dual personalities

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January 25, 2017

The moon is mine

by chuckofish

George Sotter (1879-1953)

I have a compact to commune
A monthly midnight with the Moon;
Into its face I stare and stare,
And find sweet understanding there.

As quiet as a toad I sit
And tell my tale of days to it;
The tessellated yarn I’ve spun
In thirty spells of star and sun.

And the Moon listens pensively,
As placid as a lamb to me;
Until I think there’s just us two
In silver world of mist and dew.

In all of spangled space, but I
To stare moon-struck into the sky;
Of billion beings I alone
To praise the Moon as still as stone.

And seal a bond between us two,
Closer than mortal ever knew;
For as mute masses I intone
The Moon is mine and mine alone.

–Robert Service, from “Moon-Lover”

In case you have forgotten, a tessellation of a flat surface is the tiling of a plane using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps. In mathematics, tessellations can be generalized to higher dimensions and a variety of geometries. A periodic tiling has a repeating pattern.

(I’ll admit, I had to look it up.)

The painting above (“Silent Night” c. 1923) is by George Sotter (1979-1952). The paintings that follow are by Maxfield Parrish, Bertha Lum and Albert Bierstadt.

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All photos from Pinterest.

4 Comments
January 24, 2017

Some things never change dept.

by chuckofish

I become quite melancholy and deeply grieved to see men behave to each other as they do. Everywhere I find nothing but base flattery, injustice , self-interest, deceit and roguery. I cannot bear it any longer; I’m furious; and my intention is to break with all mankind.

―Moliere, The Misanthrope (1666)

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Well, c’est la vie.

Happy Tuesday.

4 Comments
January 23, 2017

Grant us strength and courage

by chuckofish

Quelle busy weekend! The weather was beautiful on Saturday (72 degrees!) so everyone, including me, was out and about.

Grandpappy and I visited the wee babes at the hospital.

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Lottie is now big enough to fit into preemie clothes!

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Little boy is over 3 lbs! It won’t be long before he can wear pants too.

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On the social side we went out to dinner with old friends. I attended my church’s annual meeting and stayed for the service following. Afterwards I had lunch with my pal Carla.

In between all these activities I managed to work in the yard and go to an estate sale,  but there was not much time for puttering around the house.

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Having finished The Thin Man, I  moved into deeper water and started to re-read the wonderful A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly, a hero among Quakers and in the larger world of Christian mystics.

To this extraordinary life I call you–or He calls you through me–not as a lovely ideal, a charming pattern to aim at hopefully, but as a serious, concrete program of life, to be lived here and now, in industrial America, by you and by me.

This is something wholly different from mild, conventional religion which, with respectable skirts held back by dainty fingers, anxiously tries to fish the world out of the mudhole of its own selfishness. Our churches, our meeting houses are full of such respectable and amiable people. We have plenty of Quakers to follow God the first half of the way. Many of us have become as mildly and as conventionally religious as were the church folk of three centuries ago, against whose mildness and mediocrity and passionlessness George Fox and his followers flung themselves with all the passion of a glorious and a new discovery and with all the energy of dedicated lives. In some, says William James, religion exists as a dull habit, in others as an acute fever. Religion as a dull habit is not that for which Christ lived and died.

The weekend sped by and now it is Monday once again. I’m off to the salt mine. Enjoy your day, okay?

*BCP, Post-Communion Prayer

7 Comments
January 21, 2017

But tell me what happens when dreams don’t come true*

by chuckofish

Today is a big day for many women I know, who have traveled far and spent a lot of money for the chance to stand in a large crowd chanting angry slogans.

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I get it. They care deeply about women’s rights (as do I). However, it is not the merits of the movement that I want to discuss here. Rather, I want to comment on an underlying motivation I discovered that struck me as particularly important.  According to the many women I know who are participating, what excited them most about protesting was the prospect of belonging and having a purpose.  To me, that says more about the alienation of modern life than it does about the state of women’s rights.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t doubt their feminist fervor, but practically speaking, it would make much more sense for them to take the money they are spending on travel and hotels, and donate it to some worthy women’s charity. Clearly, there is more going on here. Maybe it’s time to spend some quality time trying to figure out what is missing from our lives (and I don’t mean government supplied birth control).

All of us feel alienated from time to time (some of us feel that way all the time), but losing oneself in a group can provide only temporary relief. Usually, introspection produces more durable results. Here’s a sad song from Mary Chapin Carpenter to help you get started:

You can read the lyrics here.

Safe travels for all. I hope you find what you seek, but remember that the thrill of mob solidarity is illusory.

*Mary Chapin Carpenter, “Hand on My Back”

5 Comments
January 20, 2017

Whiskey for my men, beer for my horses*

by chuckofish

I’ve been watching a lot of television lately. In these winter months when I frequently come home after it’s already dark out, I all too often curl up on the couch in the den and stay there. So whether I’m watching a movie or binge-watching Fuller House, season two, on Netflix, which by the way is sensational,

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I try to do something else at the same time so I won’t feel too bad about myself.

Here are some ideas for those of you who think you also spend too much time as winter couch potatoes:

Count all the change that has been piling up in bowls all over the house.

IMG_2372.JPGFinish one of those needlepoint projects you’ve started. If needlepoint is not your thing, any craft will do.

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Indulge in beauty treatments. I mean, we all need remarkably radiant skin, right?

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Any more ideas?

When I’ve had enough of watching the old boob tube, I go back to a book. Right now I’m re-reading The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, which is excellent.

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Unfortunately, reading in the evening usually sends me straight to dreamland and then, before I know it, the alarm is going off and it is time to get up and go to work!

Well, thank goodness it is Friday again. Have a great weekend!

*Toby Keith (I’d forgotten how great he is)

3 Comments
January 19, 2017

Happy birthday, Mary, Dolly and Buffy!

by chuckofish

Can it be January 19th already? Zut alors! Readers of this blog may remember that this is the birthday of our dear mother, as well as Dolly Parton and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Truly a day to celebrate!

Here is a photo of our little mother holding one DP who is one-year old.

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I think my older brother (age 6) took the picture because 1) the look on our mother’s face and 2) the artful set-up of the snapshot, the empty garage taking a prime part of the photo.

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There are other snaps in this series taken by my mother of the baby in the stroller and of Cowboy Chris. But I’m betting my brother picked up the camera and said, “Let ME take a picture of YOU!”

Anyway, I’m glad he did.

Well, I plan to toast Mary, Dolly and Buffy tonight. (Drynuary turned out not to be a thing.) In their honor, I may watch one our mother’s favorite movies. Possibilities would be:

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Decisions, decisions…

In the meantime, here’s a little Bruce Spingsteen to brighten your day: O, Mary, don’t you weep no more…a rockin’ rendition of an old favorite.

Have a blessed day and never forget that pharaoh’s army got drowned.

4 Comments
January 18, 2017

Against the arrows of the coming sun

by chuckofish

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Within the circuit of this plodding life
There enter moments of an azure hue,
Untarnished fair as is the violet
Or anemone, when the spring stew them
By some meandering rivulet, which make
The best philosophy untrue that aims
But to console man for his grievences.
I have remembered when the winter came,
High in my chamber in the frosty nights,
When in the still light of the cheerful moon,
On the every twig and rail and jutting spout,
The icy spears were adding to their length
Against the arrows of the coming sun,
How in the shimmering noon of winter past
Some unrecorded beam slanted across
The upland pastures where the Johnwort grew;
Or heard, amid the verdure of my mind,
The bee’s long smothered hum, on the blue flag
Loitering amidst the mead; or busy rill,
Which now through all its course stands still and dumb
Its own memorial, – purling at its play
Along the slopes, and through the meadows next,
Until its youthful sound was hushed at last
In the staid current of the lowland stream;
Or seen the furrows shine but late upturned,
And where the fieldfare followed in the rear,
When all the fields around lay bound and hoar
Beneath a thick integument of snow.
So by God’s cheap economy made rich
To go upon my winter’s task again.

–Henry David Thoreau

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Flyover photos via KMOV.com

2 Comments
January 17, 2017

A bushel and a peck

by chuckofish

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Here’s a snapshot I found of our older brother when he was a few months old in 1951. Our mother’s younger sister is holding him. He was born a little early and only weighed about 5 lbs. He looks a little stressed. (Note furrowed brow.)

But look at the bouncing baby boy a few months later!

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Babies.

5 Comments
January 16, 2017

Day by day

by chuckofish

Happy MLK Day and, if you are lucky enough to be home like I am, I hope you are enjoying your day off.

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That’s ice on the trees…

In fact, this has turned out to be a very nice four-day weekend for me, because we had a “snow day” on Friday due to the ice storm here in flyover country. I stayed home for two days puttering around and re-organizing drawers and shelves and closets.

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By Sunday morning the storm was pretty much over. I went to church and was surprised by how many people were there. The OM said they were probably stir crazy and just wanted to get out of the house. Well, maybe.

After church we went to lunch and then to the hospital to see the wee babes and their parents who were kangarooing as they do every day (even during the ice storm).

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We watched Sully (2016) over the weekend and liked it a lot. Tom Hanks was just right as the remarkable pilot who landed the plane on the Hudson River without a single loss of life back in 2009. I think the movie could have used a little more backstory, but I won’t quibble. It was good.

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I cannot say the same for the much heralded Manchester By the Sea (2016) which I did not like.

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Bad things happen in life, terrible things, but this movie seems to say that all of life is just a long, sad, hopeless journey and then you die. The characters in this movie are uniformly unable to express their feelings, much less talk without use of the F-word in every sentence. After the movie the OM and I both wondered what the writer/director was trying to say. I just didn’t get this movie.

Well, today I am going to enjoy my day off as the temperatures continue to climb and the ice melts. And I will continue to believe that life has meaning.

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once. There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak — even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere. He speaks, I believe, and the words he speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of our selves and of our own footsore and sacred journeys. We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music. Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement. But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it. “Be not afraid,” says another, “for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” He says he is with us on our journeys. He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began. Listen for him. Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him.

–Frederick Buechner, The Sacred Journey 

4 Comments
January 14, 2017

The weather outside is frightful…

by chuckofish

An ice storm is due to hit my dual personality’s flyover town this weekend.

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I just hope they don’t lose their power. Even if it doesn’t last, ice can do damage that can take weeks to  fix.  Back in the “Great Ice Storm of ’98” hundreds of electrical pylons simply buckled under the weight of the ice, and it took more than three weeks to restore power to some areas.

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Ice is not all bad, though. Take, for example, what our northern neighbors in Ottawa have been doing on the frozen Rideau canal:

You can read more about it here. Apparently, dragon boat ice racing is a thing in northern and eastern Europe because, hey, otherwise people could only skate, play hockey, ice-climb, ice-fish, ice-boat (yes, it’s real),  go curling, or — for the really crazy people out there — down hill racing on ice skates. Seriously.

What next?

Personally, I’m not in favor of risking life and limb for a thrill or money. I’d rather stay inside with a good book and a cup of tea, and I fervently hope that my DP will be able to do just that until the weather improves.

Wherever you are, have a safe, non-slip weekend!

 

3 Comments