Poetic Justice (Buddy Mondlock/Tom Kimmel)

I received a lovely card a few weeks ago from my former UU congregation (MollyL's handwriting, I'm pretty sure), wishing me a Happy Birthday and inviting me to their upcoming David Fisher Memorial Annual Poetry Service, via Zoom, which I had coordinated for the previous nine years.  I think I surprised everyone by showing up, and we were all mutually glad to see each other.  It was delightful to view everyone's faces, especially Rev. Susan, who is recovering from a tragic car accident, and the usual cast of poets/readers:  Alfredo, Gary, Sarah/Birch, Jerry... as well as a few newcomers.

As I had spoken from the pulpit for many years running, updating the math:

If you began attending or visiting the UU Church of Ft. Lauderdale after June 26, 2010 (the date of David Fisher’s passing, at the age of 81), you may be wondering who he was and why this service is a memorial to him.  During Coffee Hour after today’s service, you should approach one of our long-term members and ask them to tell you a David Fisher story.

In the meantime, here’s the 75-words-or-less answer:  David Fisher graduated college with a philosophy degree, he did two years of Army service, he was a doctor (practicing internal medicine), he was a minister, he was a college professor, he was a psychiatrist, he was a member of our Sunday Services Committee, and he was our choir director from 2003-2009.  He was a brother, a father, a grandfather… and he was in a long-term committed relationship with his partner Paul. 

Rev. Gail (our previous minister) said "he was one of the most graceful, gracious, grace-filled people I ever met” with the "unique ability to live lightly in the world and have great impact.  He was a minister in every aspect of his life.” 

David and I shared a love of verse… and his annual poetry service was always a spiritual experience.  I had volunteered to help coordinate the last one (April 2010) since David’s health issues were becoming a factor… and he had actually been in the hospital the week before the service. However, he pushed to be discharged the day prior, which made our collaboration even more inspiring and joyful… 

In his absence, this is my ninth year coordinating, and I am beyond honored to have taken up the baton, to make sure this service remains an annual event. 

However, this service is about so much more than poetry.  We here at the UUCFL are rich:  in tradition (remember Noralee’s cat poems?)… in community (look how many of you chose to attend and/or participate)… and in memories (David Fisher would be proud).

Here's/cheers to David, and to the many who carry on his legacy.  I certainly vow to continue!


SONG:  Poetic Justice by Buddy Mondlock and Tom Kimmel

BOOK:  The Carrying by Ada Limón (here's a wonderful interview with the poet, who was new to me before Sunday's service... 💖)

POEM:  This Day, O Soul by Walt Whitman

This day, O soul, I give you a wondrous mirror;
Long in the dark, in tarnish and cloud it lay—But the cloud
has pass'd, and the tarnish gone;
…Behold, O soul! it is now a clean and bright mirror,
Faithfully showing you all the things of the world.

QUOTE(S):  "Who knows anyway what it is, that wild, silky part of ourselves without which no poem can live?" ~ Mary Oliver

"Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." ~ by Carl Sandburg

Take a Pebble (Emerson, Lake, & Palmer)

About once a week, I meet up with Sarah and Colin to walk at a park 20 minutes from our home.  It's mostly shady, tucked into a subdivision, and has many lovely winding trails.  You can tell most of the people using it live in the neighborhood, and it's a well-kept secret, so it's not crowded at all.  Sarah says she sees most of the same couples, families, individuals every time she goes.

A few weeks ago, we noticed that someone had painted and left rocks along the trail, two of which are pictured above (Have Fun and Make Things Happen), which then inspired Sarah to follow through on an art project with Colin.  I provided the large river rocks (snagged from the ground-level area at the bottom of our condo complex stairwell), and they added their creative touches.  Sarah is a huge fan of the Dave Matthews Band, so all three are lyrics from his songs...  :-)

The next time I met up with them, our goal was to leave the DMB rocks along the trails, as a thank you and follow-up. And we did.  Hope they brought smiles to others' faces, as theirs did to ours...  :-)

SONG:  Take a Pebble by Emerson, Lake and Palmer

BOOK:  If You Find a Rock by Peggy Christian, Barbara Hirsch Lember (Photographer)

POEM:  Miracles by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle?

