There is joy
in all:

in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,

in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.
 
So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.
 
The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.
 
~ Anne Sexton
The Awful Rowing Toward God
 

Gardening as Therapy

"“The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic, always enterprising, and never satisfied. They always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”

Vita Sackville-West

First, and what follows...

"THEY CAME FIRST for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

THEN THEY CAME for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

THEN THEY CAME for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

THEN THEY CAME for me
and by that time no one was left to speak up."

-- Martin Niemöller

-----------

 THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats

----------

"We don't need to be born again. We need to grow up."


-- Bishop Spong

Camas Lillies

Consider the lilies of the field,
the blue banks of camas
opening into acres of sky along the road.
Would the longing to lie down
and be washed by that beauty
abate if you knew their usefulness,
how the natives ground their bulbs
for flour, how the settlers’ hogs
uprooted them, grunting in gleeful
oblivion as the flowers fell?

And you — what of your rushed
and useful life? Imagine setting it all down —
papers, plans, appointments, everything —
leaving only a note: "Gone
to the fields to be lovely. Be back
when I’m through with blooming."

Even now, unneeded and uneaten,
the camas lilies gaze out above the grass
from their tender blue eyes.
Even in sleep your life will shine.
Make no mistake. Of course
your work will always matter.

Yet Solomon in all his glory
was not arrayed like one of these.

~ Lynn Ungar

Passover

They thought they were safe
that spring night when they daubed
the doorways with sacrificial blood.
To be sure, the angel of death
passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert
without a home without a bed
following new laws to an unknown land.
Easier to have died in Egypt
or stayed there a slave, pretending
there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first
naked days outside the garden,
is that there is no safety,
only the terrible blessing
of the journey. You were born
through a doorway marked in blood.
We are, all of us, passed over,
brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,
whose imagination you hold.
God did not promise that we shall live,
but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,
brilliant in the night sky.


-- Lynn Unger

Won't You Celebrate With Me

won't you celebrate with me

what i have shaped into

a kind of life? i had no model.

born in babylon

both nonwhite and woman

what did i see to be except myself?

i made it up

here on this bridge between

starshine and clay,

my one hand holding tight

my other hand; come celebrate

with me that everyday

something has tried to kill me

and has failed.

-- Lucille Clifton

As white and non-woman as I may, this resonates with me still. Here on this bridge between starshine and clay, between all there is, and all we know, won't you celebrate with me this one truth: We live.

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

-- Robert F. Kennedy

Opening Words

I believe the earth
exists, and
in each minim mote
of its dust the holy
glow of thy candle.
Thou
unknown I know,
thou spirit,
giver,
lover of making, of the
wrought letter,
wrought flower,
iron, deed, dream.
Dust of the earth,
help thou my
unbelief. Drift
gray become gold, in the beam of
vision. I believe with
doubt. I doubt and
interrupt my doubt with belief. Be,
beloved, threatened world.
Each minim
mote.
Not the poisonous
luminescence forced
out of its privacy,
The sacred lock of its cell
broken. No,
the ordinary glow
of common dust in ancient sunlight.<
Be, that I may believe. Amen.

-- Denise Levertov

Buttons

I HAVE been watching the war map slammed up for

advertising in front of the newspaper office.

Buttons--red and yellow buttons--blue and black buttons--

are shoved back and forth across the map.

A laughing young man, sunny with freckles,

Climbs a ladder, yells a joke to somebody in the crowd,

And then fixes a yellow button one inch west

And follows the yellow button with a black button one

inch west.

(Ten thousand men and boys twist on their bodies in

a red soak along a river edge,

Gasping of wounds, calling for water, some rattling

death in their throats.)

Who would guess what it cost to move two buttons one

inch on the war map here in front of the newspaper

office where the freckle-faced young man is laughing

to us?

Carl Sandburg

Fun With Thermite

At work, a major project for the last year or so has been extracting dead drives from machines leaving campus, with the intent of finding a way to render them unreadable. Degaussing was impractical, so we settled on running a drill bit through the platters in a couple of locations.

Effective, but it left us with about 200 nonfunctional drives leaking shards of aluminum. To make a long story short, I've seen one too many episodes of Mythbusters, so I asked the Director of IT if some of us couldn't have the drives for what, because we're an academic institution, I'll call an "experiment." The purpose of the experiment? To make a big boom and set stuff on fire. We're guys...this should go without saying.

I ordered several tens of pounds of unmixed thermite from a guy on the Web (just google "thermite mix" and it'll be pretty clear). Raymond drilled the drives, and Barth provided the camera. Long story short, we set up a stack of 100 drives and burned them out using molten iron.

The results were pretty cool, though I have to say that unless you got a real bulk rate on thermite, it would be a pretty cost-ineffective (though completely destructive) way to ensure your data didn't get out of your hands. Also, if we do this again, we'll remove all plastics and PCBs from the drives. We pulled off the drive rails, but the PCBs and connectors burned out, leaving a pretty noxious soot. Live and learn.

Anyway, you can see a gallery of images or watch a shortened video of the goings on.

Words for the wise: As really dangerous chemical reactions go, thermite isn't a big deal. It's just very hot, and very energetic. As the video shows, it drips molten iron and throws burning iron powder for quite a distance. It's also kind of a pain to light. I'm not going to say don't play with it, but use common sense if you do, and don't do anything really stupid.

Once a thermite reaction starts, you cannot stop it. It will laugh at your pitiful fire extinguisher. Water will create an explosion, and burning metal shrugs off dry chemical. I repeat: Don't be stupid, stupid. I can do this because I'm an adult with insurance and a healthy sense of self-preservation. If you do this and burn down something important, give yourself third-degree burns, or set the back lot on fire, it's your own fault.