Mary, Queen of Heaven, pray for us.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us.

JULY 11

REFLECTION FOR TODAY

I spent a good share of my life feeling inferior to others. Because of this feeling, I continually compared myself with them. I compared my weaknesses with their strengths and, of course, I fell short. Once I learned that comparing myself was a copout for not developing my own creativity and talents, it became easier to let go of this defense. Becoming willing to let go of my comparing has opened me to creativity and talent I never dreamed I had.


MEDITATION FOR TODAY

If I begin to compare myself to someone else, give me a little push.


TODAY I WILL REMEMBER

I have a great deal to offer by just being me.



FROM: TODAY BOOK, (http://www.emotionsanonymous.org)

© Copyright 1987 Emotions Anonymous, used with permission of the EA International Service Center

JULY 5

REFLECTION FOR TODAY

Love make me vulnerable. When I love someone, I grow close to him or her. This person can see my soft spots and knows what hurts me. I have hurt so much already I do not want to hurt anymore, so I start to back off, hoping if I keep a safe distance I will cut down my chances of getting hurt. I also limit my chances of finding intimate relationships. I could end up living in a superficial, noncommittal environment where caring and sharing would only be words. Being close to someone is a risk, but it is also a delight. The person who know what really hurts me is also the person who knows what makes me happy and how to put a sparkle in my eye, a spring in my step, and a song in my heart. The distance I keep between myself and my loved ones keeps out hurt but also keeps out joy.


MEDITATION FOR TODAY

Give me the courage to get close enough to take a chance on getting joy into my life.


TODAY I WILL REMEMBER

I can keep out hurt, but I can also keep out joy.


FROM: TODAY BOOK, (http://www.emotionsanonymous.org)

© Copyright 1987 Emotions Anonymous, used with permission of the EA International Service Center


(I highly recommend adding this feed, if you need some daily reminders.)
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/justfortodays/profile

Our Lady of Perpetual Help, pray for us.

Pray for us.

"The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung at random between the profusion of matter and of the stars, but that within this prison we can draw from ourselves images powerful enough to deny our nothingness."

Andre Malraux
French author & resistance leader (1901 - 1976)

Nossa Senhora do Rosário de Fátima, pray for us.

Mary, Queen of Heaven, pray for us.

Mother of Good Counsel, return to us. On the path of peace lead us.

Our Lady of Lourdes, pray for us.

Our Lady of Prompt Succor, Hasten to Help Us!

What is time?
Is it the autumn leaves that change?
Or the snow that floats from the sky

What is Time?
Is it the air we breathe?
Or the wings that teach
The new born bird to fly

Who can tell?
I don’t know
Will we change?
Will we grow?

What is time?
Is it eternity
In heaven
Or just a hope for peace on earth

Where’s the time

Gone in a blink of an eye
But with every blink
a birth

We live
We learn
We love
In time

We give
We yearn
We grow
In time

Time for change
Its time to care
It’s not too late
Don’t despair
Reach inside your heart

To find the joy and love
To share with all mankind
For all we know

All we have
Is time

-Billy Porter

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us.

Pray for us.

"Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious."

-Oscar Wilde

A little lady with a huge voice.



Check out her MySpace!

The music and the spirals of cigarette smoke rising up like genies. The other kids already asleep wherever they fell. Draped on a chair. Or on a volcano of coats. Or under a table. Everywhere except their beds. But no one notices.

The bodies below moving and twirling like bits of colored glass in a kaleidescope. Tables and chairs pushed to the edges to make room for dancing. "Vereda tropical" playing from the hi-fi. Aunties in silk dresses so tight they seem to explode like orchids, aunties laughing with their big flower mouths, and the air sweet-sweet with their ladies' perfume, and sweeter still the men's cologne, the kind men wear here in Mexico, sweeter than flowers, like the sugary words whispered in the women's ears--- mi vida, mi cielo, muñeca, mi niña bonita.

The men in their shark suits, gray with a little lightening bolt of blue, or olive with a gleam of gold when they move. A stiff white handkerchief in the pocket. The man's hand leading a woman when they dance, just a little tug, just a little like when you yank a kite to remind it--- Don't go too far. And the woman's hand nesting inside the man's big heart-shaped hand, and his other hand on her big heart-shaped hips. A beautiful woman with black-black eyes and dark skin, who is our mother in her good fuchsia satin dress bought at the Three Sisters on Madison and Pulaski, and her matching fuchsia cut-glass earrings. Swish of stockings against the cream-colored nylon slip with its twin shells of lace on top and an accordion pleat at the hem, and one strap, always one, lazy and loose and asking to be put back. My father with a curl of lavender cigarette smoke, his mouth hot next to my mother's ear when he whispers, his mustache tickling, the roughness of his cheek, and my mother throwing her head back and laughing.


