A Tidings of Magpies

The Guest House by Rumi This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor. Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture, still, treat each guest honorably. He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond. please note: poem gleefully stolen from Blissful Bohemian . Thanks Annie.

Trees are being lighted and the preparations begin. "In goes my hand into that wool-white-bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and the firemen. It was on the afternoon of the day of Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas. December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. But there were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes." please note: A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

"One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six. All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged, fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands into the snow and bring out whatever I can find." please note: photo by Estonia Tallinn, A Child's Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

"If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough." Eckhart, Meister please note: photo from a very interesting blog, Arch At Rang . Try it, you'll like it:>)

Optimism by Jane Hirshfield More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs--all this resinous, unretractable earth. I'm about ready to swab the inside of a turkey with orange rinds and coat the rest with butter before turning on the oven to 360 degrees, waiting for the smells of Thanksgiving to fill the air of the kitchen down the steps to the front hallway. CollegeGrrrl will be home this evening. HoneyHaired Grrrl is off school and Hubby is working a four hour shift this morning. Someone will root through the attic and dust off one board game or another--Clue, Battleship, Barbie Dating Game for a little rough and tumble before we eat. The boxer already sprawls unmoveable on the floor in front o...

If Hiliary becomes the next Secretary of State will we be seeing a lot more of this slice of mancake?? Good times are here again.

RUN by Ann Patchett "...a spectacular autumn book: moody and thoughtful, gentle in its handling of weighty topics, and quietly suspenseful."--Holly Silva, The St Louis Post-Dispatch Quintessential Sentence: "Anger and sadness and a sense of injustice that was bigger than any one thing that had happened stoked an enormous fire in her chest and that fire kept her heart vibrant and hot and alive, a beautiful, infallible machine." Favorite word: Enneacanthus obesus Full Disclosure: Ann Patchett could write out a grocery list and I would love it.

Runways Café II by Marilyn Hacker For once, I hardly noticed what I ate (salmon and broccoli and Saint-Véran). My elbow twitched like jumping beans; sweat ran into my shirtsleeves. Could I concentrate on anything but your leg against mine under the table? It was difficult, but I impersonated an adult looking at you, and knocking back the wine. Now that we both want to know what we want, now that we both want to know what we know, it still behooves us to know what to do: be circumspect, be generous, be brave, be honest, be together, and behave. At least I didn't get white sauce down my front. please note: art by Johann Gotthardt

My favorite show has been cancelled and pirates are actually the bad guys??

Survival by Sri Chinmoy I am not dreaming Of a hope-victory-life. I am just dreaming Of a hope-survival-life. One of our patients returned to our unit today to say hello, unrecognizable in her own clothes and walking without assistance. Her father could not stop smiling. She looked a little befuddled at all the fuss. She remembers nothing of her 8 day stay and that's just fine. She may be able to go back to school in the spring. She may need to stay out the year. Either way, she has a future waiting for her and we could not be happier as we send her towards it.

Okay, enough already...the first snow has fallen, to be followed by more flurries. Christmas music jangles from the radio. I get it. Summer is really over and the holidays are pouring out of their cars and scampering up the front steps. So..are you sending Christmas cards this year? You wanna send one to the address below? From the front lines to the home front, the American Red Cross provides our military men and women with the care and assistance they need. This holiday season the Red Cross is partnering with Pitney Bowes for the Holiday Mail for Heroes campaign. For the second year, holiday cards are being collected to distribute to American service members, veterans and service families in the United States and those deployed around the world. Pitney Bowes is generously donating technology, resources and postage to make this holiday card program possible. The goal is to collect and distribute one million holiday cards to spread the spirit of the season--that would be Holiday Cheer,...

Waking from a nap, we stand at the window watching dark clouds crawl across the sky, whip state-sized wisps down and out and up. Lights come on early, and people below on the street scurry and bumble about My arm around you, you say— Let it rain, let it pour.

First Christmas song heard on the radio--Wednesday, November 12. First dusting of snow in CinCity--Sunday, November 16. What about Thanksgiving?? Good grief...

Tonight I wonder where the man is who used to stand just inside the doors of the Lexington Avenue entrance to Grand Central Station. The full moon is rising. Around the earth, meteors move through space. Every day for over a year I walked by him early in the morning and at the end of the day he still stood in the same position, arms down his sides, looking straight ahead at thousands of people walking without colliding in all directions at once, everybody trying to get to a different place.

I have left my wife at the airport, flying out to help our daughter whose baby will not eat. And I am driving on to Kent to hear some poets read tonight. I don't know what to do with myself when she leaves me like this. An old friend has decided to end our friendship. Another is breaking it off with his wife. I don't know what to say to any of this-Life's hard. And I say it aloud to myself, Living is hard, and drive further into the darkness, my headlights only going so far. I sense my own tense breath, this fear we call stress, making it something else, hiding from all that is real. As I glide past Twin Lakes, flat bodies of water under stars, I hold the wheel gently, slowing my body to the road, and know again that this is just living, not a trauma nor dying, but a lingering pain reminding us that we are alive.

Guess who's coming to dinner... Bond. Tomorrow. Be there.

I have learned that life goes on, or doesn't. That days are measured out in tiny increments as a woman in a kitchen measures teaspoons of cinnamon, vanilla, or half a cup of sugar into a bowl. I have learned that moments are as precious as nutmeg, and it has occurred to me that busy interruptions are like tiny grain moths, or mice. They nibble, pee, and poop, or make their little worms and webs until you have to throw out the good stuff with the bad. It took two deaths and coming close myself for me to learn that there is not an infinite supply of good things in the pantry.

"...a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and known as 'Armistice Day'." In 1918, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day in the eleventh month, the world rejoiced and celebrated the triumph of ending the old world order. After four years of bitter and devastating war, a peace treaty was signed and hope for diplomatic resolutions reigned. The "war to end all wars" was now over. Except for the ones that soon followed. This is a deeply heartfelt thanks for the many peaces that have been fought for and a prayer for those still slightly out of reach.

(to remind myself) Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your work, doubt their judgment. Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. please note: photo by wicked nox

It was a beautiful fall day in River City, the kind of day when the sky darkens to a pewter grey showing off the yellows and oranges of the trees along the neighborhood streets, when the temperature's dropped just enough to feel comfortable in a sweatshirt, when it's not surprising to see a murder of crows land in the graveyard behind the house. The kind of day when it doesn't feel odd at all to sit here with my best friend with a couple of cups of coffee and discuss all the reasons why we think someone killed our neighbor.

Sometimes by Sheenagh Pugh Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; crops don't fail, sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well. A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest man; decide they care enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for. Sometimes our best efforts do not go amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to. The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

And, the new "First Daughters" are moving in with a new puppy?? This day just keep getting better and better.

OVER SO SOON?? The Election Carnivale is almost at its close and already I'm starting to miss the players strutting and fretting their way across my television screen. I shall miss the strategery and the mavericking. As the world holds its breath and waits, we here in the states will know by Wednesday if is right around the corner or if there's four more years of material for Tina Fey.

VOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTEVOTE your values.

The Dead by Susan Mitchell At night the dead come down to the river to drink. They unburden themselves of their fears, their worries for us. They take out the old photographs. They pat the lines in our hands and tell our futures, which are cracked and yellow. Some dead find their way to our houses. They go up to the attics. They read the letters they sent us, insatiable for signs of their love. They tell each other stories. They make so much noise they wake us as they did when we were children and they stayed up drinking all night in the kitchen. Kyrie from the Requiem Mass by Tomas Luis de Victoria and performed by the Tallis Scholars(reallocated from the ConcordPastor--thank you!)