The Speed of Trees (Ellis Paul)

SONG: The Speed of Trees by Ellis Paul

BOOK: The Choiring of the Trees by Donald Harington

POEM: Working Together by David Whyte

We shape our self

to fit this world

and by the world

are shaped again.

The visible

and the invisible

working together

in common cause,

to produce

the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way

the intangible air

passed at speed

round a shaped wing

easily

holds our weight.

So may we, in this life

trust

to those elements

we have yet

to see

or imagine,

and look for the true

shape of our own self

by forming it well

to the great

intangibles about us.

QUOTE: "Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven." ~ Rabindranath Tagore

The Truth of a Woman (Kristina Olsen)

My friend M posted this YouTube link to her website not too long ago... and I've since received it from other friends as well - I found the film collage brilliantly creative... and, combined with today's song and poem, perfectly suited. Enjoy!

SONG: The Truth of a Woman by Kristina Olsen

BOOK: Painting Women: Cosmetics, Canvases, and Early Modern Culture by Patricia Phillippy

POEM: Red Berries by Jane Hirshfield

Again the pyrocanthus berries redden in rain,
as if return were return.

It is not.

The familiar is not the thing it reminds of.
Today's yes is different from yesterday's yes.
Even no's adamance alters.

From painting to painting,
century to century,
the tipped-over copper pot spills out different light;
the cut-open beeves,
their caged and muscled display,
are on one canvas radiant, pure; obscene on another.

In the end it is simple enough-

The woman of this morning's mirror
was a stranger
to the woman of last night's;
the passionate dreams of the one who slept
flit empty and thin
from the one who awakens.

One woman washes her face,
another picks up the boar-bristle hairbrush,
a third steps out of her slippers.
That each will die in the same bed means nothing to them.

Our one breath follows another like spotted horses, no two alike

Black manes and white manes, they gallop.
Piebald and skewbald, eyes flashing sorrow, they too will pass.

QUOTE: "Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises." ~ Leontyne Price

Across the Universe (The Beatles)

"Scientists have confirmed what we all knew: You do indeed have a little voice in your head that warns you when you're about to do something dumb. It's called the anterior cingulate cortex, according to white-coated authorities at Carnegie-Mellon University. If you're receptive to it, it's as good as having a guardian angel. "Don't do it," the voice whispers when you're on the verge of locking your keys in your car or leaving the bar with the cute drunk you just met. "Go back," it murmurs as you start to walk away from a huge, though initially inconvenient, opportunity. "

SONG: Across the Universe by The Beatles

BOOK: The Little Prince: Sixtieth-Anniversary Gift Edition (Hardcover) by Antoine de Saint-Exupery (Author), Richard Howard (Translator)

POEM: Concerning the Atoms of the Soul by John Glenday

Someone explained once how the pieces of what we are

fall downwards at the same rate

as the Universe.

The atoms of us, falling towards the centre

of whatever everything is. And we don't see it.

We only sense their slight drag in the lifting hand.

That's what weight is, that communal process of falling.

Furthermore, these atoms carry hooks, like burrs,

hooks catching like hooks, like clinging to like,

that's what keeps us from becoming something else,

and why in early love, we sometimes

feel the tug of the heart snagging on another's heart.

Only the atoms of the soul are perfect spheres

with no means of holding on to the world

or perhaps no need for holding on,

and so they fall through our lives catching

against nothing, like perfect rain,

and in the end, he wrote, mix in that common well of light

at the centre of whatever the suspected

centre is, or might have been.

QUOTE: "If you were all alone in the universe with no one to talk to, no one with which to share the beauty of the stars, to laugh with, to touch, what would be your purpose in life? It is other life, it is love, which gives your life meaning. This is harmony. We must discover the joy of each other, the joy of challenge, the joy of growth." ~ Mitsugi Saotome

The Book I'm Not Reading (Patty Larkin)

SONG: The Book I'm Not Reading by Patty Larkin

BOOK: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die by Peter Ackroyd (Foreword), Peter Boxall (Editor)

POEM: I'M WORKING ON THE WORLD by Wistawa Szymborska

I'm working on the world,

revised, improved edition,

featuring fun for fools,

blues for brooders,

combs for bald pates,

tricks for old dogs.

Here's one chapter: The Speech

of Animals and Plants.

Each species comes, of course,

with its own dictionary.

Even a simple "Hi there,"

when traded with a fish,

make both the fish and you

feel quite extraordinary.

The long-suspected meanings

of rustlings, chirps, and growls!

Soliloquies of forests!

The epic hoot of owls!

Those crafty hedgehogs drafting

aphorisms after dark,

while we blindly believe

they are sleeping in the park!

Time (Chapter Two) retains

its sacred right to meddle

in each earthly affair.

Still, time's unbounded power

that makes a mountain crumble,

moves seas, rotates a star,

won't be enough to tear

lovers apart: they are

too naked, too embraced,

too much like timid sparrows.

Old age is, in my book,

the price that felons pay,

so don't whine that it's steep:

you'll stay young if you're good.

Suffering (Chapter Three)

doesn't insult the body.

Death? It comes in your sleep,

exactly as it should.

When it comes, you'll be dreaming

that you don't need to breathe;

that breathless silence is

the music of the dark

and it's part of the rhythm

to vanish like a spark.

Only a death like that. A rose

could prick you harder, I suppose;

you'd feel more terror at the sound

of petals falling to the ground.