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks, atomic_star, for loaning this book to me.

"Sadism is not a name finally given to a practice as old as Eros; it is a massive cultural fact which appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century, and which constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination: unreason transformed into delirium of the heart, madness of desire, the insane dialogue of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite."

~Michel Foucault

Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery. But let not this blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself. Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be. And whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams; it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.


- Max Ehrmann, 1927

Snow

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don't bite till you know
if it's bread or stone.
What I bite is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

-Anne Sexton

I woke up this morning with a bad hangover
And my penis was missing again.
This happens all the time.
It's detachable.

This comes in handy a lot of the time.
I can leave it home, when I think it's gonna get me in trouble,
or I can rent it out, when I don't need it.
But now and then I go to a party, get drunk,
and the next morning I can't for the life of me
remember what I did with it.

First I looked around my apartment, and I couldn't find it.
So I called up the place where the party was,
they hadn't seen it either.
I asked them to check the medicine cabinet
'cause for some reason I leave it there sometimes
But not this time.
So I told them if it pops up to let me know.

I called a few people who were at the party,
but they were no help either.
I was starting to get desperate.
I really don't like being without my penis for too long.
It makes me feel like less of a man,
and I really hate having to sit down every time I take a leak.

After a few hours of searching the house,
and calling everyone I could think of,
I was starting to get very depressed,
so I went to the Kiev, and ate breakfast.
Then, as I walked down Second Avenue towards St. Mark's Place,
where all those people sell used books and other junk on the street,
I saw my penis lying on a blanket
next to a broken toaster oven.
Some guy was selling it.
I had to buy it off him.
He wanted twenty-two bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen.

I took it home, washed it off,
and put it back on. I was happy again. Complete.
People sometimes tell me I should get it permanently attached,
but I don't know.
Even though sometimes it's a pain in the ass,
I like having a detachable penis.

Candles

If on your grandmother's birthday you burn a candle
To honor her memory, you might think of burning an extra
To honor the memory of someone who never met her,
A man who may have come to the town she lived in
Looking for work and never found it.
Picture him taking a stroll one morning,
After a month of grief with the want ads,
To refresh himself in the park before moving on.
Suppose he notices on the gravel path the shards
Of a green glass bottle that your grandmother,
Then still a girl, will be destined to step on
When she wanders barefoot away from her school picnic
If he doesn't stoop down and scoop the mess up
With the want-ad section and carry it to a trash can.
For you to burn a candle for him
You needn't suppose the cut would be a deep one,
Just deep enough to keep her at home
The night of the hay ride when she meets Helen,
Who is soon to become her dearest friend,
Whose brother George, thirty years later,
Helps your grandfather with a loan so his shoe store
Doesn't go under in the Great Depression
And his son, your father, is able to stay in school
Where his love of learning is fanned into flames,
A love he labors, later, to kindle in you.
How grateful you are for your father's efforts
Is shown by the candles you've burned for him.
But today, for a change, why not a candle
For the man whose name is unknown to you?
Take a moment to wonder whether he died at home
With friends and family or alone on the road,
On the look-out for no one to sit at his bedside
And hold his hand, the very hand
It's time for you to imagine holding.

~ Carl Dennis

Wee one.

I'll be seeing you soon.

I'll be back when I'm ready.

I never knew what everybody meant by endless, hopeless bleak despair
Until one day when I found out
The first time I ever left my house
It saw me and followed me home
And stayed with me for my whole life

For years and years I wandered the earth
Condemned to a life of bleak despair
Then one day I looked around and found
It had disappeared

Hopeless bleak despair
It was always there
And then one day it disappeared
In a puff of smoke
In an unceremonious way
One day it disappeared

All I had ever wanted in my life was only to be free of it
It drove away my family
It made me lose my job
Whenever anybody saw it
They'd say get out of here

For years and years I wandered the earth
Sick of my life, looking forward to death
The one day I looked around and found
It had disappeared

For years and years I wandered the earth
Until I died and went to hell but my
Despair had ascended to heaven
That's how I finally got rid of it

The Bachelor

No family pictures on the wall, no books,
A drafting desk, a travel magazine;
No children, one divorce, a satellite dish—
A cold, efficient exercise machine,

And in the corner with the firewood, stacks
Of videos. The fridge comes with "lite" beer
And non-fat milk for the granola stored
In jars. I've looked, but there's no sugar here.

Platoons of running shoes camp by the door;
His Boston fern, neglected, pays the price;
His one unfriendly cat purposefully saunters
Across the threshold, searching hard for mice.

