Winnow the Dreams

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Sun and Wind on the Roof, 1915
John French Sloan, 1871 - 1951

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.

The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

by Richard Wilbur

Click to hear poet Richard Wilbur read this amazing poem
and explain how he was inspired by the idea of the floating laundry.

Another painting by artisit John French Sloan ~ also inspired by laundry!
Red Kimono on the Roof, 1912

See also:
1. additional perspectives on Wilbur's poem
2. interesting blog post on "Love Calls Us"
3. clever little analysis for beginners

And a few more connections:
1. Contemporary poet, Barbara Kunz Loots describes the tension between possibility and duty with elegant simplicity. For her the "infinite possibilities" are "delicate grain" and the "infinite duties" are "the plain bread of day."

Waking
How hard it is to winnow the dreams from waking,
To watch the gold illusion drift away
And turning to the delicate grain of morning
Grind it into the plain bread of day.
by Barbara Kunz Loots
2. Last week on facebook, epigrammatist and collage artist Michael Lipsey captured the same idea in this fetching visual. Is it a beaver, as in "busy as a beaver" (infinite duty)? Or is it a groundhog, as in if I don't like what I see, I'm not coming out! Maybe it is not the bright sunshine so much as the it is the sheen of infinite possibility that causes the groundhog to shrink from its shadow and run away, overwhelmed. Perhaps love does not call the groundhog to the things of this world.

"There's an in between time when you wake up,
hanging onto the dream, but beginning to remember
things you need to do today." ~ Michael Lispsy
When I read Lipsey's caption concerning the "in between time," I couldn't help thinking of what Loots says about watching "the gold illusion drift away," as the dreamer sifts the wheat from the chaff; and of the "astounded soul" in Wilbur's poem, hanging "bodiless and simple," waiting to rejoin the waking body for another round of mundane errands. At first "the soul shrinks from all that it is about to remember" -- the repetition, the banality, the laundry. But after a few moments of semi - wakeful debate, "the soul descends . . . in bitter love" to accept the reality of the day at hand. Similarly, we rise up "in bitter love" to embrace each day, despite a thousand misgivings. The voice in both poems is resigned yet optimistic: the grain is delicate, the laundry is sacred, the day redeems itself.

3. I am reminded of the E. B. White "To - Do - List" fridge magnet:
"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy.
If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem.
But I arise in the morning torn between
a desire to improve the world
and a desire to enjoy the world.
This makes it hard to plan the day."
White vacillates between enjoyment and accomplishment, as do the sunstruck groundhog (though maybe not the industrious beaver), the reluctant dreamer, and the astounded soul. The vacillation makes it "hard to plan the day" -- but not impossible. One way or another, even if only by "habit" (Wilbur's pun), we accept the challenge of the sun, yawn, rise, go forth day after day, keeping our "difficult balance." I especially like the way that Wilbur's conlcusion can actually be found in his title: "love call us to the things of this world."

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Wednesday, August 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

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my running list of recent reading
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Two Poems for Bastille Day

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

The Acqua Claudia, built between 38 - 52 AD

"All right . . . all right . . . but apart from better sanitation
and medicine and education and irrigation and public health
and roads and a freshwater system and baths and public order . . .
what have the Romans done for us?"

"Brought peace!"

From Monty Python's Life of Brian

********************The Fall of Rome
(for Cyril Connolly)

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

1947
W. H. Auden

"Altogether elsewhere . . . "

Four Preludes
On Playthings of the Wind

1
The woman named Tomorrow
sits with a hairpin in her teeth
and takes her time
and does her hair the way she wants it
and fastens at last the last braid and coil
and puts the hairpin where it belongs
and turns and drawls: Well, what of it?
My grandmother, Yesterday, is gone.
What of it? Let the dead be dead.

2
The doors were cedar
and the panel strips of gold
and the girls were golden girls
and the panels read and the girls chanted:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us every was.
The doors are twisted on broken hinges.
Sheets of rain swish through on the wind
where golden girls ran and the panels read:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

Rainy Day at the Colosseum
3
It has happened before.
Strong men put up a city and got
a nation together,
And paid singers to sing and women
to warble: We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation,
nothing like us ever was.