Only a world like that. To die

just that much. And to live just so.

And all the rest is Bach's fugue, played

for the time being

on a saw.

QUOTE: "For books are more than books, they are the life, the very heart and core of ages past, the reason why men lived and worked and died, the essence and quintessence of their lives." ~ Amy Lowell

Shine (Joni Mitchell)

Joni Mitchell: The legendary singer-songwriter is back
Pierre Perrone is the first to hear her long-awaited album
By Pierre Perrone, The Independent, 10 August 2007

http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/features/article2849630.ece

Ten years ago, it looked like Joni Mitchell's life had gone full circle. This most archetypal of singer-songwriters was inducted into the Rock'n'Roll Hall of Fame along with her old friends Crosby, Stills and Nash. But, more importantly, she was reunited with the daughter she'd given away for adoption after becoming pregnant in the mid-Sixties, and her musical and personal journey – which had taken her from Saskatoon, Saskatchewan to Laurel Canyon, California via Greenwich Village, New York – seemed complete.

"In some ways, my gift for music and writing was born out of tragedy and loss," she told the documentary-maker Susan Lacy. "When my daughter returned to me, the gift kind of went with it. The songwriting was almost like something I did while I was waiting for my daughter to come back."

In 1998, Mitchell released Taming The Tiger, her last album of new material, and toured the US and Canada that year, and again in 2000. After that, as she explained during a two-part Radio 2 documentary broadcast earlier this year, she spent most of her time painting, watching old movies and listening to talk radio. "I came to hate music," she admitted to her friend the British songwriter Amanda Ghost.

Indeed, in 2002, as she issued Travelogue, a double CD on which she revisited her repertoire with orchestral backing, Mitchell announced she'd had enough of "the corrupt cesspool, the pornographic pigs" of the music industry and would be a recording artist no more. "Nothing sounded genuine or original. Truth and beauty were passé. I got the picture. I quit the business," she said. And, despite working with Rhino, the reissue arm of Warners, on a couple of thematic compilations of her oeuvre, she was as good as her word.

Until last year, that is, when Jean Grand-Maître, the artistic director of the Alberta Ballet, contacted Mitchell for permission to use her compositions in a ballet. Rather than simply let him choose songs to fit what would have been a "somewhat autobiographical" piece called Dancing Joni, she helped the project evolve into The Fiddle and the Drum, which premiered in Calgary, Canada, in February. She contributed some of her politically charged paintings to the set design and also delivered a couple of new songs she'd been working on, an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's "If" – her favourite poem – and "If I Had A Heart".

These compositions are now two of the pivotal tracks on Shine, Mitchell's new album to be released via Hear Music, the Starbucks-owned label, in the US and Canada, and the Concord Music Group/ Universal in the UK and the rest of Europe at the end of September.

A listen to the 10 tracks last week confirmed that Shine lives up to Mitchell's assertion that it's "as serious a work as I've ever done". In fact, I'll go further: aside from the accordion-driven reinterpretation of "Big Yellow Taxi", her only British hit single and her second most-covered song (190-plus versions and counting but still way behind "Both Sides Now"), which is obviously aimed at radio programmers, this is the best album by an artist of her generation since Bob Dylan's Modern Times.

As she had barely picked up a guitar in 10 years, Mitchell started at the piano with "One Week Last Summer", a dreamy, chill-out instrumental reminiscent of her beloved Debussy, as well as Brian Eno's ambient music. What she calls "the piano-dominant songs" form the core of Shine, the most bare album she has made since the early Seventies. The jazzy feel of "This Place", "Hana" and the anti-war "Strong is Wrong" is deceptive and all the more effective as the stark lyrics sink in, while the haunting "If I Had a Heart" and "Bad Dreams are Good" sound like laments for planet Earth.

Starbucks customers caught unawares might gulp on their lattes, but what should they expect from the woman who presciently wrote, "they paved paradise and put up a parking lot" in 1970? In fact, in the context of what is a mission-statement album, the reinterpretation of "Big Yellow Taxi" makes perfect sense. "Shine", the floating, ethereal title track, and "If", the album closer adapted from Kipling's poem, feel like hopeful elegies and chinks of light at the end of the tunnel.

Even if Ken Lombard, the Hear Music supremo and president of Starbucks Entertainment, used the Radiohead rumours as a smokescreen on his recent visit to the UK, the announcement that Mitchell had followed in the footsteps of Sir Paul McCartney and signed to the Starbucks-owned label shouldn't come as too much of a surprise. Getting involved with the Starbucks Hear Music project in 2005 had already helped change her gloomy outlook. Mitchell allowed the coffee company to issue a Selected Songs compilation of her catalogue, cherry-picked by the likes of Elvis Costello, Dylan and Chaka Khan, and also assembled her own favourite music – tracks by Debussy, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Steely Dan, Deep Forest, Edith Piaf, Etta James, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye, Dylan, Leonard Cohen and The New Radicals – for their Artist's Choice series. "I reviewed the songs and compositions that, over the course of my life, really got to me. I needed to remember what it was that I had once loved about music," she reflected.

Having badmouthed the majors and US radio, this iconic artist also knew she had to figure out a way of getting her new music to her original Sixties' and Seventies' fanbase and possibly reach out to a younger demographic. The Starbucks tie-up couldn't be more timely, since singer-songwriters of both genders currently dominate radio formats around the world.

