The Vibrant Channeled Creator

Octopus’s Garden by Walter Koessler
Jeanne rescues Ray

Geneen Roth

The World is on Your Plate 

FEBRUARY 22, 2022
90 Minute Workshop  –  LIVE Online via Zoom

Winter Twilight

by Anne Porter

On a clear winter’s evening

The crescent moon

And the round squirrels’ nest

In the bare oak

Are equal planets.
 
Anne Porter, “Winter Twilight” from Living Things. © 2006 Zoland Book

It’s the birthday of the printer Giambattista Bodoni, born in Saluzzo, Italy (1740). He came from a family of engravers, and by the time he died, he had opened his own publishing house that reprinted classical texts and he had personally designed almost 300 typefaces. His typeface Bodoni is still available on almost any word processing program. He said, “The letters don’t get their true delight, when done in haste and discomfort, nor merely done with diligence and pain, but first when they are created with love and passion.”

The Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday, February 16, 2022

He says: Jeremiah 17:8-10

I the Lord test the mind

and scratch the heart

to give to all according to their ways,

according to the fruit of their doings.

He says: Psalm 1: 3-4

They are like trees planted by streams of water,

bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;

everything they do shall prosper.

Luke 6:26

Blessed are you who are poor,

for yours are the kingdom of God.

Feb 11,2020
We’ve been sort of mesmerized by the Winter Olympics and dangerously thin athletes speedskating, one hand behind the back, taking the turns semi-horizontally, and others flying off a ski jump spinning in the air so as to give their mothers cardiac arrest, and downhill events won by a margin of one-hundredth of a second, and all of it taking place in arid hills near Beijing, on artificial snow, and then seeing the Italians win gold in curling, which is like Bryn Mawr placing first in boxing. One astonishment after another, but I’ve kept my eye on Monday the 14th knowing that attention must be paid.

I am contracted to the woman I love but the vow to love and honor (at the altar, I whispered the word “obey” to myself) left out a great deal, such as “take careful aim at the middle of the toilet bowl” and “when asked what you’d like for dinner, the correct answer is ‘a green salad with oil and vinegar, please.’” Over the 26 years of marriage, other addenda have attached to the contract, including “do not give me articles of clothing as gifts because I will only have to donate them to the Salvation Army.”
I remembered the 14th when I walked into the drugstore to pick up a Baby Ruth candy bar, which is a vitamin supplement for a man on a green leafy diet, and I saw the aisle stocked with garish scarlet heart-shaped trash, gifts so ugly they’d be grounds for divorce. Who buys this dreck? Men who just realized on their way home that it is the 14th and there is no time to shop around.
It’s easy for the Day to slip up on a person, since there’s no St. Valentine’s Day service at church, but it’s an important day especially for us Northerners of Anglo/German/Scandinavian persuasion who were brought up to be cautious with declarations of affection, who are not huggers, who save “I love you” for birthdays and anniversaries and don’t say it in front of the children. This day is meant for us. We ignore it at our peril.
Flowers are a better idea than chocolate but the best idea is a poem. For example:
You and I, my dear love,
Are a pair I am gladly part of,
Like carrots and peas,
Or salami and cheese
And when push comes to shove,
We fit like a hand in a glove,
Snug as the hug
Of two bugs in a rug,
Or birds in a nest up above.
A double limerick. A sonnet would be better, but you don’t want to write a third-rate sonnet especially if your true love is someone who actually reads poetry. You could, of course, simply write, with a good fountain pen, Shakespeare’s “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” or if you’ve never been in disgrace, Liz Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways” or Robert Dylan’s “I’ll be your baby tonight” but only if your penmanship is good. A love poem that looks like it was written by a child or a physician is not a good idea.
Valentine’s Day was traumatic for me as a child because I was shy, not a popular kid, and I had a home haircut that was not nicely tapered in back but was cut in a series of terraces, and I desperately wanted to be liked and when I looked at my valentines from classmates, I could see that they were the inexpensive kind that came six to a page and were torn out along a dotted line, and the edges had little bumps. Mine were bumpy valentines, not particularly meaningful.
If you’re reading this Monday morning and you have no valentine and she’s still in the shower, write my double limerick on a card and sign it and give it to her. Don’t say I wrote it; claim it as your own. She doesn’t want a valentine from me, she wants one from you. And put your arms around her and tell her she’s your best friend and she makes your life wonderful. It’s an important moment for old lovers, this meaningful embrace. The woman knows all the worst things about you, every single one except your undercover work for Rafael Trujillo, she knows your messiness, your ineptitude, your extensive ignorance, but she stands by you. God bless her. He’s already blessed you. Without our wives, we’d be living in a boxcar, sniffing glue, and would’ve missed the Winter Olympics, and been mesmerized by hoot owls calling, “HOOOO!” Who? Her, of course. Who else?

It’s the birthday of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht (books by this author), born Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht in Augsburg, Bavaria (1898). He studied philosophy, drama and medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he first experimented with writing poetry and plays.
Following the death of his mother in 1920 he began writing plays in earnest. His first major runaway success was The Threepenny Opera (1928), a creative collaboration with composer Kurt Weill. The Threepenny Opera was an adaptation of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera and it offered a harsh critique of capitalism from a Socialist perspective. It was during this time that Brecht developed his theory of “epic theater” which asks the audience to acknowledge the stage as a stage, the actors as actors, and not some make-believe world of real people.
With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 Brecht sought asylum in Denmark, Sweden, and Finland, and journeyed across Russia and Persia. He produced some of his most famous anti-war works during that time, including Mother Courage and Her Children (1941). He eventually settled in Santa Monica where he wrote more than 50 screenplays in six years, but only one of them was accepted: Hangmen Also Die (1943), an anti-Nazi film that came out in the middle of World War II. He later said, “The intellectual isolation [in Hollywood] is enormous. Compared to Hollywood, Svendborg is a world center.”
In 1947 he was blacklisted by the studios when he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, which accused him of being a Communist sympathizer. Brecht stated in front of the HUAC:
“We are living in a dangerous world. Our state of civilization is such that mankind already is capable of becoming enormously wealthy but, as a whole, is still poverty-ridden. Great wars have been suffered, greater ones are imminent, we are told. One of them might well wipe out mankind, as a whole. We might be the last generation of the specimen man on this earth. The ideas about how to make use of the new capabilities of production have not been developed much since the days when the horse had to do what man could not do. Do you not think that, in such a predicament, every new idea should be examined carefully and freely? Art can present clear and even make nobler such ideas.”
He made his way to East Germany in 1949 and went on to run the Berliner Ensemble, which soon became the country’s most famous theater company.
Brecht died of a heart attack in 1956 at the age of 58 and is buried in Berlin.
He wrote, “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”

The hem of his robe filled the temple .
Seraphs were in attendance above Him,

with 6 wings, two covering their faces, two their feet, with 2 wings to fly.

They sand “Holy,holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts”
“the whole earth is full of His glory”

Whom shall I send?” He asked.
“Here I am, send me.It is not I but the grace of God with me.”

Jesus said to Simon: “Do not be afraid:from now on you will be catching people, not fish!
Luke 5:1-11