And while the singers sang
and the strong men listened
and paid the singers well
and felt good about it all,
there were rats and lizards who listened
... and the only listeners left now
... are ... the rats .. and the lizards.

And there are black crows
crying, "Caw, caw,"
bringing mud and sticks
building a nest over the words carved
on the doors where the panels were cedar
and the strips on the panels were gold
and the golden girls came singing:
We are the greatest city,
the greatest nation:
nothing like us ever was.

The only singers now are crows crying, "Caw, caw,"
And the sheets of rain whine in the wind and doorways.
And the only listeners now are ... the rats ... and the lizards.

~ "the orange dot marks the trail" ~
4
The feet of the rats
scribble on the doorsills;
the hieroglyphs of the rat footprints
chatter the pedigrees of the rats
and babble of the blood
and gabble of the breed
of the grandfathers and the great-grandfathers
of the rats.

And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.

1926
Carl Sandburg

Via Scala
All photos of Rome and environs taken by Ben McCartney
~ Summer 2012 ~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 28th

Between now and then, read
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Currently featuring photographs from Paris
by Steven La Vigne

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Ancestors

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Paternal Grandparents

~ Recent Family History ~
a poem
by Ernest Sandeen (1908 - 1997)
Looking out at us from their photographs,
mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles,
now dead for forty - five years or more,
don't recognize us, can't even imagine us.
And we are helpless to penetrate the safety
of their innocence . . .
from Collected Poems (237)

Maternal Grandparents

" . . . we start [that which] we will not live to see,
just as our ancestors could not live to see us.
And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,
as predisposition, as burden upon our fate, as murmuring blood,
and as gesture that rises up from the depths of time."
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)
from Letters to a Young Poet (62)
I've never forgotten a dream that I had one night when I was in my early twenties. My mother's parents seemed to be right beside my bed, sitting in rocking chairs, sipping tea (or was it Sanka?) from china cups. In reality, my grandfather was still alive at the time, though my grandmother had died fifteen years earlier. It was not a dreamy or dreamlike dream; it was more of a visitation, consisting of a single scenario and one line of dialogue: my grandmother saying to me, "You are very American aren't you?" What could that mean? They were just as American as I, born in America, as were their parents, who had immigrated several generations before. We were not new to the Country, so my American - ness should come as no surprise to them.

Upon waking, I interpreted the dream as their way of granting me permission to forge ahead into a future which, as Rilke says, they would not live to see, reassuring me that my way of being in the world was going to be different than theirs had been . . . and that this was okay with them. Over the years, I have not remembered many dreams, but this one remains as vivid to me as the night my grandparents came to acknowledge that beyond a certain point, they could no longer imagine me, yet I would always have their blessing and their unconditional love.

"We have all rejected our beginnings
and become something our parents could not have foreseen."
by Robertson Davies (1913 - 1995)
from Fifth Business (248)

I love seeing my my maternal grandmother
in these outfits, obviously some of her favorites,
that she chose for having her photograph taken.
Such stylish footwear and that extravagant hat!


Her older brother, known for his photography, had promised her a photo session, and she was hoping to model something elegant, but he had a radical idea: if she wanted another picture taken, she could pose in his baseball uniform. Not her idea of finery, but she reluctantly agreed -- the first and last time in her life to don a pair of trousers. Perhaps he convinced her by insisting that "A hundred years from now, this photo will be a family treasure, cherished by your grand-daughter!" If so, how right he would have been!

On the back, my grandmother has written:
"Rovilla in ball suit"

In another treasured photo,
here is my paternal grandmother, also defying convention.
On the back, my Aunt Sue has written:
"Our Momma in slacks.
This is the only time I ever saw her in slacks."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bristow Ancestors
Click to see slideshow & hear music by Gerry McCartney
~ Also On YouTube ~

Gerry's Paternal Great - Grandparents and Great - Aunts

We tried to recreate their unusual pose . . .

and thought it would be even more fun
to replace the newspaper . . .

with a 21st Century equivalent.

