The Vibrant Channeled Creator

It’s the birthday of novelist, memoirist, and screenwriter Marguerite Duras (books by this author), born near a small village in French Indochina near what is now Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam (1914). Her parents had left France to teach in the colonial South Pacific island but her dad became ill there and died and Duras had an impoverished miserable childhood in which she was abused by her mother and brother.
When she was a teenager she became lovers with a wealthy, older Chinese man whom she met on a ferry between Sa Dec and Saigon. She would write about him for the rest of her life in autographical works like The Sea Wall (1953), North China Lover (1991), and The Lover (1984) which was an international best-seller and won France’s most prestigious literary prize.

The Lover begins:
“One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place a man came up to me.  He introduced himself and said, ‘I’ve known you for years.  Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you that I think you’re more beautiful now than then.  Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now.  Ravaged.’”

Driving Nails
by Gary L. Lark

I learned to walk stud walls
setting rafters when I was six.
I straightened nails for my father
to re-drive, piecing a home together
after work or on weekends.

We were called Okies by some
when we moved to the valley,
putting up our tar-papered shack.
Two years later a house was rising
to face them across the pasture.

The only plans were sketched
on a six inch pad, but all the corners
were true. The septic tank hole
was dug with pick and shovel.
Lumber carted home from the mill.

The only time help came
was when we poured the foundation.
Guys from the mill rode springing planks
to deliver tons of wet concrete by wheelbarrow,
tamped down with shovel handles.

My father beveled the molding,
drilled and set each piece of hardwood flooring,
not a nail would show. I crawled insulation
into tight places above the ceiling
and helped with rolled roofing.

Nobody mentioned our low rank
when my mother joined the garden club.
And she never mentioned the hurt
they had caused – just came home
and parked the Buick in the shack.

Gary Lark, “Driving Nails” from Getting By. © 2009 Gary Lark published by Logan House. Reprinted with permission.

Ants

by Daniel Hoffman

Theirs is a perfection of pure form.

Nobody but has his proper place and knows it.

Everything they do is functional.

Each foray in a zigzag line

Each prodigious lifting

Of thirty-two times their own weight

Each excavation into the earth’s core

Each erection

Of a crumbly parapetted tower —

None of these feats is a private pleasure,

None of them done

For the sake of the skill alone —

They’ve got a going concern down there,

A full egg-hatchery

A wet-nursery of aphids

A trained troop of maintenance engineers

Sanitation experts

A corps of hunters

And butchers

An army

A queen

Each

Is nothing without the others, each being a part

Of something greater than all of them put together

A purpose which none of them knows

Since each is only

The one thing that he does. There is

A true consistency

Toward which their actions tend.

The ants have bred and inbred to perfection.

The strains of their genes that survive survive.

Every possible contingency

Has been foreseen and written into the plan.

Nothing they do will be wrong.
 
“Ants” by Daniel Hoffman from Beyond Silence. © Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

When we look with the eye of the soul,

we see within

through the soul,

the Extreme Love of our Creator!

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2022
“We start from our own certainties and, when we lose them, we turn to God… There is a lovely phrase written above a confessional here in the Vatican that reminds us of this. It addresses God with these words, “To turn away from you is to fall, to turn back to you is to rise, to abide in you is to have life.”… We need the closeness of God and the certainty of his forgiveness, which alone eliminates evil, disarms resentment and restores peace to our hearts.”
Pope Francis

Watercolor by Jeanne

Walkers pass with open coats
Bright scarves loose and flying free
From Renga #3
jch and Kim Kaufman

Together we are 81

Together we have lost hundreds of pounds

Together we play classical guitar

See if our music speaks to you…

Jeanne in the mountains

The Writer’s Almanac for Thursday, March 31, 2022


My Son, Under the Waterfall


by Alan Michael Parker

The weight of what falls surprises, the solidity of


the slapping water, its constant and different pressures,
the way when you’re thirteen everything seems


not to have happened, life itself, and yet be
dumped upon you, and you can spread wide


your arms, wide as the rest of July, and still
be filled with feeling while holding nothing,


like a movie screen, or the voice of the girl
who called on a Friday to ask about the homework.