Mitchell's eagerly awaited comeback could also help put in perspective her unique achievements and demonstrate how much she has inspired and influenced everyone from Suzanne Vega and Beth Orton to KT Tunstall via Morrissey and Prince – who swears that The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Mitchell's 1975 album, is "the greatest record ever made". Even Madonna is a fan. "I worshipped her when I was in high school. I knew every word to Court and Spark," Madonna has said. "Blue is amazing. I would have to say that, of all the women I've heard, she had the most profound effect on me from a lyrical point of view."

Born Roberta Joan Anderson on 7 November 1943 in Fort McLeod, Alberta, the girl who began calling herself Joni in her early teens is the only child of William Anderson, who managed a grocery store after he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, and Myrtle "Mickey" McKee, a schoolteacher. Looking out of the window at the wheat fields, the wide open landscape, the railtracks and the highway outside the homes they lived in first in Maidstone, then in North Battleford and finally in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, she already felt a "permanent longing to set off and go somewhere."

She took piano lessons for a year and a half but got her knuckles wrapped for improvising her own tunes. When she contracted polio aged nine, she spent weeks in hospital, but made it home by Christmas, defying the nuns' expectations and the doctor's diagnosis. "I walked. So polio, in a way, germinated an inner life and a sense of the mystic. It was mystical to come back from that disease," she later recalled.

At 13, she joined the local choir. Arthur Kratzman, her English teacher, encouraged her painting and writing to such an extent that she subsequently dedicated her debut album to him. The teenage Joni used all the money she'd made modelling for a department store to buy a $36 ukulele because the acoustic guitar she really wanted was too expensive. With the help of a Pete Seeger method, she taught herself a few chords and started singing in coffee houses while studying at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology.

"In the beginning, I thought of myself as confident mimic of Joan Baez and Judy Collins," she said. "As a painter, I had the need to innovate. As a musician... at that time, it was just a hobby. I didn't think I had the gift to take it any further."

Losing her virginity and becoming pregnant in 1964 by fellow student Brad McGrath set off a chain of events as the couple first moved to Toronto to hide her pregnancy and then split. She still played the occasional gig while working in a department store and gave birth to Kelly Dale Anderson on 19 February 1965. A month later, she met folk musician Chuck Mitchell and they married because she hoped to create a family unit for the daughter she had put in a foster home, but he went back on his promise and she gave Kelly up for adoption.

They moved to Detroit, though the ill-matched acoustic duo they formed didn't last, her husband unable to understand that the guilt Mitchell suffered had made her wise beyond her years. "I started writing to develop my own private world and also because I was disturbed," she admitted. "I feel grateful for every bit of trouble I went through. Bad fortune changed the course of my destiny. I became a musician."

Tom Rush stopped by the couple's Detroit apartment, instantly understood where "Day After Day", "Both Sides, Now" and "Little Green" came from, and recorded Joni's composition "Urge For Going". "Tom would say, 'Do you have any new songs?' I'd play him a batch and he'd say, 'Any more?' I always held out the ones that I felt were too sensitive, or too feminine, and those would always be the ones he chose. Because of Tom, I began to get noticed," she remembered.

As Dave Van Ronk and Buffy Sainte-Marie also began performing her songs, Mitchell left her husband in 1967 and moved to New York. She found herself more at home in Greenwich Village and made her first visit to the UK where the American producer and guru of the underground scene Joe Boyd introduced her to the Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention, who recorded her composition "Chelsea Morning" in 1968.

With Judy Collins including a definitive rendition of "Both Sides Now" on her Wildflowers album, Mitchell became the most talked-about singer-songwriter without a recording contract. This was rectified when she met manager Elliot Roberts, who secured her a deal with Reprise Records as she hooked up with David Crosby. The former member of The Byrds had seen her in a club in Florida and produced her eponymous debut, the one most fans call Song to a Seagull.

Mitchell was the muse of Laurel Canyon, the poster girl of the hippie generation. She wrote the era-defining "Woodstock", anticipated green concerns with "Big Yellow Taxi", her breakthrough hit, in 1970, and recorded the must-have albums Clouds, Ladies of the Canyon, Blue, For the Roses and Court and Spark. Over the next two decades, she refused to be pigeonholed as the folkie with the sweet soprano voice and flaxen hair, and moved into pop, rock, jazz, and what wasn't yet called world music and electronica.

From the mid-Seventies, Mitchell's back story seemed to affect people's perception of her, yet she kept moving into more challenging territory, recording with the jazz stalwarts Wayne Shorter, Jaco Pastorius and Charles Mingus, who made the most of her unusual chord structures.

"For years everybody said, 'Joni's weird chords, Joni's weird chords'," she has said, "and I thought, 'how can chords be weird?' Chords are depictions of your emotions, they feel like my feelings. I called them Chords of Inquiry, they had a question mark in them," she explained. "There were so many unresolved things in me that those suspended chords I found by twisting the knobs on my guitar, they just suited me."

But Mitchell always had a hard time coming to terms with fame, and first talked about quitting live performances during a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1970. "I never liked the roar of the big crowd. I could never adjust to the sound of people gasping at the mere mention of my name. It horrified me," she confessed. "And I also knew how fickle people could be. I knew that they were buying an illusion, and I thought maybe they should know a little more about who I am. I didn't want there to be such a gulf between who I presented and who I was. David Geffen [her agent, her roommate and her label boss in the Seventies and Eighties] used to tell me that I was the only star he ever met who wanted to be ordinary. I never wanted to be a star. I didn't like entering a room with all eyes on me."