As he begins to age, and his gray beard
Inaugurates the thinning of his hair,
He'll pale with each sensation in his chest,
Each flutter, every pain and numbness there—

No cardiologist, nor any chart
Will ever find the trouble with his heart.

-Leslie Monsour

delicata77 & sirlarkins:


naman & myvisionthing:


EDIT: For reasons beyond explanation, I deleted the previous post I made of these and therefore deleted the sweet comments that some of you left about the avatars. It was nothing personal and I feel like a dork for accidentally deleting them.

Choices

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.

for Drago Stambuk

-Tess Gallagher

"Speaking of men.
As individual husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and lovers, rather than as the most affluent team of business associates on the planet--are involved with this bleeding situation in a deeply subconscious way.
Men do themselves a great service learning about women and the moon. Unless they're incarcerated, it is just about impossible to avoid interacting with us.
Bleeding ladies are taught to be, at best, intolerant of a month-to-month physiological occurrence which clocks the time of our bodies. We therefore act mighty peculiar. Disliking something unavoidable takes its toll after a while. Some people call this PMS.
If, at every stage of life, society commanded men to despise their hard-ons, how pleasant would they be when this bodily function that they are incapable of desisting occurred?
Society fails to acknowledge that our bleeding cycles affects men's lives tremendously. This is further compounded by the fact that women who live and work in close proximity to one another tend to merge bleeding cycles. Chances are, every woman in a given household or workplace is bleeding at the same time. Sometimes men are surrounded on all sides by cranky, bleeding cunts.
To the incognizant, we seem entirely unpredictable. We may bite a man's head off for the smallest vagrancy.
They know this.
There is no way for them not to know this.
But chances are, they don't understand, and act like jerks 'cause their courage is tested. When most men who don't understand women see how really scary we are, courage usually segues into fear. This results in anger, frustration, violence and the perpetuation of general disrespect towards women. Bottom line: Men are afraid of our blood....
Can't say that I blame men for fearing our bloody cunts. We be powerful people when we bleed....
The social requirement that we fulfill the responsibilities of our non-menstruating selves at all times throughout our cycle is the source of our alleged PMS.
We're taught to distrust everything about our very compelling blood mystery. Yet the clickety-clack, passive-aggressive business world of men and machines is the absolute antithesis of everything our senses crave the first few days of our blood. In our souls we know this. In our DNA, we want to be quiet with ourselves. In this society, where a day to ourselves might very well mean no one to care for the children and no food on the table, bleeding women are naturally irritable...."

I still cannot thank jodawi enough for buying this for me so many summers ago...

The interviewer talks with a former U.S. Army infantryman who is veteran of a zombie takeover which took place in Yonkers, New York:

"I caught one square in the chest. I watched him fly backward, hit the asphalt, then get right back up again as if nothing has happened. Dude...when they get back up...

[The cigarette has burned down to his fingers. He drops and crushes it without noticing.]

I did my best to control my fire, and my sphincter. 'Just go for the head,' I kept telling myself. 'Keep it together, just go for the head."...

We could have stopped them, we should have, one guy with a rifle, that's all you need, right? Professional soldiers, trained marksmen...how could they get through? They still ask that, critics and armchair Pattons who weren't there. You think it's that simple? You think that after being 'trained' to aim for the center mass your whole military career you can suddenly make an expect head shot every time? You think in that strait-jacket and suffocation hood it's easy to recharge a clip or clear a weapon jam? You think that after watching all of the wonders of modern warfare fall flat on their high-tech hyper ass, that after already living through three months of Great Panic and watching everything you knew as reality be eaten alive by an enemy that wasn't even supposed to exist that you're gonna keep a cool head and a steady fucking trigger finger?

[He stabs a finger at me.]

Well, we did! We still managed to do our job and make Zack pay for every fuckin' inch! Maybe if we'd had more men, more ammo, maybe if we'd just been allowed to focus on our job...

[His finger curls back into his fist.]

Land Warrior, high-tech, high-priced, high-profile netro-fucking-centric Land Warrior. To see what was in front of our face was bad enough, but spybird uplinks were also showing how truly large the hoard was. We might be facing thousands, but behind them were millions! Remember, we were taking on the bulk of New York City's infestation! This was only the head of one really long undead snake stretching all the way back to Time's Fuckin' Square! We didn't need to see that. I didn't need to know that! That scared little voice wasn't so little anymore. It was in my earpiece. Every time some jerkoff couldn't control his mouth, Land Warrior made sure the rest of us heard it. 'There's too many!' 'We gotta get the fuck out of here!' Someone from another platoon, I didn't know his name, started hollering 'I hit him in the head and he didn't die! They don't die when you shoot them in the head!' I'm sure he must of missed the brain, it can happen, a round just grazing the inside of the skull...maybe if he'd been calm and used his own brain, he would have realized that. Panic's even more infectious than the Z Germ and the wonders of the Land Warrior allowed that germ to become airborne. 'What?' 'They don't die?' 'Who said that?' 'You shot it in the head?' 'Holy crap! They're indestructible!' all over the net you could hear this, browning shorts across the info superhighway...."