Something our parents could not have foreseen!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Sunday, July 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Peace Concluded 1856
by John Everett Millais

I love the uncanny similarity between the above photograph
of Gerry's great - grandparents and this painting,
depicting a wounded British officer reading the Times
newspaper report of the end of the Crimean War.

When the Iris Blows Blue

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Irises
painted by Vincent Van Gogh (1853 - 1890)

"How well he has understood the exquisite nature of flowers!"
French art critic Octave Mirbeau (1848 - 1917)
The irises were lovely this year. Every spring, when they bloom, I think of Rukeyser's poem "Iris": "blue below blue . . . blue before blue . . . blue behind blue." As the opening line reveals, this is really a poem for May, but I think that it is equally suited to mid - June. For one thing, the irises often continue well past the middle of the May. For another, today is Flag Day, and I can still remember from childhood that my grandmothers always called these stately waving flowers by their popular common name: flags.

Iris
1
Middle of May, when the iris blows,
blue below blue, the bearded patriarch-
face on the green flute body of a boy
Poseidon     torso of Eros
blue
sky below sea
day over daybreak violet behind twilight
the May iris
midnight on midday

2
Something is over and under this deep blue.
Over and under this movement, etwas
before and after, alguna cosa
blue before blue
is it  
           perhaps    
                             death?
That might be the wrong word

The iris stands in the light.

3
Death is here, death is guarded by swords.
No. By shapes of swords
flicker of green leaves
under all the speaking and crying
shadowing the words the eyes     here they all die
raging withering       blue evening
my sister death the iris
stands clear in light

4
In the water - cave
ferocious needles of teeth
the green morays
in blue water     rays
a maleficence     ribbon of green     the flat look of
eyes staring     fatal mouth staring
the rippling potent force
curving into any hole
death finding his way.

5
Depth of petals, May iris
transparent     infinitely deep they are
petal - thin      with light behind them
and you, death,
and you
behind them
blue behind blue
What I cannot say 
in adequate music
something being born
transparency     blue of
light standing on light
this stalk of
(among mortal petals - and - leaves)
light

Muriel Rukeyser
American Poet (1913 - 1980)

Iris the Rainbow Goddess
photograph from Vatican City ~ by TheCityGoddess

The iris plant takes its name from the Greek word for rainbow ~ iris ~ and the closely related eiris, meaning messenger. The elegant, delicate flowers are also named after Iris, Goddess of the Rainbow. As daughter of a marine god and a cloud-nymph, Iris is a goddess of both sea and sky. To read more about her roles as personification of the rainbow and messenger of the Olympian Gods, take a look at these beautiful explanatory sites: Owl's Daughter and Theoi.

Rukeyser's poetry is rich in Biblical and classical allusion; in "Iris" she draws on the Greek gods to make an unexpected connection. She sees the tall flag - like flowers with their sword - like leaves not only as rainbows and messengers, but also as a unique combination of Poseidon, God of the the Sea, and Eros, the God of Love. The iris blossom is an aged Poseidon, "the bearded patriarch," while the lithe stalk and narrow leaves remind her of a youthful Eros, "green flute body of a boy." Together they form the flower we love. Eros is an airborne god, and Poseidon rules the sea. Taken together, these two elements, air and water -- like Iris herself -- combine with light to create that phenomenon we love -- the rainbow.

While some still refer to the multi - colored irises as "flags," others call them "swords," as Rukeyser does in this poem: " . . . death is guarded by swords. / No. By shapes of swords / flicker of green leaves." Poseidon and Eros each possess a sword of sorts, Poseidon controling the calm and storm of the sea with his trident; Eros controling the calm and storm of human hearts with his golden - or (for those less lucky in love) leaden - tipped arrows.

Iris as flower, flag, sword. Iris as rainbow, goddess, messenger. Iris as air, water, and sky. Both Muriel Rukeyser and Louise Gluck (in the following poem) honor the complexity of this remarkable plant. In both poems, the flowers are respected as messengers from the afterlife, traveling back from the otherworld, offering new perspectives on mortality and light.