She disappeared to the wilds of Canada at regular intervals and kept questioning the mendacious workings of the music business, as far back as the For the Roses album with "You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio" in 1972. Having announced her retirement in 2002, Mitchell enjoyed her new role as mother and grandmother and really thought she wouldn't go back to making music. All this has changed now with this unexpected burst of creativity and a renewed sense of urgency and concern about the state of the world. As she told The Word magazine earlier this year: "I'm not interested in escapist entertainment when the planet is at red alert. We're busy wasting our time on this fairy-tale war when nobody's fighting for God's creation. I realised I wasn't ready for retirement."

With a mixed media exhibition due to open in New York in the autumn and Shine, Joni Mitchell is back. What a long strange trip it's been.

'Shine' is out on Concord/Universal on 24 September

SONG: Shine by Joni Mitchell

BOOK: The Joni Mitchell Companion : Four Decades of Commentary by Stacy Luftig (Editor)

POEM: If by Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream--and not make dreams your master;

If you can think--and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings--nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run--

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And--which is more--you'll be a Man, my son!

QUOTE: "To be a star, you must shine your own light, follow your own path, and don't worry about the darkness, for that is when the stars shine brightest."

Garden Rose (Kris Delmhorst)

I had a very full weekend... my husband's out of town until tomorrow evening... I think I'm coming down with some sort of cold or flu bug... my son Eric is leaving Friday to go back to college... I'm under-rested and overwhelmed... went into work late and left early - not sure how to describe my feelings other than out of sorts... discombobulated... not quite focused? Have decided to spend about 30 minutes catching up on e-mail and then popping 3 extra-strength Tylenol and crawling between the covers - will probably take the phone off the hook to avoid interruption. The way I feel, I could very well sleep straight through until tomorrow morning - bliss...

SONG: Garden Rose by Kris Delmhorst

BOOK: New Menopausal Years, The Wise Woman Way: Alternative Approaches for Women 30-90 by Susun S. Weed

POEM: Thistles by Louise Erdrich

Under ledge, under tar, under fill

under curved blue stone of doorsteps,

under the aggregate of lakebed rock,

under loss and under hard words,

under steamrollers

under your heart,

it doesn't matter. They can live forever.

The seeds of thistles

push from nowhere, forming a rose of spikes

that spreads all summer until it

stands in a glory of

needles, blossoms, blazing

purple clubs and fists.

QUOTE: "What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our Father (The New, Revised Edition) ~ (Susan Werner)

I love, love, love the new Susan Werner CD... having bought four copies so far because I keep giving them away - she's coming to South Florida in March... and I'm going to try to persuade her to do the music for the next day's Sunday service, drawing from these wonderful tunes (right up our UU alley... :-)

Susan Werner's "The Gospel Truth" is a socially conscious, contemporary gospel album that balances the faithful and the agnostic. The infectious joy of gospel music, with lyrics anybody - or, almost anybody - can agree with - and sing along to....

In the summer of 2006, as if the muse was tugging on her heartstrings, singer-songwriter Susan Werner attended the Chicago Gospel Music Festival in her adopted hometown for the first time. The overwhelming, ecstatic energy of the event prompted her friend Kenni to remark, "Wow, is there a way you can get all this joy, but without the Jesus?" This honest question sparked a remarkable creative odyssey that led Werner to pews in over 20 churches across the United States in search of The Gospel Truth, a groundbreaking independent collection that may just be the world's first agnostic gospel recording.

Tapping fearlessly into the zeitgeist of contemporary American religious culture, the eleven songs on The Gospel Truth are both heartfelt and incisive, biting yet optimistic, drawing from Werner's own personal spiritual questions to engage the Christian community at large. Addressing those tough universal doubts that fundamentalists surely have but wish to God they could verbalize; Werner seeks common ground with her traditional religious counterparts in finding solutions to the issues that divide America.

Fresh off the success of I Can't Be New, her critically acclaimed 2004 collection of all-original compositions done in the Great American Songbook style, Werner's road to truth is paved by both witty observations of Christian culture and, musically, an ongoing love for classic gospel, country and bluegrass traditions. Just as she immersed herself in the songs of Gershwin, Cole Porter, et al and the classic interpretations by Julie London as part of her creative process on I Can't Be New, Werner this time was tireless in mining inspiration from legendary and contemporary country, gospel and bluegrass artists, from familiar names like The Carter Family and The Stanley Brothers, to the lesser known Claire Lynch and Fern Jones (the co-called Patsy Cline of gospel).

"Someone suggested I do a blues album for my next project, and while toying with the idea, I came across the music of Blind Willie Johnson, a bluesman from the 1920's whose music went beyond 'my baby done left me' and into what you might call gospel blues. I liked his sense of transcendence, the spirit of conveying something beyond his own heartbreak. Then I attended the Chicago gospel festival and the energy of the music, the choirs was unlike anything I'd ever experienced."

A farm girl, raised in a large Catholic family in rural Iowa, Werner spent years caught in the spiritual middle between a healthy religious skepticism and a true appreciation for all that Christianity means to millions of people in the United States. "For me, The Gospel Truth is the most American of Americana projects," she says. "My personal doubts aside, religion gives us much of our energy as a nation, and is a source, I think, of the beautiful naiveté we have about truly being a force of good in the world. It's part of the American personality. And I don't necessarily feel I have to get right with God, but I figure we have to somehow get all right with God because God's not leaving American life anytime soon.

