flashes of silver
fish plash beneath clacking palms:
season of the fins
sweet budding branches:
brush back the flying darkness
comb through tangled stars
lavender shadows
ease across the evening sky:
waiting for the moon
Godot Gets a Gig
When a friend’s mother died some years ago, those who’d known her were offered a remembrance from her extensive collection of plants. I chose a slightly pathetic, short and scruffy little cactus no one could identify and took it off to live at The Place, twenty-three acres of unimproved land in the Texas hill country.
There was a cabin at The Place, filled with all the conveniences of modern life. There were screened windows and an ill-fitting screen door that closed with a terrifically satisfying metallic “thwang!” There were Coleman lanterns and a wood-burning stove, gravity-fed water from a barrel in a tree and all the shade you could want.
Still, the valley itself was the attraction, filled as it was with scrub and live oak, pin oak, black walnut and cherry. Along the creek, water striders darted beneath canopies of fern. Fossils – clams, whelks and corals – lined its limestone bed. In summer, lightning bugs rose from the damp and decaying bottoms like shimmering steam and, at the first touch of autumn, freezing ice plants split their tall, slender stems, the curling froth of water betokening winter to come. (more…)
The Saining of Speech
From Oban to Skye, from the Outer Hebrides to St. Kilda they traveled, two Aberdeen photographers intent on capturing and preserving the life of a remarkable people. The beautifully colored lantern slides of George Washington Wilson and Norman Macleod, an iconic collection now in the hands of Mark Butterworth, were produced in the late 1880s, fifty years before color photography came to Scotland,
Even as Wilson and Macleod pursued their photography, Alexander Carmichael was traveling the highlands and islands from Arran to Cithness, from Perth to St. Kilda, collecting traditional prayers, invocations and blessings of the people. Between 1855 and 1899, he compiled his Carmina Gadelica (Gaelic Songs), magnificent examples of Celtic tradition combined with Christian faith.
After St. Patrick’s arrival in Ireland and St. Columba’s missionary journey to Scotland, a unique culture, theology and spirituality began to evolve. Our modern eagerness to separate sacred and secular would have seemed laughable to those early converts. In the words of Avery Brooke, “Celtic Christians seldom left the spiritual behind in the living of their lives, nor the world behind in their prayers.” Tolerant of Celtic beliefs and practices, Christian missionaries were more than willing to adapt the prayers, blessings and invocations Celts wove into the fabric of their daily life. As Brooke says, “Christ was the Chieftain of Chiefs, but the old tales, songs, customs and runes – not to mention the crops, the fish, the daily work and nightly sleep – were sained, or marked with the sign of the cross, just as were fæiries, banshees and people.”
At heart, saining was a matter of consecration, but not in our modern sense of setting aside or apart. We tend to understand consecration as removal from the realities and routines of daily life, but for the people of the Isles, consecration elevated and hallowed every ordinary circumstance. (more…)
Quinta Scott ~ Where News Meets History
I have Wendy Billiot to thank for my introduction to Quinta Scott. When Wendy, my favorite Bayou Woman, first guided me (and “Otherbug”, my companion paper doll***) through the waterways and highways of Louisiana’s Terrebonne Parish, I just was beginning my education in the living ways of marsh, bayou and swamp.
When Quinta Scott stepped aboard Wendy’s boat some time earlier, she already had spent decades becoming an accomplished photographer and years traveling and documenting the Mississippi River for her book, The Mississippi: A Visual Biography. Fifteen years in the making, the book was photographed and written between the Flood of 1993 and the Flood of 2008, with Hurricanes Gustav and Ike thrown in for good measure. (more…)
Chase Jarvis & A New Paradigm
Back in the day, when journalism was journalism, gossip was gossip and propaganda was recognized for what it is, aspiring beat writers learned to begin good news stories by answering six basic questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? Useful as they are as a mnemonic device, these “Five Ws and One H” have a history of their own. At one point they even were memorialized by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories (1902), where a poem accompanying the tale of The Elephant’s Child opens with this bit of verse.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew).
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Questions which begin with one of the famous words are especially useful because none of them can be answered by a simple “yes” or “no”. Anyone interested in writing an informative news story, providing a good interview, understanding historical context or carrying on enjoyable dinner conversation knows the importance of the “five w’s and an h”. (more…)
