Poetry Friday: Summer Poetry Swap, #1

I decided to participate in two Summer Poetry Swaps this year, out of the five that Tabatha organized. When you sign up, Tabatha sends you the address of someone else who has signed up, and your only job is to send that person a poem.

For the first Poetry Swap, I received a poem from Jone Rush MacCulloch, who blogs at Deo Writer. Her creation was a combination of two of her passions: photography and words. She took a photo and put it on a wooden plaque (the packaging inside the Priority Mail envelope had a Walgreen Photo logo, so I figured out that's where Jone took her photo to make this, and nobody's paying me to advertise them, but wow, this is a very very cool product and I will be trying it myself).

Here's Jone's poem:

The words say:

ancient walls
carved by sand, wind, rain
river sky
above me
connects two worlds with stories
of the past

- jone rush macculloch

I love the words, and I love the colors, and I love the walls and the sky. Jone's note said that this photo comes from her trip to Secret Canyon, also known as Slot Canyon, in Page, Arizona. (Here's a post from a travel blog with some description and more photos.) My daughter is in the process of moving out west to the desert, and I don't think Jone knew that, but her beautiful photo helps me imagine a place I've never been. Soon I'll be connecting my daughter's new world with mine as we share our stories in our written and spoken conversations. They'll be stories of the past, but also the present. When I go home, Jone's poem will take pride of place on the bookcase in my room, along with photos of my children.

Thank you, Jone! And thank you, Tabatha! I love Poetry Swaps!

Buffy has today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Rain

As a Facebook friend put it, "This has been the Aprilest June ever." I'm visiting my parents in the US, and it has been raining and raining and raining. Yesterday when the rain let up for a few minutes, I went outside and took some photos, and kept thinking about Langston Hughes' famous rain poem. It's about April, but I'm going to post it anyway, in a video at the bottom after some of my pictures.

You can read it here.

And here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Heaven

I've been gearing up for days to write a poem, and it still hasn't happened, but a friend posted these Wendell Berry lines on Facebook this week:

The painter Harlan Hubbard said
that he was painting Heaven when
the places he painted merely were
the Campbell or the Trimble County
banks of the Ohio, or farms

and hills where he had worked or roamed:

a house’s gable and roofline

rising from a fold in the hills,

trees bearing snow, two shanty boats

at dawn, immortal light upon

the flowing river in its bends.

And these were Heavenly because

he never saw them clear enough

to satisfy his love, his need

to see them all again, again.

Wendell Berry, from Leavings

I love the idea of those Heavenly things we keep looking at, keep seeing new sides of, new aspects. Maybe a place or an object stops being lovable to us the day we stop looking at it.

Recently my husband and I were sitting at a table in a restaurant. He told me I looked beautiful. I handed my camera to him and said, "If I look beautiful, take a picture so I can see what you see."

When I looked at his picture of me, all I could see were flaws, but it also made me smile because after all these years, he still wants to keep looking at me, to keep seeing me again and again and again, even as time and gravity and childbirth have taken their toll. Like Harlan Hubbard, painting and repainting those same homey Ohio scenes, he still hasn't seen me "clear enough." He keeps looking.

Here's this week's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #51 of the year was The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More, by Bruce Feller. I liked this book and its cheerful, can-do approach to fixing little things that drive people crazy about their families.

Book #52 was a re-read, Brian D. McLaren's Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words. I wrote about it before here in 2013 and here in 2018.

Book #53 was No Summit Out of Sight: The True Story of the Youngest Person to Climb the Seven Summits, by Jordan Romero. This is another addition to my reading about mountain climbing; I wrote a bit about that here. Book #54 is yet another: Within Reach: My Everest Story, by Mark Pfetzer.

Book #55 was Lethal White, by Robert Galbraith, another in the Cormoran Strike series. I like this series and I'll definitely read the next one that comes out.

Book #56 was I Feel Bad About My Neck, by Nora Ephron. A friend recommended this to me. While I liked some of the essays in this, I didn't really feel bad about my neck before reading the book, and now I do. So thanks, Nora.

Book #57 was God's Favorite Place on Earth, by Frank Viola. This book is about Bethany, the place where Jesus often stayed with his friends Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.

Book #58 was An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, by Daniel Mendelsohn. Amazon kept recommending this for me based on my previous reads, and this time Amazon got it right. I absolutely loved this book. Mendelsohn is a literature professor, and his dad comes one year to his Odyssey seminar. Then the two go on an Odyssey cruise together. In between, the story of their relationship and the dad's childhood are woven together. I'm a sucker for these examinations of how mythology reflects our lives. Here's a taste of the writing: "It was from Fred that I understood that beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching. For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him. In this way - because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death - good teaching is like good parenting." Oh, Daniel Mendelsohn, you are speaking my language.

Book #59 was No More Faking Fine: Ending the Pretending, by Esther Fleece Allen.