"People all over the world want to give meaning to their life's journey and engage in a larger sense of purpose," Werner adds. "Here, in the United States, it seems that churches are the default setting—the first place you look for that sense of purpose. Overall, these songs convey my belief that doubt and faith can reside side by side in a good person. And, I guess I'd reached a time in life where I wanted to have this conversation with myself; to keep what my church going parents got right while moving into what was true and right for me. And, while I'm not absolutely sure we encounter God through church music, I do know that church music is very revealing of us as human beings. And that's what The Gospel Truth is really all about."

Werner's first step in getting at that truth is "(Why Is Your) Heaven So Small," a pointed barb at the hypocrisy of narrow-minded "one way to heaven" religiosity. Producer Glenn Barratt sets Werner's Appalachian gospel melody amidst groove driven drums and sitars, which takes the song, as the singer sees it, "from Kentucky to Katmandu." Werner mines the Bible's important passages on social justice in the sing-along hand clapping rouser "Help Somebody," while on the soul searching, choir-backed ballad "Forgiveness," she questions loving one's enemies when they so cruelly use religion as justification for discrimination and oppression. And Werner's neo-traditional bluegrass composition "Did Trouble Me" affirms the importance of conscience in a well-lived life.

The introspective ballad "Sunday Mornings" takes Werner (and no doubt, thousands of listeners) back to their childhood memories of attending church with their families, and to a time, not necessarily a better time, when strict, church approved gender roles ruled the day. "Our Father, The New Revised Edition" offers comic relief in the form of a direct prayer to God to deliver us from self-righteous people who think they speak for Him. Werner then dishes up a New Orleans styled shuffle for "Lost My Religion," a kind of backslider's lament. Yet despite her doubts, Werner gives herself over to the evocative ballad "Don't Explain It Away" (a nod to the possibilities of mystical transcendence) and to the sing-along "I Will Have My Portion," a song that perfectly captures Werner's desire to have all the joy without the Jesus. The Gospel Truth closes with the truly "agnostic gospel" of the frank and humorous "Probably Not" and the hopeful "Together," which imagines the kind of peaceful world God would want (if there is a God – a question Werner leaves unanswered).

SONG: Our Father (The New, Revised Edition) by Susan Werner

BOOK: A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles by Marianne Williamson

POEM: God Says Yes to Me by Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I don't paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I'm telling you is

Yes Yes Yes

QUOTE: "There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham." ~ Anna Sewell

Writing Again (We're About 9)

SONG: Writing Again by We're About 9

BOOK: On Writing by Stephen King

POEM: Words by Dana Gioia

The world does not need words. It articulates itself

in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path

are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.

The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being.

The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other --

illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.

Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands

glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow

arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot

name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.

To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper --

metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa

carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds,

painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving

each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it.

The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always --

greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

QUOTE: "In the richness of language, its grace, breadth, dexterity, lies its power. To speak with clarity, brevity and wit is like holding a lightning rod." ~ James Salter

Act Naturally (The Beatles)

Headed to the movie in a few minutes for Date Night with my husband - given my week away and then subsequent scramble to catch up, we've had a hit-and-run relationship for the last three weeks. It will be nice to relax with a nice romantic comedy, and a bite to eat afterwards... with some good getting-each-other-up-to-speed conversation - the one-on-one evening is long overdue... <3

SONG: Act Naturally by The Beatles

BOOK: Myth & the Movies: Discovering the Myth Structure of 50 Unforgettable Films by Stuart Voytilla

POEM: The Movies by Billy Collins

I would like to watch a movie tonight

in which a stranger rides into town

or where someone embarks on a long journey,

a movie with the promise of danger,

danger visited upon the citizens of the town

by the stranger who rides in,

or the danger that will befall the person

on his or her long hazardous journey—

it hardly matters to me

so long as I am not in danger,

and not much danger lies in watching

a movie, you might as well agree.

I would prefer to watch this movie at home

than walk out in the cold to a theater

and stand on line for a ticket.

I want to watch it lying down

with the bed hitched up to the television

the way they'd hitch up a stagecoach

to a team of horses

so the movie could pull me along

the crooked, dusty road of its adventures.

I would stay out of harm's way

by identifying with the characters

like the bartender in the movie about the stranger

who rides into town,

the fellow who knows enough to duck

when a chair shatters the mirror over the bar.

Or the stationmaster

in the movie about the perilous journey,

the fellow who fishes a gold watch from his pocket,

helps a lady onto the train,

and hands up a heavy satchel

to the man with the mustache

and the dangerous eyes,

waving the all-clear to the engineer.

Then the train would pull out of the station

and the movie would continue without me.

And at the end of the day

I would hang up my oval hat on a hook

and take the shortcut home to my two dogs,

my faithful, amorous wife, and my children—

Molly, Lucinda, and Harold, Jr.

QUOTE: "Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." ~ Gloria Steinem

Jubilee (Mary Chapin Carpenter)

SONG: Jubilee by Mary Chapin Carpenter

BOOK: Change Your Thoughts - Change Your Life: Living the Wisdom of the Tao by Wayne W. Dyer

POEM: Becoming by Jim Harrison

Nowhere is it the same place as

yesterday.

None of us is the same person as

yesterday.