Moss slimes the rocks, cattails rim the pools,
and the water rushing to arrive through the cut


feels like sunlight on your skin if only sunlight
would have mass and volume and pound


your head and shoulders, and with your mouth open
breathing is like laughing and laughing

is like breathing, and the surprise persists,
the sense of being between elements and standing up


in your swim trunks and sandals as though
on land and swimming at once,


and your resolve also matters, to keep hold
of these feelings, of each single feeling


no matter the future, to stay true to what you feel
and not to give the next kid a turn, the long line of


campers beginning to chant your name, and you
pretend not to hear, deafened by the lovely


crushing of the water on your head.
 
Alan Michael Parker, “My Son, Under the Waterfall” from Elephants & Butterflies. Copyright © 2008 by Alan Michael Parker. Used by permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd. http://www.boaeditions.org.

Something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine unites us, tanks attacking apartment buildings: the reality of pure evil clarifies our own situation. Our problem isn’t polarization, it’s Twittification, which is undue attention paid to twits and the inherent decency of the vast majority who patiently listen to shouters and bemoaners and handwringers and weigh what they say even if it’s unintelligible.

Calm down, people. So Ginni Thomas urged the White House to dispose of the 2020 election. Her perfect right. She did not, however, personally go to the Capitol on January 6 and bust down doors and go in and attempt to hang Mike Pence. Give the woman credit. Give No. 45 credit. He could’ve marched on the Capitol, leading a convoy of tanks, and seized the electoral ballot boxes and declared himself president for life, and if this had come up before the Supreme Court, would Justice Thomas have recused himself and would the Court have struck down the lifetime appointment and if they did, how many tanks do they command to enforce the decision? No, it was only a show. No, 45 sat in the White House and watched it on TV and two weeks later he went back to Mar-a-Lago.
I once was an alarmist myself and wrung my hands daily and succeeded in becoming miserable, which in Minnesota is an excellent way of making others miserable, so I considered getting a therapist, but then sanity struck: the idea of sitting in a small room with venetian blinds and degree certificates on the walls and telling a young woman with close-cropped hair that my father hadn’t hugged me when I was a boy struck me as a waste of a perfectly good hour so I didn’t.
There are millions of mentally ill in America who desperately need care but it’s hard work and few wish to deal with this. State mental health hospital systems were mostly demolished years ago, because conditions in some were horrendous, and so “deinstitutionalization” took place and now the mentally ill languish in small facilities, some even more horrendous but not so noticeable, and others wander the streets homeless, and a great many wind up in prison. For a country that imagines itself to be Christian, this is bizarre. Jesus wept for the leper, the demon-possessed, the sick and helpless, and in this country we put them where we don’t have to look at them. When I fly into LaGuardia, the plane descends over one of the worst hellholes in America, Rikers Island. New York state finds itself with an enormous budget surplus. Democrats run the state and the city, and will they fix this horror that is staring them in the face? Don’t count on it.
The Christian faith sets high standards, some of which must be ignored: “Ye cannot be my disciples unless you give up all you possess,” Jesus said, which suggests we’re to be nudists, which is not possible in Minnesota. So nuts to that. I cannot live without my coffee maker and my laptop computer. Google will recover in an instant the line from the psalm, “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies,” and so I’m keeping my table. Google also finds me that great Nichols & May sketch in which he kisses her passionately and while locked in the kiss she opens the corner of her mouth and exhales cigarette smoke. It’s on YouTube.
I don’t put her exhalation up with “preparest a table,” but comedy is a gift, and it’s perishable, like kale, but the computer preserves some of it fresh as can be, and for the pleasure of seeing that kiss and the woman exhaling, I guess I have to accept the twitticization and of course I have to love my enemies and I plan to take on that project as soon as Rikers Island is cleared. Keep me informed as to any progress.
from Garrison Keillor and Friends March 30, 2022