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles,

Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan,

Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky,

Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge

of the water,

Or stand under trees in the woods,

Or talk by day with anyone I love, or sleep in the bed

at night with anyone I love,

Or sit at the table at dinner with the rest,

Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car,

Or watch honeybees busy around the hive

of a summer forenoon,

Or animals feeding in the fields,

Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air,

Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining

so quiet and bright,

Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon

in spring;

These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles,

The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place.

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle,

Every cubic inch of space is a miracle,

Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread

with the same,

Every foot of the interior swarms with the same.

To me the sea is a continual miracle,

The fishes that swim-the rocks-the motion of the waves

-the ships with men in them,

What stranger miracles are there?

QUOTE:  "If you are in the country, you should notice landmarks - that is, objects which help you to find your way or prevent you getting lost, such as distant hills, church towers, and nearer objects, such as peculiar buildings, trees, gates, rocks, etc." ~ Robert Baden-Powell

Pleas (Widespread Panic)

From The New York Times weekend briefing:

In both red and blue states, government and health officials are finding innovative ways to cope, but still lack what experts say they need to track and contain outbreaks. And while the U.S. has made strides over the past month in expanding testing — about 1.2 million tests were done in one week alone — its capacity is nowhere near the level President Trump suggests it is.

and...

A rash of ominous new polls and President Trump’s erratic briefings have the G.O.P. worried about a Democratic takeover of both the presidency and the Senate in November if Mr. Trump doesn’t put the nation on a radically improved course.


From their mouth to goddess' ears!  Buy stock in purple candles now...  :-)

[And thanks to Melanie for this!]


SONG:  Pleas by Widespread Panic

BOOK:  Practicing Mindfulness: 75 Essential Meditations to Reduce Stress, Improve Mental Health, and Find Peace in the Everyday by Matthew Sockolov

POEM:  Things To Try That Might Knock Out the Virus* by Richard Prins

1. Chug a carton of expired milk

2. Host a nationwide pillow-fight

3. Bail out the fossil fuel industry

4. Creepy accordion music

5. Ask to speak to the virus’s manager

6. Redeem a lifetime of earnest prayer for one (1) bad-ass miracle

7. Drunk-dial your ex

8. Knock your teeth out one by one and put them inside a maraca, then scare the virus away with your snazzy, impeccable rhythm

9. Crack a dodo bird egg and drink it raw

10. Wrap your body in tin foil, like a burrito

11. Wrap your body in dental floss, like a mummy

12. Smile more often, while flagellating yourself

13. Shave your head and boil all the hairs; serve with tomato sauce and parsley

14. Dose your pets with LSD and see if they think up an out-of-the-box solution

15. Huff some toothpaste

16. Have a staring contest with a taxidermied moose

17. There’s always spontaneous combustion

18. When all else fails, steal the virus’s identity, max out all its credit cards, then marry it so it can’t testify against you

19. Did you try turning yourself off and on again?

*The author doesn’t recommend any of these activities; he’s just wondering out loud if they might work and/or being sarcastic. Quoting him, in or out of context, shall be construed as proof of bias. The U.S. Surgeon General advises forgetting everything you just read.

QUOTE:  "Re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul." ~ Walt Whitman

One Thousand Candles, One Thousand Cranes (Small Potatoes)

Wednesday was the the five-year "anniversary" of the Iraq War - a moment of respectful silence, please...

One Thousand Paper Cranes for Peace: The Story of Sadako Sasaki
Gimundo, 3/12/08

Original story by Kathryn Hawkins

In my dream, Sadako says to me, "Leave it to me, mom" and I wake up calling, "Sadako!"

Then I realize it was a dream and I wonder how she is. For a while, I'm lost in my sad thoughts and join my hands in prayer before the tablet of the deceased.

- from a letter by Fujiko Sasaki, Sadako Sasaki's mother

On August 6th, 1945, World War II's Allied forces dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. In an instant, the city was obliterated. When the dust had cleared, people's shadows remained frozen in place on sidewalks and the sides of buildings. The people themselves simply vanished. On that tragic day, 140,000 civilians were killed.

The Sasaki family lived one mile from the spot where the bomb went off. The couple and their two-year-old daughter, Sadako, managed to survive the nuclear attack, though soon after the explosion, thick black clouds of radioactive soot and dust began to fall like snow. Though the family tried to protect themselves, they could not avoid breathing the contaminated air.

As time went on, the young family tried to rebuild their damaged lives. The war had ended; they could put it behind them. The Sasakis had three more children, though Sadako was always her mother's favorite: "She was so considerate and thoughtful that I relied on her," she wrote. As Sadako grew older, she became a strong, healthy, athletic young woman – she was the fastest runner on her school track team.