We finally die from the exhaustion of

becoming.

This downward cellular jubilance is

shared

by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and

rivers,

and perhaps the black holes in galactic

space

where our souls will all be gathered in

an invisible

thimble of antimatter. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

Yes, trees wear out as the wattles under my chin

grow, the wrinkled hands that tried to strangle

a wife beater in New York City in 1957.

We whirl with the earth, catching our breath

as someone else, our soft brains ill-trained

except to watch ourselves disappear into the distance.

Still, we love to make music of this puzzle.

QUOTE: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." ~ Anais Nin

Galileo (The Indigo Girls)

Your Horoscope for AUGUST 8, 2007

Today's planetary configuration is very good for writers, SUSAN. Likely you are finding it easier to write. Take advantage of these auspicious conditions to put down all of your ideas on paper. You will thank yourself on those days when you lack ideas. Think of it as loading up the woodpile to feed your intellectual fire during the months ahead.

From Wikipedia: "Galileo Galilei (Feb. 15, 1564 - Jan. 8, 1641) was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer and philosopher closely associated with the scientific revolution. His achievements include the first systematic studies of uniformly accelerated motion, improvements to the telescope, a variety of astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo is often referred to as the "father of modern observational astronomy", as the "father of modern physics" and as the "father of science". The motion of uniformly accelerated objects, taught in nearly all high school and introductory college physics courses, was studied by Galileo as the subject of kinematics.

Although he tried to remain loyal to the Catholic Church, Galileo's adherence to experimental results, and their most honest interpretation, led to his rejection of blind allegiance to authority, both philosophical and religious, in matters of science. In broader terms, this helped separate science from both philosophy and religion, a major development in human thought."

Hmmmm, due to time/energy constraints, I don't yet seem to be in a place of "loading up the woodpile" - I'm feeling more motivated, though, for when it finally does unleash...

P.S. Apropos of nothing, but reminded because of the imagery in the poem (to which I can totally relate)... I hate squirrels (sorry) - as Carrie from Sex and the City says, "a squirrel is just a rat in a cuter outfit" (right, M?... :-)

SONG(S): Galileo by The Indigo Girls

Did Galileo Pray? by Ellis Paul

BOOK: The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God by Carl Sagan

POEM: I Remember Galileo by Gerald Stern

I remember Galileo describing the mind

as a piece of paper blown around by the wind,

and I loved the sight of it sticking to a tree,

or jumping into the backseat of a car,

and for years I watched paper leap through my cities;

but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing

Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck,

dancing back and forth like a thin leaf,

or a frightened string, for only two seconds living

on the white concrete before he got away,

his life shortened by all that terror, his head

jerking, his yellow teeth ground down to dust.

It was the speed of the squirrel and his lowness to the ground,

his great purpose and the alertness of his dancing,

that showed me the difference between him and paper.

Paper will do in theory, when there is time

to sit back in a metal chair and study shadows;

but for this life I need a squirrel,

his clawed feet spread, his whole soul quivering,

the loud noise shaking him from head to tail.

O philosophical mind, O mind of paper, I need a squirrel

finishing his wild dash across the highway,

rushing up his green ungoverned hillside.

QUOTE: "Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe." ~ Albert Einstein

The Long Road (Cliff Eberhardt)

Historically, my birth day/week/month has been a time of reflection about the previous year and the upcoming one: hopes, dreams, goals, expectations, resolutions, etc. - it's a perfect occasion to assess my role on this planet and how I'll do things differently (or not) over the next twelve months...

My trip to the Falcon Ridge Folk Festival (with a few days on either end) was almost a week, my return flight into Ft. Lauderdale was delayed Monday evening and I hit the ground running, back to work that Tuesday morning - this past weekend was full with obligations, not to mention birthday festivities, and then Monday rolled around again. I'm still tired and back to overwhelmed, with very little opportunity to ruminate, much less put my thoughts into any semblance of coherence.

So... I'll continue to post relevant songs/books/poems/quotes until divine inspiration strikes - it will happen when it's meant, I have no doubt...

SONG: The Long Road by Cliff Eberhardt

BOOK: Road Novels 1957-1960: On the Road / The Dharma Bums / The Subterraneans / Tristessa / Lonesome Traveler / Journal Selections (Library of America) (Hardcover) by Jack Kerouac

POEM: The Journey by Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice --

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do--

determined to save

the only life you could save.

QUOTE: "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio (Joni Mitchell)

Such a lovely birthday yesterday... starting with our UU church service on the theme of Faith - I then drove down to Miami to be on Michael Stock's Folk and Acoustic Show to promote our upcoming Labyrinth Cafe concert series, for which I do the booking.

I had a blast chatting with Michael and sharing stories of the upcoming performers, as well as playing their CDs - what I had presumed to be a 30-minute slot of airtime stretched into an hour. At the very end I had asked Michael if, after we wrapped up Labyrinth conversation, I could play two songs - I told him it was my 53rd birthday and couldn't think of anyplace I'd rather spend it than sharing my music passion. He then spun Susan's House, a most delightful song my friend Laurie wrote for my birthday last year... and then You're Aging Well, my personal anthem - I found out later my daughter Sarah had been listening in and cried her way through both (very validating to think it helped her understand my endeavors a bit more... :-)

Came home to nap and then out to dinner with the rest of the family, as a combined celebration with Eric, whose friend Ryan also joined us - we went to a Chinese buffett and, 3/4 of the way through the meal, my husband, who's allergic to shellfish, began having a reaction. Fortunately we had taken two cars so Sarah drove him home to load up on Benadryl while the boys finished eating - we stopped at Publix to get a cake (since we were planning to savor the desserts at the restaurant) and opened cards and presents in the comforts of home (and medication!). It was my turn to cry at the sweet messages from my family - we then sang Happy Birthday (I inadvertently used trick candles... :-) and I was in the bed by 10:30 p.m... definitely not my modus operandi but, after the full weekend and last week's Falcon Ridge trip, I had hit the proverbial wall...