Why I’m Here
by Jacqueline Berger

Because my mother was on a date
with a man in the band, and my father,
thinking she was alone, asked her to dance.
And because, years earlier, my father
dug a foxhole but his buddy
sick with the flu, asked him for it, so he dug
another for himself. In the night
the first hole was shelled.
I’m here because my mother was twenty-seven
and in the ’50s that was old to still be single.
And because my father wouldn’t work on weapons,
though he was an atomic engineer.
My mother, having gone to Berkeley, liked that.
My father liked that she didn’t eat like a bird
when he took her to the best restaurant in L.A.
The rest of the reasons are long gone.
One decides to get dressed, go out, though she’d rather
stay home, but no, melancholy must be battled through,
so the skirt, the cinched belt, the shoes, and a life is changed.
I’m here because Jews were hated
so my grandparents left their villages,
came to America, married one who could cook,
one whose brother had a business,
married longing and disappointment
and secured in this way the future.

It’s good to treasure the gift, but good
to see that it wasn’t really meant for you.
The feeling that it couldn’t have been otherwise
is just a feeling. My family
around the patio table in July.
I’ve taken over the barbequing
that used to be my father’s job, ask him
how many coals, though I know how many.
We’ve been gathering here for years,
so I believe we will go on forever.
It’s right to praise the random,
the tiny god of probability that brought us here,
to praise not meaning, but feeling, the still-warm
sky at dusk, the light that lingers and the night
that when it comes is gentle.

Jacqueline Berger, “Why I’m Here” from The Gift That Arrives Unbroken. Copyright © 2010 by Jacqueline Berger. Used by the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Autumn House Press, autumnhouse.org. Reprinted with permission.

SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2022
“Can corruption become normal, I wonder? Brothers and sisters, unfortunately, yes. We can breathe the air of corruption just as we breathe oxygen… What paves the way for this? One thing: the carefreeness that turns only to self-care: this is the gateway to the corruption that sinks the lives of all of us. Corruption benefits greatly from this no good carefreeness. When everything is going well for someone, and others do not matter to him or her: this thoughtlessness weakens our defences, it dulls our consciences and it turns us — even involuntarily — into accomplices. Because corruption is not solitary: a person always has accomplices. And corruption always spreads, it spreads.”
Pope Francis

SATURDAY, MARCH 26, 2022
“Today’s world puts so many barriers between people. And the result of these barriers is exclusion, rejection. This is dangerous, if you reject anyone… There are barriers between States, between social groups, but also between people. And often even the phone you keep looking at becomes a barrier that isolates you in a world that you have at your fingertips. How beautiful it is instead to look people in the eye, to listen to their story, to welcome their identity; to create, through friendship, bridges with brothers and sisters of different traditions, ethnic groups and religions. Only by doing this will we build, with God’s help, a future of peace.”
Pope Francis

“In three words

I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life:

it goes on.”Robert Frost

Banana School


by Billy Collins

The day I learned that monkeys


as well as chimps, baboons, and gorillas


all peel their bananas from the other end


and use the end we peel from as a handle,


I immediately made the switch.

I wasted no time in passing this wisdom on
to family

friends, and even strangers


as I am now passing it on to you—


a tip from the top,

the banana scoop,


the inside primate lowdown.

I promise: once you try it


you will never go back except


to regret the long error of your ways

And if you do not believe me,


swing by the local zoo some afternoon.


with a banana in your pocket


and try peeling it in front of the cage


of an orangutan or capuchin monkey,


and as you begin, notice


how the monkeys stop what they’re doing,


if they are doing anything at all,


to nod their brotherly approval through the bars.

Better still, try it out on the big silver

back gorilla.


See if you can get his dark eyes to brighten a bit


as the weight of him sits there in his cage


the same way Gertrude Stein is sitting


in that portrait of her she never liked by Picasso.
 
Billy Collins, “Banana School” from Whale Day and Other Poems. © 2020 Billy Collins published by Random House, 2020.