Some of the same themes in this book were also in book #60, a memoir written by a friend from childhood: The Colors of My Country, by Esther Lee Barron. I recognized many of the people and places in this, and I really appreciated how Esther's vignettes let her past be what it was: she didn't try to prettify the sadness and loss. Sure, God can bring good out of the difficulties we face, but they still hurt; they hurt badly. It took so much courage for her to write about this, and I applaud her. C.S Lewis wrote that one of the reasons we read is so we don't feel alone, and when I read about Esther's cross-cultural meanderings I feel less alone with my own. Great job, Esther!

Book #61 was Pacifica, by Kristen Simmons. This is another in the dystopia/post-apocalyptic genre, about a world drowned by climate change. I had read another book by Kristen Simmons before, but this one was much, much better. It was atmospheric and believable, and I liked the characters. The book reminded me a lot of Paolo Bacigalupi; I wrote about his books here, here, and here.

Poetry Friday: Living in Two Places

Since last Poetry Friday I have traveled to a different planet; it's impossible to believe that the United States and Haiti are in the same galaxy, and though I know they are, and am well aware of the implications of that, for a moment I like to pretend otherwise. (Here's a post on the falsehood of that "two planets" theory I'm trying to keep alive in my head.)

where we are
by Gerald Locklin

(for edward field)

i envy those
who live in two places:
new york, say, and london;
wales and spain;
l.a. and paris;
hawaii and switzerland.

there is always the anticipation
of the change, the chance that what is wrong
is the result of where you are. i have
always loved both the freshness of
arriving and the relief of leaving. with
two homes every move would be a homecoming.
i am not even considering the weather, hot
or cold, dry or wet: i am talking about hope.


Michelle has today's roundup.

Spiritual Journey First Thursday: Connection

Today's host Ramona asked us to write about connection. Connection is very important to me; I value my friends and family and wish for more time with them. But so much of my experience of connection involves separation. I feel pain because I am far from those I love, because either I leave or they do. Sometimes it feels as though it would be easier never to make connections, since it is so difficult to lose them.

Henri Nouwen, in his book Life of the Beloved, addresses this problem. He talks about how we are "called to give our very lives to one another and that, in so doing, we become a true community of love," but adds that we can give ourselves away because we can

"trust that our little lives will multiply themselves and be able to fulfill the needs of countless people....The fruitfulness of our little lives, once we recognize it and live it as the life of the Beloved, is beyond anything we ourselves can imagine. One of the greatest acts of faith is to believe that the few years we live on this earth are like a little seed planted in a very rich soil. For this seed to bear fruit, it must die. We often see or feel only the dying, but the harvest will be abundant even when we ourselves are not the harvesters. How different would our life be were we truly able to trust that it multiplied in being given away! How different would our life be if we could but believe that every little act of faithfulness, every gesture of love, every word of forgiveness, every bit of joy and peace will multiply and multiply as long as there are people to receive it...and that -- even then -- there will be leftovers!"

If we do believe this, we can invest ourselves in the people God puts in our lives at any given time, even if the connection is short and soon broken. We can trust that God will keep giving us people to invest in.

You know what? That is a lot easier said than done. I have recently lost several close friends, and it's challenging to keep making new friends at all. Anybody who's read this blog much at all has seen this as a recurring theme in my life. Nouwen's words help me think about it and deal with it.

Be sure to visit Ramona's blog to see how others have responded to this prompt.

What I Learned in May

I started last year's "What I Learned in May" post by writing, "I don't think people learn much in May, at least not the school kind of learning. May is mostly disrupted schedules, noisy celebrations, chaos of many varieties. There were projects and exams, yes, but mostly, if you haven't learned it by now, you probably won't, not this year."

I feel the same way this May. Yesterday in our last meeting of the year, my colleagues and I were invited to reflect using a series of questions. What were we proud of? What was a time we felt joyful and inspired? What was the most valuable thing we learned? I couldn't answer those questions very well. I did better with the negative ones. What was frustrating? What caused stress? What was the biggest mistake we made this year and how can we avoid making it again in the future?

May isn't the time for feeling good about my teaching. I just read all that work, posted all those grades. I know exactly what we accomplished this year, and what we didn't. Give me a few weeks of peace and quiet, and I'll be enthusiastic again by August.

I do have a small file on my desktop of links from this month, though, so here goes:

My brother sent me this podcast about language use in France, and specifically how you can and can't refer to race. So interesting, especially when listened to in Haiti, home of one part of France's stinky history of slavery and inequality.

Rachel Held Evans died at 37.

Dina Nayeri writes on how family separation at the southern border is "a literal hell constructed for children." That description makes it sound like a ranty political piece, and it's not, at all: it's a beautiful, reflective description of what Nayeri knows about how little kids' minds work, based on her own translation of her two year old daughter's ways of seeing the world. Who is listening to little kids who are separated from their parents, she asks?

Here's another one from lithub.com, this one about mothers who are writers, and to what extent our children's stories do and don't belong to us.

Jean Vanier died at 90.

That's all I wrote down in my "What I Learned in May" file. No doubt I learned more than that. I started an eBird account, for example, and learned to identify some birds. I wondered, reading about mass extinctions, whether I'd just started paying attention to birds right when they all were about to go away. I started making plans for a birdwatching club next year at school, even if I'm the only one out there peering up into the branches.

I cleaned out my classroom and ended another school year.