Great day past, great year ahead - nothing like crossroads and milestones to keep a journey fresh and anticipatory...

SONG: You Turn Me On, I'm a Radio by Joni Mitchell

BOOK: Public Radio: Behind the Voices by Lisa A. Phillips

POEM: by William Stafford ~ When I Met My Muse
I glanced at her and took my glasses
off - they were still singing. They buzzed
like a locust on the coffee table and then
ceased. Her voice belled forth, and the
sunlight bent. I felt the ceiling arch, and
knew that nails up there took a new grip
on whatever they touched. "I am your own
way of looking at things," she said. "When
you allow me to live with you, every
glance at the world around you will be
a sort of salvation." And I took her hand.

QUOTE: "If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music." ~ Albert Einstein

Forever Young (Bob Dylan)

Today I am fifty-f*cking-three years old - who'd a thunk it?!?

The following, written by Robert Redford, was posted to the Dar Williams discussion list yesterday - considering her song, You're Aging Well, is my personal anthem, this hits me in the heart. I'm fond of saying that I feel 19 until I pass a mirror, and then do a double-take at the older woman staring back - maybe I'll purposely avoid the looking glass so as to prolong my perception, however skewed... :-)

Some time ago I was driving from Santa Fe to Sundance - taking back roads only - when I came on some cattle wandering along ahead of me, headed by a woman in a rusted red pick-up. Because of having to slow down I had time to gaze around and think. I focused on the back of the head and shoulders of the woman in the truck. She had a ponytail and a bandana cinching up her blonde hair. She periodically waved a tanned arm outside the driver's open window directing and yelling instructions to a couple of cowboys riding alongside the course.

I thought, she has wonderful energy--youthful and spirited. I imagined a young girl 16 or 17 schooled on ranch life taking on the responsibilities of older brothers.

Finally, as they all cleared and I passed I saw her face. It was of a woman in her 60's, wizened by the rigors of weather and hardship. As she looked at me and smiled, her wrinkled and burrowed brow still bore an innocence of a time gone by. I thought, when did that moment happen, that moment when she passed from youth to old age? Is she aware of the moment? Of this Passing? Did she know? Do any of us?

P.S. I'll be on the radio today, in the 2:00 p.m. hour, on Michael Stock's Folk and Acoustic Show (WLRN, 91.3), promoting our upcoming Labyrinth Cafe concert series, for which I do the booking - the station webstreams if anyone who reads this has a notion to listen...

SONG: Forever Young by Bob Dylan

BOOK: The Fountain of Age by Betty Friedan

POEM: How to Be Old by May Swenson

It is easy to be young, (Everybody is,

at first.) It is not easy

to be old. It takes time.

Youth is given; age is achieved.

One must work a magic to mix with time

in order to become old.

Youth is given. One must put it away

like a doll in a closet,

take it out and play with it only

on holidays. One must have many dresses

and dress the doll impeccably

(but not to show the doll, to keep it hidden.)

It is necessary to adore the doll,

to remember it in the dark on the ordinary

days, and every day congratulate

one's aging face in the mirror.

In time one will be very old.

In time, one's life will be accomplished.

And in time, in time, the doll––

like new, though ancient––will be found.

QUOTE: "We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations." ~ Anais Nin

The Moon and St. Christopher (Mary Chapin Carpenter)

Tomorrow is my birthday and I expectantly await yet another year of adventures and experiences - I keep my father's St. Christopher (patron saint of travelers) medal on my keychain to remind me of dad's presence and to protect me on my journeys...

SONG: The Moon and St. Christopher by Mary Chapin Carpenter

BOOK: The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler

POEM: Moon Gathering by Eleanor Wilner

And they will gather by the well,
its dark water a mirror to catch whatever
stars slide by in the slow precession of
the skies, the tilting dome of time,
over all, a light mist like a scrim,
and here and there some clouds
that will open at the last and let
the moon shine through; it will be
at the wheel's turning, when
three zeros stand like paw-prints
in the snow; it will be a crescent
moon, and it will shine up from
the dark water like a silver hook
without a fish--until, as we lean closer,
swimming up from the well, something
dark but glowing, animate, like live coals--
it is our own eyes staring up at us,
as the moon sets its hook;
and they, whose dim shapes are no more
than what we will become, take up
their long-handled dippers
of brass, and one by one, they catch
the moon in the cup-shaped bowls,
and they raise its floating light
to their lips, and with it, they drink back
our eyes, burning with desire to see
into the gullet of night: each one
dips and drinks, and dips, and drinks,
until there is only dark water,
until there is only the dark.

