Subtraction

My husband says that mathematics is the language of the gods. My grandson Jake, always a little off center, is learning math in kindergarten, and has the concepts of addition and subtraction well under control. He told me yesterday: Hair minus hair equals bald!

:-P

I Signed

The Rules of Grammar

Abraham Kaplan, an exponent of Hassidic Judaism, in his analytic paper called "The Meaning of Ritual: Comparisons," published in Reflections on Mormonism, Judaeo-Christian Parallels quotes Edmund R. Leach, writing "In seeking to understand ritual we are, in effect, trying to discover the rules of grammar and syntax of an unknown language." Kaplan says that "Ritual can be regarded as a language, and I am using the word in its broadest sense as a symbol in action." (Italics mine) He continues, "But language is not constituted by a grammar and syntax alone; it must also have a semantics and be a carrier of meaning."

Interpretation of this symbolic language then becomes prime force behind understanding the actions performed. So, who is the interpreter of the Mormon Temple ritual as it is being performed tomorrow night in HBO's Big Love? We, as viewers? The writers? The producers? Can symbols that hold specific meaning as part of a foreign language, to be understood only in terms of the whole system, be communicated and understood in the short and fictitious context of an hour of TV?
Even if it is relevant to the story line? Will it lead too easily to distorted conceptions of Mormonism?

For us Mormons, temple symbolism is something which, in some way, really is what it signifies. No mystery here. No "secret." Just the symbol, rich in meaning, with levels of nuance, making something concrete that is abstract. If we then, privately choose to wear "magic" underwear that reminds us to eat healthily, to pray, to be honest--why should this become a public matter? Whose business should it be but ours, privately? Who gives HBO invasion of privacy rights concerning private temple rituals and sacraments (or their interpretations thereof)? Does your neighbor have the right to come into your house and then broadcast things he has found on your bookshelf, or in your fridge and cupboards to the whole neighborhood, because it is "relevant" to a funny story he is writing about you?

Just wondering. Next question: Does it matter? No. Should I care? Probably.

What I Learned in Church Today...

...and I should frame it and hang it on my wall: "Don't worry. Everything will be okay in the end. If it isn't okay, then it isn't the end."

;-D

BOP

CEREUS

If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you.
~ Michelle McGrane

Tomorrow is a very long time away.
Above you Cassiopeia boasts of her arrogant beauty.
Below you the dust of some night-blooming
flower clings to your feet as you walk among pedestrians
and bicycles across the Pont des Iles toward Ville-Marie.
This is how you come to the end.

If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you.

You may forever after lie awake
in the dark, hour after hour
as if you had died, and time
no longer matters, precise in its disbelief
that tomorrow will be better. Think of it
this way: pretend that you are walking
toward someone who waits for you
in fog, just across the bridge.

If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you.

When you come to the other side, and the fog lifts,
you find a tavern that sells Maranges,
and an old woman sells flowers that smell of some
night-blooming thing you can almost recall;
for that moment, standing on the edge
of memory: something that might really have happened.

If you are lucky
you will carry one night with you.

ReadWritePoem (Words)

Counting-Out Rhyme

Silver bark of beech, and sallow
Bark of yellow birch and yellow
Twig of willow.

Stripe of green in moosewood maple,
Colour seen in leaf of apple,
Bark of popple.

Wood of popple pale as moonbeam,
Wood of oak for yoke and barn-beam,
Wood of hornbeam.

Silver bark of beech, and hollow
Stem of elder, tall and yellow
Twig of willow.

~Edna St. Vincent Millay

(Read it out loud!)

Weathervanes

For a few weeks I have been at a loss for words. Taking myself too seriously, or something like that. Maybe it was viewing BodyWorlds. Or burying the sparrow with my grandson. Or my creaky back. Or whatever. But I've been feeling, um, unsettled. Doubting the status quo. A weathervane.

Yesterday Larry H Miller died in Salt Lake City, a man I didn't know, (and you've probably never heard of). But he was famous around here. He died of diabetes and kidney failure. There was a picture of him in today's newspaper, Larry as a teenager, looking young and fresh--even handsome--something I would never have imagined. He was a multi-millionaire and lived in a huge house not too far away...the sight of it would make you gasp, it was that big. He graduated from high school with a 1.77 GPA, and dropped out after six weeks at the University of Utah. He started out selling cars, and at the time of his death he owned 74 business enterprises--car dealerships, movie theaters, a shopping mall, a movie production company, restaurants, TV and radio stations, a professional baseball team, an NBA franchise (the Utah Jazz).... He was a creative genius.

