Words Twice a Week 1.3
If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available, along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church. Click here.
So the line from the song that I have used looking back for the past 10-15 years is from Circle Dance by Bonnie Raitt -
Can’t go back and make things right, (though I) wish I’d understood;
Time has made things clearer now – we did the best we could.
Probably lets myself off the hook, but that’s what I do. Then a line from a song, poem, or play that I would keep in mind looking forward – on the one hand there are all kinds of psalms or hymns, but that seems a little too easy. Here’s what I’m picking for this year -
From Nobel prize recipient Mr Dylan (as in “Bob”, not “Matt”!) -
Take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind,
down the foggy ruins of time,
far past the frozen leaves,
the frightened, haunted trees,
out to the windy beach,
far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow,
Yes to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand wavin’ free,
silhouetted by the sea,
circled by the circus sand,
let me forget about today until tomorrow…
Ok – I don’t know what it all means either, but I really like the line about “dancing (on the beach) beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free.” I would like to picture myself doing that. I don’t really, but I would like to!
Then here’s your bonus for this week – two stories from A Small Fiction, by James mark Miller. I bought it with my Snowbound Card. (They are stories in 280 characters or less -) And I had trouble picking just two, we’ll probably get a few more next time.
Adults had a hard time seeing the robots as alive.
Children didn’t. They had stuffed animals.
They knew. Loving something makes it real.
And
“Describe destination,” the time machine said.
“Take me to a time when I can make a difference,” she said.
A brief hum.
“You are here.”
That was me – what did you come up with?
Some days from the Church calendar
Jan 4 Elizabeth Ann Seton She was the first person born (August 28, 1774) in what would become the United States to be canonized by the Catholic Church. She was actually Episcopalian for the first 30 years of her life. After her husband died, Elizabeth and Anna Maria went to Italy to stay with the families of her late husband's business partners, Filippo and Antonio Filicchi, who introduced her to Catholicism. When she returned to New York she joined the Catholic Church in 1805 and was active in founding schools and the Sisters of Charity, the first congregation of religious sisters in the United States. She became known as “Mother Seton”. She was made a saint in 1975.
Jan 6 The Epiphany It means “The Revealing” or “Disclosing” of God in Jesus to all the world, in particular to the Wise Men who came from afar. Some cultures take down Christmas decorations. Some cultures have a “Three Kings Cake” to celebrate, others (think New Orleans!) have such a cake on Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the end of the season after Epiphany. I say, let’s do both!
Jan 8 Harriet Bedell Born in 1875, she was a missionary for 10 years to the Cheyenne in Oklahoma, (who adopted her into the tribe, giving her the name Vicsehia – Bird Woman), then for 15 years to the native Alaskans, 40 miles south of the Arctic Circle, then for the rest of her life (she lived to be 94!) with the Seminole in Florida. In Florida Bedell encouraged the tribe's women to revive the doll-making and basket-weaving skills. She also encouraged them to incorporate their brilliant patchwork designs into clothing for both men and women. She also helped them sell their work to the tourist trade—both through an arrangement with the Collier Company and by negotiating with northern department stores, as well as by fighting the sale of mislabeled import goods in local tourist outlets. In 1947 she gave the invocation when Pres Truman dedicated the Everglades National Park.
A few days from the earth/world calendar -
Jan 4
+ T.S. Eliot died in 1965. He wrote Murder in the Cathedral, as we noted last week. And The Waste Land.
+ The National Negro League was founded in 1920. It gave talented Black ball players a place to play baseball in the years before integration. So now the question is should MLB just merge the statistics from those years or keep them separate.
+ Erwin Schrodinger died in 1961. He was an Austrian physicist, involved in the development of quantum theory. He also wrote on philosophy, ethics and religion. He is perhaps best known for his “Schrodinger’s Cat” thought experiment.
Jan 5
+ Ernest Shackleton died in 1922. He led three expeditions to Antarctica and astonishingly did not die on any of them. The story of his Endurance expedition has captivated me ever since I was a child. Not that I would have wanted to go along! In his 1956 address to the British Science Association, Sir Raymond Priestley, one of his contemporaries, said "Scott for scientific method, Amundsen for speed and efficiency but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton", paraphrasing what Apsley Cherry-Garrard had written in a preface to his 1922 memoir The Worst Journey in the World.
+ Twelfth Night – “Epiphany Eve” (see above!) and also a play by William Shakespeare. The day/night was a time of festivity, master/servant reversals, gender reversals, and such.
Jan 7
+ Transatlantic telephone service begins in 1927. W Paul Jones comments “we have figured out how to have instant communication between nations and continents, but we have not learned much about understanding one another.”
+ in 1785 Jean-Pierre Blanchard, a French inventor, crossed the English Channel in a hot-air balloon. “Up, up and away...”
Jan 8
+ in 1790 George Washington gave the first State of the Union address.
+ birthday (1935) of Elvis, one of those people who we can identify with just one name. For example, it’s also the birthday in 1942 of Stephen Hawking, but we don’t say “the birthday of Stephen.” So besides Elvis and Cher, how many other “one namers” or “first namers” can you think of?
+ Arcangelo Corelli died on this day in 1713. If you are going to have two names, having the first one be “Arcangel” would be - well, interesting. He composed music that influenced Vivaldi and Bach. And speaking of names singular or double, Galileo Galilei died on this day in 1642.
Jan 9
+ 1861 – first shots of the Civil War fired.
Jan 10
+ first General Assembly of the United Nations in 1946.
+ Thomas Paine published Common Sense in 1776. It helped spark the American Revolution. He also wrote a book called Agrarian Justice in which he describes two kinds of property. (This comes from Peter Barnes’ book With Liberty and Dividends for All.) “Firstly, natural property, or that which comes to us from the Creator of the universe – such as the earth, air, water. Secondly, artificial or acquired property – the invention of men” The latter kind of property must necessarily be distributed unequally, but the first kind rightfully belonged to everyone equally, Paine thought. It was the “legitimate birthright “of every man and woman, “not charity, but a right.” Paine suggested a “National Fund” to pay every man and woman fifteen pounds at age 21 and ten pounds a year after age 55. ($17,500 and $11,667) It would be funded by “ground rent” from landowners and other privatizers of natural wealth, ie, those who use the natural world, or the constructs of the community, in one way or another to make money for themselves. Interestingly, Barnes’ point is not just to give everybody money, but rather to rescue, save, the middle class. Studies show that cultures without a robust middle class are not very stable or sustainable. Well, ok, moving on…..
Well, not quite – here’s a comment from Lou Dobbs on Fox News about oil – “The oil that we’re talking about belongs to us...We should have, let’s call it the American Trust. Have the oil companies put their fees into that Trust, not to be touched by the Treasury Department or any other agency, but for investment on behalf of the American people. A couple of things then happen. One, it reminds everyone whose oil this is. And it even puts a little money, a little dollar sign, on what it’s worth to be a citizen.” Of course, there might be a little question of just who the “us” is that the oil belongs to. But it would be a start. The last chapter in Barne’s book is From Here to the Adjacent Possible. I like that idea. Now, moving on, really...
+ The Treaty of Versailles took effect in 1920. It demanded reparations from Germany and ceded a significant amount of land. Didn’t really work all that well.
A prayer for the week -
God of all Creation,
let the peach which is in your heart
flow into your world.
And may all who share your world
live together in justice, kindness, and humility.
We ask in the name of Jesus, Prince of Peace.
A challenge for the week? How about writing a story with 280 characters or less. Kind of like writing a haiku but with more of a narrative sense to it.
That’s it for now….
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