QUOTE: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass." ~ Anton Chekov

Some Fires (Cosy Sheridan)

SONG: Some Fires by Cosy Sheridan

BOOK: Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean

POEM: Burning the Fields by Linda Bierds
1.
In the windless late sunlight of August,
my father set fire to a globe of twine. At his back,
the harvested acres of bluegrass and timothy
rippled. I watched from a shallow hill
as the globe, chained to the flank of his pickup truck,
galloped and bucked down a yellow row, arced
at the fire trench, circled back,
arced again, the flames behind
sketching first a C, then closing to O—a word
or wreath, a flapping, slack-based heart,
gradually filling. To me at least. To the mare
beside me, my father dragged a gleaming fence,
some cinch-corral she might have known,
the way the walls moved rhythmically,
in and in. And to the crows, manic
on the thermals? A crescent of their planet,
gone to sudden sun. I watched one stutter
past the fence line, then settle
on a Hereford's tufted nape,
as if to peck some safer grain, as if
the red-cast back it rode
contained no transformations.
2.
A seepage, then, from the fire's edge: there
and there, the russet flood of rabbits.
Over the sounds of burning, their haunted calls
began, shrill and wavering, as if
their dormant voice strings
had tightened into threads of glass.
In an instant they were gone—the rabbits,
their voices—over the fire trench,
into the fallows. My father walked
near the burn line, waved up to me, and from
that wave, or the rippled film of heat,
I remembered our porch in an August wind,
how he stepped through the weathered doorway,
his hand outstretched with some
book-pressed flower, orchid or lily, withered
to a parchment brown. Here, he said, but
as he spoke it atomized before us—
pulp and stem, the pollened tongue,
dreadful in the dancing air.
3.
Scummed and boxcar thin,
six glass-walled houses stretched beside our fields.
Inside them, lilies, lilies—
a thousand shades of white, I think.
Eggshell, oyster, parchment, flax.
Far down the black-mulched beds, they seemed
ancestral to me, the fluted heads of
dowagers, their meaty, groping,
silent tongues. They seemed
to form perspective's chain:
cinder, bone, divinity . . .
4.
My father waved. The crows set down.
By evening, our fields took the texture
of freshened clay, a sleek
and water-bloated sheen, although no water
rested there—just heat and ash
united in a slick mirage. I crossed the fence line,
circled closer, the grasses all around me
collapsing into tufts of smoke. Then as I bent
I saw the shapes, rows and rows of tougher stems—
brittle, black, metallic wisps, like something grown
to echo grass. The soot was warm,
the sky held smoke in a jaundiced wing,
and as a breeze crossed slowly through,
stems glowed—then ebbed—
consecutively. And so revealed a kind of path,
and then a kind of journey.

QUOTE: "Love is the fire of life; it either consumes or purifies."

The Wonder of Birds (The Innocence Mission)

Continued introspection, as I straddle the line between last week's exhiliaration and this week's exhaustion - thought the following relevant for more than a few reasons. Every evening at dusk, the neighborhood birds gather on trees a few blocks from my home, to roost through the night - in passing, they appear to be giant white magnolia blossoms... until one rustles a feather or decides to relocate. "Grace will be ours" indeed - when I revel in the magic of this sight, I truly believe it already is...

SONG: The Wonder of Birds by The Innocence Mission

BOOK: Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

POEM: Why I Need the Birds by Lisel Mueller

When I hear them call

in the morning, before

I am quite awake,

my bed is already traveling

the daily rainbow,

the arc toward evening;

and the birds, leading

their own discreet lives

of hunger and watchfulness,

are with me all the way,

always a little ahead of me

in the long-practiced manner

of unobtrusive guides.

By the time I arrive at evening,

they have just settled down to rest;

already invisible, they are turning

into the dreamwork of trees;

and all of us together —

myself and the purple finches,

the rusty blackbirds,

the ruby cardinals,

and the white-throated sparrows

with their liquid voices —

—ride the dark curve of the earth

toward daylight, which they announce

from their high lookouts

before dawn has quite broken for me.

QUOTE: “A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer; it sings because it has a song.” ~ Maya Angelou

Close to My Heart (Dar Williams)

I'm still recovering from Falcon Ridge, so am uncharacteristically out of words - however, I couldn't let another day go by without sending skyward Happy Birthday wishes to Eric, my "baby", who turned 19 on July 28 (we're celebrating ours together this Sunday).

My pregnancy with him was... unexpected... and he truly is a chosen child - he's been such a blessing, responsible for my gray hair, but all my laugh lines too. He's stubborn, witty, disorganized, kind-hearted, a know-it-all, generous - I must admit, when I get the most frustrated with him, I realize I'm exactly the same way... :-)

I've said that Dar has written songs for all three of my children, released close to the time each of them went away to college - the following is E's... <3

SONG: Close to My Heart by Dar Williams

BOOK: Love You Forever by Robert Munsch

POEM: Learning the Bicycle by Wyatt Prunty

The older children pedal past

Stable as little gyros, spinning hard

To supper, bath, and bed, until at last

We also quit, silent and tired

Beside the darkening yard where trees

Now shadow up instead of down.

Their predictable lengths can only tease

Him as, head lowered, he walks his bike alone

Somewhere between his wanting to ride

And his certainty he will always fall.

Tomorrow, though I will run behind,

Arms out to catch him. He'll tilt then balance wide

Of my reach, till distance makes him small,

Smaller, beyond the place I stop and know

That to teach him I had to follow

And when he learned I had to let him go.

QUOTE: "Making the decision to have a child - it's momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking outside your body." ~ Elizabeth Stone