In this excerpt, Sugar reads the discarded diaries of the woman she is working for:

"...Sugar opens another of Agnes Unwin's diaries and balances it on her lap....It's 1865 in Abbots Langley, and Agnes considers herself a Lady at last. By Sugar's standards, she hasn't yet done a single thing or thought a single grown-up thought, but in Agnes's view she is nearly 'finished'....

Eugenie was taken away from school today, in tears. She is to be married next month, to her secret correspondent from Switserland! In circumstances, I thought it would be mean to remind her about my water-colour brushes. Perhaps she will post them.

Sugar snorts aloud, a helpless exclamation of contempt....

In all the excitement, Eugenie has also forgotten her Scrapbook of kittens, writes the fourteen-year-old Miss Unwin. Some little darlings are not even paisted in yet! I do declare, if this Swiss banker loves Eugenie half as much as he says, he had better make sure she gets her Scrapbook back!

Now at last Sugar understands: this muddle-headed, minuetting adolescent is a lady, as fully adult as she'll ever be. Yes, and all the ladies Sugar has ever seen, all those patrician damsels dismounting imperiously from their carriages, or promenading under parasols in Hyde Park, or parading into the opera: they are children. Essentially unchanged from when they played with dolls and coloured pencils, they grown taller and gain a few 'accomplishments' until, at age fifteen or sixteen, still accustomed to being made to sit in a corner for failing to conjugate a verb or refusing to eat their pudding, they go home to their suitors. And who are they, these suitors? Self-assured young men who've already travelled the world, fathered illegitimate children and survived the pox. Bored with young men's pleasures, they turn their attention to the enterprise of marriage and, casting their eye over the new season's bloom of elaborately dressed children, they pick themselves a little wife."

Sweetness





Just when it has seemed I couldn't bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn't leave a stain,
no sweetness that's ever sufficiently sweet. ...

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.
Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don't care

where it's been, or what bitter road
it's traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

-Stephen Dunn

This is a public version of my time at the concert so that sirlarkins can link it to his post about the concert...

( a Colossal time )

"The Changed Man"

If you were to hear me imitating Pavarotti
in the shower every morning, you'd know
how much you have changed my life.

If you were to see me stride across the park,
waving to strangers, then you would know
I am a changed man—like Scrooge

awakened from his bad dreams feeling feather-
light, angel-happy, laughing the father
of a long line of bright laughs—

"It is still not too late to change my life!"
It is changed. Me, who felt short-changed.
Because of you I no longer hate my body.

Because of you I buy new clothes.
Because of you I'm a warrior of joy.
Because of you and me. Drop by

this Saturday morning and discover me
fiercely pulling weeds gladly, dedicated
as a born-again gardener.

Drop by on Sunday—I'll Turtlewax
your sky-blue sports car, no sweat. I'll greet
enemies with a handshake, forgive debtors

with a papal largesse. It's all because
of you. Because of you and me,
I've become one changed man.

-Robert Phillips

"Meanwhile, here we have this body known as George's body, asleep on this bed and snoring quite loud. The dampness of the ocean air affects its sinuses; and anyhow, it snores extra loud after drinking. Jim used to kick it awake, turn it over on its side, sometimes get out of bed in a fury and go to sleep in the front room.
But is all of George altogether present here?
Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give then names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual entities, so you think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness--so to speak--are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.
But that long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean--that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell--except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?"

Son at Seventeen

My son, an expert by overexposure,
recognizes the song before I do,
the best one of the year
about how sex is good for everybody.

This large man who was a boy a year ago
cranks up the radio till the car
is a bulging capsule of sound,
heavy on the bass.

As he drives, he sings every word loudly,
with cellular belief.
He will have it all, give it all
in his time, probably soon.

My heart begins to vibrate dangerously
at the lowest frequencies.
Tonight I feel old enough to be mother to a man.

I mime my fear to him,
My hand on my chest, my eyes wide.
I can feel it in my chest, I scream.

He stops singing long enough to nod,
Delighted that I have noticed.
It gets better, he yells.

-Francette Cerulli