Irises ~ Van Gogh
The Wild Iris
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.

Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.

It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.

Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.

You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:

from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure seawater.

Louise Gluck
American Poet (b 1943)

Related Post: "This Life Flies"

on THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
(my blog of shorter almost daily posts)

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, June 28thP.S.
More Louise Gluck:
Penelope, Who Really Cried

More Muriel Rukeyser:
La Cucaracha
Icarus, Who Really Fell
Lot's Wife, Who Gave Her Life For a Single Glance
All the Little Animals
Another Good Poem by Muriel Rukeyser
The Wrong Answer

Paris: Ferlinghetti, Fenton & Forche

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, Paris
On the right is my friend Victoria Amador, who has been around the world!

Recipe for Happiness
Khabarovsk or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
American, b. 1919
Paris Street ~ Rainy Day
Gustave Caillebotte ~ French, 1848 - 94

I guess Ferlinghetti feels that to say "Paris" -- rather than "Khabarovsk or Anyplace" -- would be simply too obvious; whereas, in the next poem, "Paris" becomes the substitute code word for something even more obvious and too often cliched:

In Paris With You

Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve drowned a drink or two.
I’m one of your talking wounded
I’m a hostage. I’m marooned.
But I’m in Paris with you.

Yes I’m angry at the way I’ve been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess that I’ve been through
I admit I’m on the rebound
And I don’t care where are we bound.
I’m in Paris with you.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre,
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysees
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There’s that crack across the ceiling

And the hotel walls are peeling
And I’m in Paris with you.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris.
I’m in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I’m in Paris with . . . all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I’m in Paris with you.

James Fenton
British, b. 1949

La Tour Eiffel
Photographed by my niece, Sara Carriker, 2013

And one more poem about Paris in which the last line says it all:
"I've been to Paris . . . "

As Children Together

Under the sloped snow
pinned all winter with Christmas
lights, we waited for your father
to whittle his soap cakes
away, finish the whisky,
your mother to carry her coffee
from room to room closing lights
cubed in the snow at our feet.
Holding each other's
coat sleeves we slid down
the roads in our tight
black dresses, past
crystal swamps and the death
face of each dark house,
over the golden ice
of tobacco spit, the blue
quiet of ponds, with town
glowing behind the blind
white hills and a scant
snow ticking in the stars.
You hummed "blanche comme
la neige" and spoke of Montreal
where a québecoise could sing,
take any man's face
to her unfastened blouse
and wake to wine
on the bedside table.
I always believed this,
Victoria, that there might
be a way to get out.

You were ashamed of that house,
its round tins of surplus flour,
chipped beef and white beans,
relief checks and winter trips
that always ended in deer
tied stiff to the car rack,
the accordion breath of your uncles
down from the north, and what
you called the stupidity
of the Michigan French.

Your mirror grew ringed
with photos of servicemen
who had taken your breasts
in their hands, the buttons
of your blouses in their teeth,
who had given you the silk
tassles of their graduation,
jackets embroidered with dragons
from the Far East. You kept
the corks that had fired
from bottles over their beds,
their letters with each city
blackened, envelopes of hair
from their shaved heads.

I am going to have it, you said.
Flowers wrapped in paper from carts
in Montreal, a plane lifting out
of Detroit, a satin bed, a table
cluttered with bottles of scent.

So standing in a Platter of ice
outside a Catholic dance hall
you took their collars
in your fine chilled hands
and lied your age to adulthood.

I did not then have breasts of my own,
nor any letters from bootcamp
and when one of the men who had
gathered around you took my mouth
to his own there was nothing
other than the dance hall music
rising to the arms of iced trees.

I don't know where you are now, Victoria.
They say you have children, a trailer
in the snow near our town,
and the husband you found as a girl
returned from the Far East broken
cursing holy blood at the table
where nightly a pile of white shavings
is paid from the edge of his knife.

