May Day! May Day!
I mean "Happy May Day!"
I'm finding the tug of spring pulling me away from my books... "you can't read! there's gardening to be done!" I hear my conscience blurt out... or "you can't read! The biking season has begun! It's time to get outside and enjoy yourself!" But of course reading IS enjoying myself, especially after a long, busy, noisy day.
So I'm reading... I'm still making my way through "The Omnivore's Dilemma," and I just picked up Barbara Kingsolver's book "Animal Vegetable Miracle." Think of it as a way to round out my gardening attempts with some good education and moral support.
What are you reading? How are you balancing your outdoor life with your indoor life? Let me know!
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I'm working on Heaven's Net is Wide, the prequel to the Otori series by Lian Hearn. Then I'm back to a couple of YA books, then on to some new historical fiction set in ancient Rome. Toss in a few business books (as yet unchosen) and that's my May reading schedule.
And maybe the weather will turn warm soon?
Collision: two seconds before, I saw the dark
chest of the horse, muscles gleaming in the rain,
silhouetted in the headlights of an on-coming truck.
Then the glass shattered into slivers and globules,
some shaped like startled birds or teeth-like flowers,
others just thin and sharp as a nightjar's cry.
"A horse ran into our car," I said shocked, quiet
as a prayer. My young son repeats "I'm so lucky
to be alive." He is reassured by my breathing,
by the trees bending, the storm ignoring our relief.
We get out, my husband shaking glass shards
from his shirt. Two white horses quiver
under the trees, rolling their white-rimmed eyes,
rain darkening their nostrils and lips
until it seems as if they are breathing the night.
But it's the black horse that bolted down the road;
her sides heave as we try to calm her, whispering
it's alright, it's alright. Her hooves are sleek
but blunted: they leave strange tracks in the mud,
shining like glass wings, curved and half-open.
There is blood under the hooves of the dark horse--
she stares over our shoulders, dreaming of the ancient
language of horses: wide-mouthed, sweet-appled, breathless.
She shivers, waiting for her True Master to take her
into more familiar pastures, to comb her down
with tufts of grass by the old barn with its chickens
laying eggs on pale straw, and where the barn owl
roosts with the hens in the coldest winters,
the moon glimmering like a salt-lick. Dark Horse,
are you longing for the wind to braid your mane
into wild songs and for the spring rains to flood
the field remembering your great hunger
for the sun growing vertical and green? Dark Horse,
you are almost darker than this sinewy dark.
You are almost faster than the wind in your memories.
Our low voices murmur distantly, like the promise
of cool water at the end of a long journey.
It's alright. You're almost there.
Anita Endrezze
["Night Mare" posted here with permission]
"I didn't kill my wife."
"I don't care."
(dialogue from the movie "The Fugitive")
"Our chiefs are killed . . . The old men are all dead . . . The little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them have run away to the hills and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are, perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I can find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever." Chief Joseph (Hinmaton-Yalaktit: Thunder Rolling in the Mountains) c. 1840-1904 / To the Nez Perce tribe after surrender to General Nelson A. Miles (battle of Bear Paw Mountains, Montana, September 30 - October 5, 1877) source: FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, JOHN BARTLETT, Fifteenth and 125th Anniversary Edition
"They [the Americans] have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent; and they admit that what appears to them today to be good, may be superseded by something better tomorrow." Alexis de Tocqueville, 1805-1859, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA, pt. I [1835] source: FAMILIAR QUOTATIONS, JOHN BARTLETT, Fifteenth and 125th Anniversary Edition
LEARNING TO LIVE WITHOUT VIOLENCE - [text, workbook, journal]
INTIMATE VIOLENCE - [research, national surveys, interview schedule]
DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, ADULT WORKBOOK - [workbook, information]
www.nativewiki.org/Anita_Endrezze
An example of restrained anger is in Anita Endrezze's poem, "Manifest Destiny," a poem I thought to be angry and violent when I first read it: "my son; in his eyes there is more than quiet pain -- / now blood-red flames bloom anger / and he is yet to live." The closing,"he is yet to live," suggests the future, and who's to say what emotions will result in what consequences in the future?
Love, if you were near me
standing by my chair
your touch would be the willow
in its glaze of air, music's fingers
moving over strings, flowers
brought like voices
to this empty room.
But you are in your absence
winter afternoons, when I
am only here,
and silences are filled
with thoughts of you
and there is nothing
Love,
and everything to do.
Kenneth MacLean
["IF YOU WERE HERE"] posted here with permission
relationships based on trust or respect; agreement not to hurt implicit in relationship; violence breaks trust; respect for their own integrity causes loss of respect for you
swear words objectify, make less than fully human; easier to hurt thing (objectified person)
Different kinds of violence? Physical, Verbal, Mental, Sexual
Why violence? quick, revenge, acceptable, control; it works/short term; violence is taught (do what done to us), around violence/peer support
When does anger become violent?
lack of impulse control - alcohol, drugs lower impulse control
stress - level up, stop thinking
stuff/repress feeling - until explosion
decision - at some level
"The mind is essentially peaceful. For me, that discovery, at least initially, held both bad news and good news, like the punch line of many current jokes. The bad news was that the relaxed mind, the mind free of disturbances, was not necessarily psychedelically exotic. I had hoped it would be. The good news was that contentment turns out to be the most exotic mind state of all and is never tedious or tiresome. We could experience it forever. We could experience it forever, because it's our natural mind." IT'S EASIER THAN YOU THINK: THE BUDDHIST WAY TO HAPPINESS. Sylvia Boorstein / / / [A TREE CLAUSE BOOK. HarperSanFrancisco and the author, in association with The Basic Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose primary mission is reforestation, will facilitate the planting of two trees for every one tree used in the manufacture of this book.]
A long-ago associate plants trees for profit; either way, planting trees is a good way to go.