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.