But when Sadako was twelve years old, she noticed that her lymph nodes were becoming swollen. A doctor's visit confirmed her parents' greatest fears: Sadako had been contaminated with radiation poisoning from the atomic bomb. She was dying of leukemia.

Soon, Sadako was forced to enter the Hiroshima Red Cross hospital for treatment. She spent months there, her disease progressing day by day. In August 1955, residents of Nagoya sent a gift of colored origami paper cranes to Sadako and the other hospital residents as a get-well present. The gift brightened the sick child's day – and it gave her an idea.

"She believed in a saying that if you fold a thousand cranes, you'd get over your sickness," her mother wrote. "She folded paper cranes carefully, one by one using a piece of paper of advertisement, medicine and wrapping. Her eyes were shining while she was folding the cranes, showing she wanted to survive by all means."

Though she was very weak, Sadako dedicated hours each day to folding cranes out of whatever materials she could scrounge together. "We warned her, ‘If you keep up that pace you'll wear yourself out,'" her father, Shigeo Sasaki, recounted. "Sadako continued to fold, saying, ‘It's okay, it's okay. I have a plan.' "

When she got to one thousand, she kept on going, hopeful that the paper birds might magically cure her illness. But it was not to be: Sadako died on the morning of October 25, 1955, surrounded by her family.

As for Sadako's thousand paper cranes, her mother gave some of them to her school friends, "and put the rest of them in her coffin as well as flowers so that she could bring them to the next world."
Although Sadako's thousand paper cranes could not save her life, they would take flight in another way, serving as a symbol of the growing movement for peace on Earth.

The following year, an Austrian journalist, Robert Jungk, traveled to Hiroshima, where he heard the story of young Sadako and her one thousand cranes. He was so moved by the tale of her determination that he told a modified version of her story to the world in a book, Light in the Ruins. In the years since, variations of Sadako's story have appeared in hundreds of other publications, most notably, a children's book called Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes, written in 1977 by American author Eleanor Coerr. The story has been used in peace education programs around the world.

Sadako's short life has also inspired another sort of legacy: the Children's Peace Monument in Hiroshima. After Sadako's death, her classmates sought to honor their friend by creating "a monument to mourn all the children who died from the atomic bombing." With support from more than 3,100 schools around the world, the students created a nine-meter high bronze statue, topped with a figure of a girl holding a folded crane. Beneath the pedestal, there is an inscription: "This is our cry. This is our prayer. For building peace in this world."

Each year, children and adults from all over the world travel to the Children's Peace Monument, bringing their own folded paper cranes as a gift to Sadako's memory, and as a symbol of their desire for peace and for the abolition of nuclear weapons. In hundreds of other cities around the world, from Kuwait City to Santa Barbara, California, children have become involved in projects to create paper cranes as symbols of peace, honoring Sadako's legacy.

Though she could not save her own life with one thousand cranes, her story may yet save millions.

[Added: thanks so much to Judy for her comment below - please go to http://thecraneproject.blogspot.com/ to check out her amazing, inspirational and tangible call for peace... ]

SONG: One Thousand Candles, One Thousand Cranes by Small Potatoes

BOOK: One Thousand Paper Cranes: The Story of Sadako and the Children's Peace Statue by Takayuki Ishii

POEM: As I Ponder'd in Silence by Walt Whitman

As I ponder'd in silence,

Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,

A Phantom arose before me, with distrustful aspect,

Terrible in beauty, age, and power,

The genius of poets of old lands,

As to me directing like flame its eyes,

With finger pointing to many immortal songs,

And menacing voice, "What singest thou"? it said;

"Know'st thou not, there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?

And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles,

The making of perfect soldiers"?

2

"Be it so", then I answer'd,

I too, haughty Shade, also sing war

-- and a longer and greater one

than any,

Waged in my book with varying fortune -- with flight, advance, and

retreat -- Victory deferr'd and wavering,

(Yet, methinks, certain, or as good as certain, at the last)

-- The field the world;

For life and death -- for the Body, and for the eternal Soul,

Lo! too am come, chanting the chant of battles,

I, above all, promote brave soldiers.

QUOTE: "We have all taken risks in the making of war. Isn't it time that we should take risks to secure peace?" ~ J. Ramsay MacDonald