminar).  I am enjoying all three, but the third is requiring much more planning , since it is a new course.  More on these in another entry.

As I write this, I am listening to the melodious conversation of American Goldfinches who are feasting in my window feeder.  Two fledglings are flapping and begging their parent, who is largely ignoring them. After all, if they're big enough to fly to the feeder, they're big enough to feed themselves!

1948

For most of my life, I thought that I was born in a boring in-between time; three years after the end of World War II, two years before the uneventful nineteen fifties.  Just since I began to teach that Mod Civ course, I have realized how significant 1948 was… not just for being the year I was born ( as if the world revolved around me)

I was just preparing to teach Shirley Jackson’s endlessly disturbing story “The Lottery”  for perhaps the tenth time. 
She wrote a passage later, called “The Morning of June 28, 1948” about the reaction to her story when it was first published in the New Yorker. I was distracted by the thought that I was just two months old when that story was first published.  That led me to my 1948 meditation:

The State of Israel was formally created in 1948

The Marshall Plan was created and implemented in 1948

The UN created the World Health Organization in 1948, and The United Nations General Assembly adopts the Universal Declaration on Human Rights

Gandhi was murdered in January of 1948

In Germany, The United States and Great Britain began a massive airlift of food, water, and medicine on June 26th to the citizens of West Berlin following the Soviet Blockade.

The Communists seized power in Czechoslovakia.

In the US Presidential Election , Harry S. Truman (Democratic) Defeats Thomas E. Dewey (Republican) and Strom Thurmond (States' Rights Democratic) and Henry A. Wallace (Progressive/Labor)

 

T.S.Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature that year.

Lawrence Olivier won the Oscar for “Hamlet” and “Hamlet” won for Best Picture.

 

Cortisone was introduced as an arthritis treatment.

Alan Paton published his novel Cry the Beloved Country.

Al Gore and Prince Charles were also born that year. So was Henning Mankell, a favorite murder mystery writer.

The Summer Olympics was held in London!

 

Preparing for the Freshmen

The members of the Class of 2016 arrive tomorrow. I'll be meeting with the 17 of them that will be my students on Monday and Tuesday for some orientation work, and then, for class on Thursday, from 12:30-1:45.

I've met most of them already, on two Saturdays in June, but that was too quick to get much of an impression of them. 

Our Core Curriculum has been extensively revised, so I'll be teaching them for one semester instead of two, which grieves me.  I'll also be teaching completely different texts, which excites me.  Teaching the same ones for thirteen years, I am ready for a change. 

First , we will be discussing three essays/excerpts they were supposed to have read over the summer:
"Naturalist" by E.O.Wilson

the conversion passage from Augustine's Confessions

an excerpt from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

These are included in the anthology we are using:  Being Human: Core Readings in the Humanities, which was compiled and published by the President's Council on Bioethics in 2003.

Then, we'll read and discuss another essay: "Curiosity and Smartphones" by Douglas V. Henry.

I'll talk more about these, how they introduce the course, and how the discussions went, next week.

The long text we will read after these essays will be Aldous Huxley's  Brave New World. I re-read it this summer, and was more horrified by it than I ever was when I read it at sixteen ( or thereabouts).
I wonder how they will take it. 

Recently I've been reading the book the class will cover in late November: Wendell berry's novel Hannah Coulter. It couldn't be more different from Brave New World.

More about that later, too.

Update on the Cornell Hawks

School starts for me tomorrow with an afternoon of faculty meetings. These meetings precede the arrival of the freshmen on Sunday, followed by Freshman Orientation, followed by the first day of classes.
I will probably not be posting regularly once school gets into full swing... but then, who knows?

Anyway, I've decided to post some photos of the three "Chicks" from the nest at Cornell. They are all fledged and hopefully hunting well. These are fairly recent shots:
C1, taken June 24:

C2, July 3:

C3 - don't know the date:

They are truly breathtaking creatures. And just this past week, the nestcam ( which is still up and running) captured the parents, Big Red and Ezra, on a return trip to the nest. The video filmed them rummaging around for about nine minutes; looked like some bonding and some remote preparations for a nest there again in 2013:

Vows for Sister Liz

In my  community, the Daughters of Charity of St.Vincent de Paul, sisters never make what in religious congregations is known as "final vows" or "solemn profession."  All of us make what canon law calls "simple vows" and we make them for one year at a time, from year to year, all our lives.We do this each year on March 25. We make them silently, during Mass.

 For the first five or so years in the Daughters, a sister doesn't make vows at all. So the first time she does this is a special occasion, and she pronounces them out loud.  We had one of these holy moments today at Sunday Mass. Sister Elizabeth Ann Sjoberg, age 30, pronounced her vows to the Lord. She did this in the pew with the sisters of her local community surrounding her, and her parents and friends looking on:

Really, it is Midsummer

Doesn't feel like it, since school starts in about ten days.  But if the first day of summer is June 21, and the first day of autumn in September 21...yes.  I tend to label the long vacation from school as summer, though this year it started in mid-May.

Anyway, after my road trip, I came back to a somewhat weedy but alive garden, thanks to Dan, the grounds manager, who kept it watered when rain didn't do the job:

He also planted some lovely perennials around the statue of St.Louise de Marillac:

Right outside the door, however, in addition to two volunteers:  a Milkweed ( host to Monarchs) and a Cleome, flourishes a mountain of weeds. I've begun to pull them up, but more needs to be done:

Road Trip Report

NB: My camera's battery ran out, so ,with the exception of the people photos, all the photos came from Google images.

On July18,  one of the other sisters and I drove out to Indianapolis Indiana -- 11 hours across Pennsylvania , Ohio, and Indiana --

 to a Daughters of Charity meeting which was held at the Marriott in downtown Indianapolis:

Stayed in this place  --- so unlike anything I am used to --- from Wednesday until Sunday. Attended great meetings and liturgies, and saw many friends from all over our Province:

Left Indianapolis at noon on Sunday, July 22, driving by myself from here on. Drove to Erie Pennsylvania --- about 7 hours--- until I was too tired to drive any further--- and stayed overnight in a Comfort Inn by the side of Interstate 90. Started out on Monday, driving I 90 along Lake Erie:

Drove I 90 across New York State to Syracuse, to Christ the King Retreat House, where I spent the next eight days in a silent retreat with about 20 of my sisters. It's a lovely spot.:

On Wednesday, August 1, I left Syracuse and continued across New York State( a four hour drive) to Adirodack NY, a village in the huge Adirondack Park . I've learned that this Adirondack wilderness is protected land ---3 million acres of it:

I stayed with my friends in their house in this beautiful country, not far from Schroon Lake , one of the hundreds of lakes in the region:

While I was there, I began to read a book about one writer and his hike from his home in Vermont to his former home in the Adirondacks. It's a beautifully written and illuminating book about the region at the present time:

Then, on Friday, August 3, I drove from there, along the scenic Rt.8 and Rt.9N, and crossed the new Crown Point Bridge across Lake Champlain in to Vermont:

I continued on this two hour drive into Middlebury Vermont, where I stayed with my cousins and visited with them and their daughter and grandchildren:

Then, on Sunday, August 5, I drove four hours south along Rt.7 through some more beautiful scenery, shouldered by the Green Mountains of Vermont

to Albany, New York, where I stayed overnight with our sisters. Monday morning, I headed back south via Rt.787, 87, 287 in New Jersey, to Rt.78 across Pennsylvania:

Seven hours later, I was home in Emmitsburg: