Touched by an Angel By Maya Angelou for National Poetry Month

Touched by an Angel By Maya Angelou

We, unaccustomed to courage
exiles from delight
live coiled in shells of loneliness
until love leaves its high holy temple
and comes into our sight
to liberate us into life.

Love arrives
and in its train come ecstasies
old memories of pleasure
ancient histories of pain.
Yet if we are bold,
love strikes away the chains of fear
from our souls.

We are weaned from our timidity
In the flush of love's light
we dare be brave
And suddenly we see
that love costs all we are
and will ever be.
Yet it is only love
which sets us free.

crap from my uncle...

I just received this in an e-mail from my Uncle Art: I have always wondered why NO ONE ever came forward from Obama's past saying they knew him, attended school with him, was his friend, etc. NO ONE, not one person has ever come forward from his past. VERY VERY STRANGE.

The rest and a refutation is here at snopes.com.

I think it's time to put him back on the "don't open e-mail from this idiot" list!

Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp

So I was watching the hyena BtVS episode, The Pack. The bullies run up to this scrawny geeky guy, the guy from those old 90 lb. weakling adds, shouting out "Lance!" One of the monkeys looks up.

Does anyone remember that old tv show, Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp? The spy show where everybody was played by chimps. No, really, I'm not making this up; you can see Tom Hanks talk about it in Turner and Hooch. Anyway, that's too much of a coincidence to not have been a deliberate reference.

Alfred Freedman obit

Alfred Freedman, the Albany-born psychiatrist who was the leader of the American Psychiatric Association when it declared in 1973 that homosexuality is not a mental disorder, died April 17 in New York City.

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor

While the gap between rich and poor is getting wider here in the US, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. So simple and so effective.

*sigh*

I took a writing class Saturday, and the instructor had us rewrite a scene from a point of view as far from the original as we could think of. Then we passed the stories over, commenting on another person's writing. The one I read was amazing! This woman didn't speak the whole class and she'd only written two short paragraphs, but it was so good. She had this whole time metaphor going, from the alarm clock's menacing red glow, to the boyfriend still sleeping, to the mother who was never on time, ending with "There was one year left, just one."

*sigh* I don't write anywhere near as well, and I'm trying to feel excited in an "there's so much to learn" kind of a way when I really feel discouraged, like "How am I ever going to learn all that?!?"