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Xmas tunes
Nov. 28th, 2020 12:11 pmEeee, and I just realized it's officially Xmas icon time!
Adoration of the Magi
Dec. 1st, 2018 12:03 pm
Adoration of the Magi
Spain (1465-1480)
Book of Hours, MS M.854 fol. 90v - Images from Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts - The Morgan Library & Museum
a different metaphor
Dec. 1st, 2018 11:55 amThose who’ve known me for quite a while, might remember the delight I took in Advent Calendars. That’s fallen away over the last few years, but this year I’m taking an interest again. Sadly, my good dozen calendars are in storage in Virginia. I did pick up a Peanuts calendar and found a couple online.
Loyola Press’ calendar doesn’t start until tomorrow, Dec 2nd. Apparently the Christian Advent works differently from the secular Advent that I'm used to, but I started looking at it today. The commentary on Kadinsky’s Last Judgement is interesting but I didn’t find it particularly engaging.
The related exercise, a guided visualization, which they call an imaginative prayer, didn’t work for me at all. At first it reminded me of Tonglen, a meditation practice out of Tibetan Buddhism. In the Loyola Press visualization, you imagine all the conflicts in the world coming in to your mind. But then, instead of creating light from yourself in the darkness, you imagine that light coming down from above. So I tried rising above the earth to feel all the conflicts and it quickly shifted in my mind to looking for the helpers. Instead I was searching for all the people’s small acts of goodness that were making a difference.
Looking back on my response to their exercise, I’m reminded of the time Barbara Marx Hubbard was trying to work out why she was so in favor of space exploration while her friend wanted to stay on Earth. I don’t recall the exact details but I do remember Hubbard’s insight: Oh, you have a different metaphor. She continued that neither way of viewing the world is right or wrong. They are just different perspectives.
The Catholic metaphor just isn’t my metaphor although I will continue checking out their Advent Calendar. I do want to acknowledge the season and there might be something that speaks to me. I think it’s time to figure out my metaphor.
A Rocky and Bullwinkle Christmas
Nov. 26th, 2017 09:51 pm
[little tree] by E. E. Cummings
Dec. 25th, 2016 02:44 pm[little tree] by E. E. Cummings
Nativity by Li-Young Lee
Dec. 25th, 2016 12:24 amjust to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.
How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night's darling?
Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,
this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,
just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,
each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.
toward the close of December.
It is minus sixty degrees.
Over the sleeping houses a dense
fog rises—smoke from banked fires,
and the snowy breath of an abyss
through which the cold town
is perceptibly falling.
As if Death were a voice made visible,
with the power of illumination...
Now, in the white shadow
of those streets, ghostly newsboys
make their rounds, delivering
to the homes of those
who have died of the frost
word of the resurrection of Silence.
Everything Christmas Should Be
Dec. 20th, 2016 12:32 amMy favorite Christmas song
Dec. 19th, 2016 12:23 amFringe - Running Back To You
Dec. 17th, 2016 01:43 amMore geeky Christmas
