HAUNTED BY THE HOLY GHOST

I hope all my days will be lit by your face

I hope all my days will be lit by your face, originally uploaded by Lacking Focus.

"I hope all my days will be lit by your face
I hope all the years will hold tight our promises
I don't want to be old and sleep alone
An empty house is not a home
I don't want to be old and feel afraid

I don't want to be old and sleep alone
An empty house is not a home
I don't wanna be old and feel afraid

And if I need anything at all
I need a place that's hidden in the deep
Where lonely angels sing you to your sleep
Though all the world is broken
I need a place where I can make my bed
A lover's lap where I can lay my head
Because now the room is spinning
The day is beginning"
-- Keane, "Atlantic"

LITTLE FLOWER

LITTLE FLOWER, originally uploaded by nikaa.

"I'm growing up again...
I'm learning to accept
That all good things must come to an end.
I'm growing up again...
I'm trying to understand what it's like
To let go of a friend."
-- The Ataris, "In Spite of the World"

When you lose something you cannot replace

Believe in me, originally uploaded by Lacking Focus.

When you try your best but you don't succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can't sleep
Stuck in reverse

And the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
COULD IT BE WORSE?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above or down below
When you're too in love to let it go
But if you never try you'll never know
Just what you're worth

Tears stream down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face
And I

Tears stream down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you.

Coldplay's "Fix You"

A photograph is a secret about a secret...

golden, originally uploaded by serni.

A photograph is a secret about a secret.
The more it tells you the less you know.
                Diane Arbus (1923 - 1971)

Facebook status:

busy trying to see if I can rent the Roman Coliseum and some lions, or maybe a few Alaskan brown bears.

I will also give him a white stone with a the name PERSON written on it...

I find it puzzling that a good number of people spend more time, effort, words and energy making sure things are properly labeled....

There is almost an absurd frenzy that all life forms who merit it get the official stamp of "Person".

I am sincerely confused by it all, and maybe just a bit irritated.
I have known and know many "persons", who are more like walking ghosts, waiting and hoping, for....for...
Something...they don't have a name for;  Like pinocchio they are waiting for that something that makes them a  real live "person".

They have learned that labels are cheap and generic, and only make them feel more hollow and pale. They fade away a little more with each new label.
In fact, labels seem to make non-persons out of people. 
Elderly, cancer patient, disabled, mentally ill, helpless, victims, Islamic, Hindu, catholic, protestant.

In the tradition of Bonhoeffer's "cheap grace", bestowing a label on someone is "cheap love".
Seeing and naming their need is easy; but very few people feel it is their job to go beyond "seeing" and "knowing".
They think doing something about is must be for the next shift...the shift that never seems to show up.

Like the wizard of Oz's gifts to Dorothy and her friends, labels bestowed with a much noise and pomp might give onlookers warm fuzzies.
But it's a promise that rarely comes to any fruition.  After the victory party, everyone goes home to rest; until the next meaningless battle.

As Dorothy and her fellow travelers learned, it is only by walking side by side, sacrificing time, missing out the fireworks or the next battle (there will always be battles that are "Life and Death"; I beginning to suspect it's a demonic plot to keep people from really doing  the one needful thing...which involves  a real person with a name, not generic "persons".

And that work is the day to day, often monotonous work of being there with the other-it could family or stranger- in and out of season, not counting cost, but willing to give what is needed, what every person longs for...a heart full of Love, someone beside you to give you courage to face the day, gaining knowledge that may not always be welcome, but that is often the price of real wisdom; and most of all a place to belong...where you are called by Name.

In everyone there sleeps A sense of life lived according to love...

 
      
Faith Healing
      
      Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What's wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled

Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice -

What's wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all's wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them - that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.

Philip Larkin

Photo: Elena Baca

A Voice So Swollen...it wont' fit your ears

Some afternoons
thud unexpectedly
and split into four pieces
on the floor.

Two large pieces, two small ones.
I could glue them back,
but what would I use them for?

Forgive me when I answer you
in a voice so swollen
it won’t fit your ears.

Words are finding their way back to me, but they are heavy

and they THUD and they are not pleasing to the ear.

So forgive me if I choose silence over the din...for awhile....

                                      *********

On "Good Letters", The IMAGE JOURNAL BLOG, Peggy Rosenthal writes

"What I treasure here—as in many of Nye’s poems—is her gift for domesticating the wild terrors of human experience, so that whatever befalls us in the wide painful world can be brought home. A simple broken bowl: Nye has a way of making small things like this “hit home” in the largest sense, home at the core of our hearts where all the evil of the universe brings its torment and all the good comes to rest....

Because “some afternoons” truly do “thud” in on us. I think of the roaring thud of natural disasters around the world, tearing down homes and ripping families apart. I think of the thud of a bomb on the home of an Afghani family, their bodies split into horribly uncountable “pieces / on the floor.” And I think of the crashes in my life and in the lives of people dear to me..."

poem: from Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Breaking My Favorite Bowl” ( Words Under the Words).

 

photos: sandig.urbanspace

TELLING STORIES....

, originally uploaded by nikaa.

"But any walk within fictional worlds has the same function as a child’s play. Children play with puppets, toy horses, or kites in order to get acquainted with the physical laws of the universe and with the actions that someday they really will preform. Likewise, to read fiction means to play a game by which we give sense to the immensity of things that happened, are happening, or will happen in the actual world. By reading narrative, we escape the anxiety that attacks us when we try to say something true about the world.

This is the consoling function of narrative–the reason people tell stories, and have told stories from the beginning of time. And it has always been the paramount function of myth: to find a shape, a form, in the turmoil of human experience."

from “Possible Woods” by Umberto Eco

String of Pearls

String of Pearls, originally uploaded by artsyevie.

FOUND BEAUTY