If you read this poem, write to me.
I have been to Paris since we parted.

Carolyn Forché
American, b. 1950

Girls Together in Paris ~ Sara & her friend Angela

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, June 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

To Forgive: Reprove, Restore, Reclaim

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Tree of Forgiveness
by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones

Last week, Gerry and I were lucky enough to view this painting
at The Lady Lever Art Gallery
in Port Sunlight, Merseyside, England
Before we proceed, allow me to express my dismay at the preponderance of exclusionary masculine pronouns to be encountered in this post: "restored to himself" ~ "he who will not be taught" ~ "wholly His" ~ "He has forgiven." In scripture, literature, female authors, male authors: How long, O Lord? Naturally, I find the omnipresence of gender - bound sentence structure depressing and distressing; yet, I like all of the following passages and their common theme that forgiveness requires searching your own soul and using your thinking cap:

"In short, I began to think, and to think indeed is one real advance from hell to heaven. All that hardened state and temper of soul, which I said so much of before, is but a deprivation of thought; he that is restored to his thinking, is restored to himself." ~ Daniel Defoe, from his novel Moll Flanders

"Impatient is he who will not be taught or reproved of his sin, and by strife wars against truth wittingly, and defends his folly."
~ Chaucer

"When He talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts . . . that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever."
~ C. S. Lewis, from The Screwtape Letters

"He has forgiven me not just a great deal, but everything."
~ St. Therese of Lisieux

My friend Joni added this insight on forgiveness . . .

"That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself,
not counting their trespasses against them,
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation."
~ 2 Corinthians 5:19:

. . . with her own concluding comment: So if God's no longer counting why are we?

Good question, Joni!

One of my favorites:
"As far as the east is from the west, so far
are our transgressions removed from us."
~ Psalms 103: 12

It took me awhile to notice that our transgressions are removed not only from the mind of God -- they are also removed from us! We no longer have to align ourselves with every old mistake we ever made. As Joni points out, "If God is not looking backwards, why are we?"

***********************************
On both the use of paternalistic pronouns and the topic of forgiveness, I am reminded of the musical, Children of Eden written in the late 1980s by Stephen Schwartz. Schwartz takes some interesting and creative liberties with the Book of Genesis, but, alas, he totally forgot to eliminate the patriarchal sexism. Now, that's what I would have done! Instead, we have the same - old same - old God as grand-dad, with no grand-mom in sight; and the relentless chant of "Father, Father, Father." [See also A Twin Sister For Jesus]

Even so, some of the lyrics are quite beautiful:

Children of Eden
Like this brief day
My light is nearly gone
But through the night
My children you will go on
You will know heartache
Prayers that don't work
And times of bitter circumstances
But I still believe in second chances

Children of Eden
Where have we left you
Born to uncertainty
Destined for pain
Sins of your parents
Haunt you and test you
This your inheritance
Fire and rain

Children of Eden
Try not to blame us
We were just human
To error prone
Children of Eden will you reclaim us
You and your children to come
Someday you'll come home

Children of Eden
Where is our garden
Where is the innocence
We can't reclaim
Once eyes are opened
Must those eyes harden
Lost in the wilderness
Must we remain . . . you will reclaim us . . .


Garden of Eden by He Qi
[artist's bio / previous post]
In the Beginning
This step is one again our first
We set our feet upon a virgin land
We hold the promise of the earth
In our hands

No flood from heaven comes again
No deluge will destroy and purify
We hold the fate of man and men
In our hands

Now at this dawn so green and glad
We pray that we may long remember
How lovely was the world we had
In the beginning

Of all the gifts we have received
One is most precious and most terrible
The will of each of us is free*
It's in our hands . . .

Children of Eden
Grant us your pardon
All that we leave to you
is the unknown

Children of Eden
Seek for your garden
You and your children to come
Some day to come home

[emphasis added]

*As wise Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. observes it in Slaughterhouse Five: "We just can't seem to help feeling so entitled to free will, but what does that really mean?"

SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Tuesday, May 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
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