Decoupage - snips of my day

I live in the heart of a sprawling city where "all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And bears man's smudge and shares man's smell..." and yet sometimes I am surprised by great natural beauty.  The wild turning of a bayou, a kingfisher perched on a wire, flights of birds or butterflies that swirl like schools of fish in the sea, swooping martins, flowers, flowers everywhere.  "...nature is never spent; There lives the dearest freshness deep-down things..."  These two ideas play tug-of-war in my thoughts.  {The quotes are from my favorite poet Gerard Manley Hopkins whose words are as deeply etched in my heart and as voiced in my prayers as any scripture.}

Yesterday I went to the zoo with my sister-in-law, my neice and her young daughters.  When one goes to the zoo one expects to see animals, animals in cages--no matter how lovely the habitat of the cage may be.  My favorite animal was wild and uncaged--a young cotton-tail rabbit sitting behind a palm tree nibbling a tidbit from the plantings.  A "dearest freshness deep-down thing" reminds me that this city is an overlay on an ancient landscape.

After I got back home I rested by catching up on blog reading.  CFS in her blog Link to this blog wrote, "The other day I was driving home from work, on 290, going posted speeds with the rest of the Houston population, and do you want to know what I saw: a duck and her four baby ducks. That is right, there was a duck trying to cross 290 with her 4 babies!!! It was a disturbing picture for me. How on earth did that duck and her four babies get up on 290?"    I identify with the duck and wonder how such a fast-moving, dangerous thing as U.S. Highway 290 came to be on the peaceful Katy prairie, ancient home to migrating water birds.   "...all is seared with trade" and the prairie is being devoured by that sprawling city that is my home.

I think of my friend DTA and her pressing concern for the over-population of the earth.  I remember  petri dishes filled with nutrients and seeded with bacterial cultures.  How very much pictures of the earth from space--the spreading lights, the destruction of forest, the growing deserts, the Texas-sized gyre of litter in the Pacific, urban sprawl creeping across the big blue marble, "all... bears man's smudge and shares man's smell"--resemble those petri dishes with the bacterial colonies eating thier substrate until all is gone and there is nothing left but death.

Another friend, VFS, blogs   Link to this blog  about the Polyphemus moth in Annie Dillard's An American Childhood.  I don't need this reminder of a disturbing story that has long lived in my memory.  I remember my mother asking me to take a look at the "worms" that were eating one of her prize plants and finding a butterfly chrysalis and watching the process of a butterfly unfurl and take its first flight, a "dearest freshness deep-down thing."  I am in sore need of such comfort.

I love Annie Dillard who voices my tug-of-war and grows my spirit.  It's time to read her books again and I'm pleased to find that I can now add her books to my Kindle:  Pilgrim at Tinker Creek  American Childhood  The Writing Life  For the Time Being  Holy the Firm  Teaching a Stone to Talk  An Annie Dillard Reader The Maytrees  The Living

My blogging friends both work with issues of childhood, although in very different fields.  Their blogs resonate with each other, echo through my thoughts, disturb my rest.   How many children did I see at the zoo today who are Dillard's Polyphemus moth?  How many mothers and children are caught in a world that has changed and is moving much too fast?  How many of us are caged in spaces too small to spread our wings and fly?  We and all creation bear the curse of a by-gone Eden, "bleared, smeared with toil..."

I find it's easy to weep.
It's harder to hope.
I share the depression that often crippled the poet.
Yet, Hopkins concluded his poem:
"Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings."

Link: to Hopkins poem on the Victorian Web.

What I'm reading...

Not much. I've made another trip to visit parents in Clifton. Road music: Best of the Righteous Brothers, Yanni In My Time, Schumann Symphonies Nos. 2 & 4, and Juilio Inglesias Tango. That list is almost a definition of eclectic. Miss Mandy Whitepaws, my sheltie, is in love with Juilio and found several of the Righteous Brothers' vocals intriguing. It was a good trip.

But it was not a break from the church library. I spent a lot of time looking at the Highsmith catalog making lists of furnishings and supplies. When I got home I prepared a budget for the coming year. I spent all day yesterday on-line making purchases from Highsmith and from Amazon, http://www.abebooks.com, and http://www.biblio.com. [If you're looking for a rare out-of-print book, give them a try. My first choice is biblio.com because I like the way they manage the orders from a plethora of independent booksellers.] I was really fortunate--or should I say blessed?--to find all but one of the thirty-three books that had to be replaced. Hurricane Ike destroyed four dozen or so others but I elected not to replace them. Given the state of the church library after the storm, the losses were really far fewer than I'd expected.
Other than catalogs I've been reading:

Fiction:
Poole, Ernest: His Family. New York: MacMillan, 1917. Project Gutenberg. Kindle, free download from http://manybooks.net/. The first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature. A beautifully crafted story of the interior life and family relationships of a man as he nears the end of his life. In New York at a time of transition (early 20th Century), his three daughters encounter their father, their family, each other, and themselves as three graces, if you will. What does it mean to be woman in the Modern world? How does a woman decide issues of career, marriage, motherhood? Poole examines issues of education, urbanization, war and conscience, and eternal life. A delightful read that is also thought provoking. FICTION 20th CENTURY PULITZER NEW YORK MODERNISM FEMINISIM

Chairside Nibbles:
mostly Kindle sampling for an upcoming reading binge

Bedside Book:
I was slow to make a new selection so I read Gerard Manley Hopkins and finally memorized

That Nature Is a Heraclitian Fire and the Comfort of the Resurrection.