Now he has gone "over the hill, as we all must," according to writer Jim Harrison, in his book Returning to Earth. Today I went alone to see The Reader. Since my movie-buddy Nila died last year, (and my husband chooses not to go to R-rated films) I have begun taking myself once in a while. Not often, but I decided that it's NOW or NEVER. I think The Reader was beautifully done, exceptionally performed. I loved it! But it didn't help this fluctuating, mutable, weathervane of stuff I have been experiencing lately. Maybe it's because this May I turn seventy. Seventy. Elizabeth Kubler Ross said it: If there are things you want to do, do them NOW. I can't say it any better than that.

Now I am going to finish my Pepsi, visit some blog-friends, listen to Garrison Keillor, and watch some TV. I'll feel better tomorrow.

image: archictecturaldepot.com

Elizabeth Gilbert ~ Worth Saving

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!
*Thank you Poet Mom, January O'Neil

Broken Tea Bowls

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places."

--Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms

I learned something valuable yesterday. I learned about broken Japanese tea bowls, and about the Japanese Wabi aesthetic. According to Zen-cha Roku, Wabi means lacking something, having things run contrary to our desires, being frustrated in our wishes. Things imperfect, things irregular or damaged. Like me, and probably like you, too.

These irreplaceable antique porcelain Japanese tea bowls used in tea ceremonies sometimes become cracked or broken. They are not throwaways. The broken bowls are painstakingly repaired with a mixture of lacquer and gold, whereby they become more valuable, the repaired bowl worth more than the original. They say that the repairs lend character and beauty to the bowl, the repaired imperfections enhancing the design, and they are prized all the more.

Crystal, my teacher, said that once she and her mother were driving in the canyon, and they had just passed one of those signs that warn: WATCH FOR FALLING ROCKS, when a landslide of boulders came crashing down on their car. One of her tires was ripped off its bent rim, the windows were broken out. Her injured mother stayed in the car, sitting in a sea of broken glass. Crystal got out, and began to pound on the dented hood. "Why ME?" she asked the mountain. "WHY ME?" I mean, how many times have you read that sign--and NEVER had any rocks fall on you? DO you know of ANYONE who ever had rocks fall on them? Why me, indeed. Crystal said when she was a child, and was faced with disappointments and hurts, her dad always told her to "Cowboy up!"

But, you know what? When I first learned about my melanoma, my first reaction was Why me? Then I thought, Because. Just because. A hundred 'why's'. A hundred 'becauses.' Why not me? Joseph Wirthlin, an LDS Apostle said last October, "The dial on the wheel of sorrow eventually points to each of us. No one is exempt." But you know what else? Nobody ever promised it was going to be roses all the way. The poet Theodore Roethke said it: "I learn by going where I have to go." Sometimes we just have to "Cowboy up."

A note I discovered once among some old papers: Adversity helps men to rise above themselves.

My husband said once, a long time ago, "When you think of the vastness and enormity of the universe, and of the billions and billions of planets and stars, doesn't it make you feel small and insignificant?" Then he added, "Me, neither!"

We are all like the precious flower vase made by Rikyo called Onjoji, and a beautiful tea bowl named Seppo, made by Koatsu--prized all the more because they were cracked, and have been fixed. We may be imperfect, but that's okay.

My favorite songwriter/poet Leonard Cohen wrote: Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.

Is that true? I think so. :)

At Last!

Everything is Possible... Tout est Possible...

Share this image by photographer Karine Doche with your friends. Make it circulate!

NOTE, 1-27-09: A few nights ago on the news, they featured a Muslim Children's Choir here in SLC, singing with a Jewish Children's Choir. After singing songs from each culture, one of the many songs they sang was "We Are Family." Afterward, the people in the audience (mostly parents) cried and embraced one another. I was very touched. The children are performing again next week in the Salt Lake Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square.
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Monday and Me

This is an old snapshot of me and a house sparrow named Monday. I was 13 or so. Monday was blown out of her nest in our Chinese Elm tree when she was a baby, and she never really understood that she was a bird, and not a person. Neither did we. She was a loved member of the family, until the day she died.

