Sunday, August 16, 2009

Hope













Witness this wonderful rendering of T.S. Eliot by Nashville artist, Dick Murphy.
Today has been a lovely day full of the prospect of hope, due in part to Dick's fine capture of the brooding poet. Also, life is sometimes difficult beyond imagining. There are griefs, sorrows, hurts, and sufferings too numerous to count. Sometimes we find ourselves situated between a rock and a hard place. Eliot knew these dire roads. Yet he used words to provoke hope:

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope


For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,


For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith


But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.


Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:


So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.






from The Four Quartets East Coker

Thanks be to God for the gifts of T.S. Eliot and Dick Murphy.





Saturday, August 8, 2009

Faces & Haiku

I joined Facebook about the time the spinmasters say it is going out of vogue. That's about right. I dug in my heels and would not consider it for the longest. Fear motivated that choice. Tired of fear. So- here we go.

I took an old friend's advice and wrote a poem about it:

Paranoid fools fear
Kept her away from faces
Some of whom she loves.