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-

built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs they throng; they glitter in marches.

Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches,

Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair.

Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare

Of yestertempest's creases; in pool and rut peel parches

Squandering ooze to squeezed dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches

Squadroned masks and manmarks treadmire toil there

Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, nature's bonfire burns on.

But quench her bonniest, dearest to her, her clearest-selvèd spark

Man, how fast his firedint, his mark on mind, is gone!

Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark

Drowned. O pity and indig nation! Manshape, that shone

Sheer off, disseveral, a star, death blots black out; nor mark

Is any of him at all so stark

But vastness blurs and time beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,

A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, joyless days, dejection.

Across my foundering deck shone

A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash

Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,

Is immortal diamond.

Peterson, Eugene H.: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places. A conversation in spiritual theology. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2005. Kindle. Can a Kindle book work as bedside reading? Just started but it promises to be informative and inspirational. I remain grateful to Peterson for his Psalms study, How do I answer the God who speaks to me?

SEASONS:
Linn, Dennis; Linn, Sheila Fabricant; Linn, Matthew: Good Goats: healing our image of God. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1994. vi, 101 p. Next month will finish this book and after our last group discussion I liked this book much better.

What I'm Reading

Fiction Binge:

Schweizer, Mark: The Mezzo Wore Mink: a liturgical mystery. Hopkinsville KY: St. James Music Press, 2008. 191 p. illustrator: Jim Hunt. I don't read mysteries but I do make exceptions. Schweizer's six books featuring an Episopal choir director who is also a small town chief of police and a wanna be writer who channels Raymond Chandler... Well, what more can I say. Laugh out loud funny! Unfortunately the slip case issued with this book probably marks the end of the series. Perfect for a cold, rainy day. Read every word including the added material and adverts on the frontis. This is one you'll either lover or hate. The series in order: The Alto Wore Tweed, The Baritone Wore Chiffon, The Tenor Wore Tapshoes, The Soprano wore Falsettos, The Bass Wore Scales, The Mezzo Wore Mink. MYSTERY EPISCOPAL CHURCH POLITICS SMALL TOWN ROMANCE 20th Century

Rolls, Elizabeth: His Lady Mistress. free download link from Kindle Daily Post, Tue. March 10, 2009 in celebration of Harlquin's 60th anniversary. This is a Harlequin Historical Romance, "a bodice ripper." ROMANCE HARLEQUIN ORCZY Several decades ago I was badly addicted to paperback romances; since I could read the shorter ones in under 2.5 hours, I read about 3 each and every week. I eventually tired of the genre as I do all formulaic ficition. Since I've been studying a lot of 19th and early 20th Century novels written by women, I found this reading of a current romance novel quite interesting. Except for the mandatory three erotic scenes in the 21st Century version and the diminishment of vocabulary and syntax, this novel is much the same as the earliest romance novels. I wonder if Rolls use of "Blakeney" is a conscious allusion to Emmuska Orczy's Pimpernel.

Bedside Book:

Mariani, Paul L.: Gerard Manley Hopkins: A life. New York: Viking, the Penguin Group, 2008. 496 p. includes index BIOGRAPHY POETS CATHOLIC OXFORD 19th Century 21st Century Hopkins has been my favorite poet since I discovered him during my freshman year at Rice Univerisity. I like Marianni's writing very much; superb shaping of excerpts from poems, journals, letters into a very readable text. One of the best accounts of Hopkins life I have read. A gift from David on my 60th brithday.

Chairside Nibbles:

Yonge, Charolotte M. (ed.): Gold Dust: a collection of golden counsels for the santification of daily life. New York: Thomas Whittaker n.d.. 165 p. DEVOTION 19th Century

Kindle:

Radcliffe, Ann: The Mysteries of Udolpho. A Project Gutenberg Book first published in 1794. This is the book everyone is reading and talking about in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey. FICTION 18th Century

Kindle:

Patten, Robert L.: George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Volume1: 1792-1835. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992. BIOGRAPHY ARTIST ILLUSTRATOR 18th Century 19th Century 20th Century This award winning biography by one of my English literature professors from Rice University is proving a most enjoyable re-read. One of Patten's strong points as a professor was rooting the literature in the history, the sociology, and the culture of the time, He offers rich details in a very readable frame. With my new interest in book illustration it is even more interesting to me now than it was on my first reading some years ago.