We buried a sparrow the other day (my grandson Jacob and I) who somehow laid himself down to die on my doorstep--none the worse, for being dead. Jacob noticed the eyes, still dark and shiny, were open. Did he crash into the window? Was he attacked by bigger birds in an argument over seeds I threw out the night before? Or was he sick, or old? Jake helped me dig a hole where flowers will grow in spring. We covered him with a napkin, Jake said it would "be easy for him to fly out someday, when he comes alive again." I agreed. I said a few words about how Heavenly Father notices the fall of sparrows. I shed a few tears, (sentimental me!), and I thought about a book I am reading called Returning to Earth, by Jim Harrison, which the back cover says is a "moving meditation on life and afterlife," with a "fierce gentle beauty." And I thought about this bird, and all of us. Harrison writes of a mine disaster where, over a period of 20 years, nearly 2,000 men had died: In the dream I finally understood that death and numbers don't cohere. Everyone is "one." An accident report might say that nine men died, four of them in their teens, but each death was "one." Each of six million Jews was "one." With death it is a series of "ones."

Last week we went to see Dr. Gunther von Hagens' BODYWORLDS at The Leonardo Museum downtown featuring "a unique collection of over 200 authentic human specimens, real people, "plastinated." Men, women, babies, a camel, a camel baby.... I am not going to discuss the ethics of the exhibition. It was awesome. It was even inspiring, as they promised it would be. People doing things in death I'm sure they never dreamed they would do, in life--skiing, ballet dancing, ice-skating, balancing beautifully and perfectly in aesthetic displays that invited all of us to contemplate and reflect on the unimaginable complexity and elegance of the human body. Each of the collection of "over 200" in the series was "one." As was the sparrow Jacob and I buried. As we all are.
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Happy New Year, Planet Earth!

túrána hott kurdís by hasta la otra méxico! from Till Credner on Vimeo.

Earthrise: Credit Apollo 8, NASA
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...and to all, a good night!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a "Good night." God bless us, every one!

* I meant only to post the lovely video, but after you've seen that, take a minute to look around Anne's place for her other great posts!
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Melvin Clarence Davis (June 8, 1939-December 21, 2008)

My husband's brother Mel died early this morning of ALS. May flights of angels sing him to his rest. We love Mel and we shall miss him. Our condolences to his children Rhonda, Chris, Scott, Jeff, Kerri, Cindy, Jodi and their families, and to his brothers and sisters, Donna, Alyce, Jean, Richard, and Marv and their families. Mel leaves behind 20 grandchildren, and 4 great grandchildren.

As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. (1 Cor. 15:22)

To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. (John 18:37)

Blessed be.

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Bearing Witness

Emily Dickinson had much to share with the world about life, and love, death and hope, and being human on a planet that has much to learn about compassion and forgiveness. Maybe most about hope. "Hope," she wrote, "is a thing with feathers That perches in the soul."

Here is one she wrote called: This Is My Letter To The World

This is my letter to the world
That never wrote to me
The simple news that Nature told
With tender Majesty

Her message is committed
To hands I cannot see
For love of her,
Sweet countrymen,
Judge tenderly of me.

--------------------------------------

And so, Christmastime is when hope perches in the soul of mankind perhaps more than at any other time of year, with its message of peace and goodwill. Here then is my Christmas message to all of you, my friends whose hands I cannot see, in the form of a question, many questions:

BETHLEHEM IN PLEIADES

Is there a Bethlehem
in Pleiades? --
A manger
made of stranger stuff
than hay
where a virgin,
silver-eyed and young
and far from home
laid another Babe
called Christ? --
Or is he called by different names
in Pleiades?
Was it a thousand
thousand years ago
or yesterday
he ran across the four-starred
square of Pegasus
and Lyrae
and Persei?
Is it, in all
the deep Manvantaras of space,
Christmas?
Is it winter on Arcturas?
Do angels carol and rejoice
in Andromeda
to an infant
born only NOW --
light years across the universe
among strange six-hoofed beasts
that stand and low and bray,
thunderstruck?
Do they see
just NOW
the star?


MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Gloria (again)....

In case you missed her the first time around, I love this little Christmas angel that tops our tree every year....

ElfYourself!

(Click it!)
Recognize any of these elves? Sent by my sister-in-law: she and her husband, me and mine, and my mother-in-law.... O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!