The flow of grace is an increasing ability to forgive reality for being what it is—instead of what we want it to be!
~~~ Richard Rohr
*****
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays and Just Jot It January! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/16/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-16th-and-one-liner-wednesday/
More information on JusJoJan and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
Today’s Just Jot It January prompt “Paris” caught my eye.
My mind immediately went to this post, written November 14, 2015 in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack there, horrible because it was so devastating and, in retrospect, because it was not the only attack that Paris has suffered.
I remember writing it from my bed in the corner room looking toward MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, where I was staying in an apartment as part of the first ever collaboration between Tupelo Press and the Studios at MASS MoCA, bringing poets together for a week of residency at the expansive Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. I had no idea as I wrote that day that our stalwart band of poets would coalesce into the Boiler House Poets and return to MASS MoCA for residency each fall for the next three years with dates planned for 2019, as well.
In that post, I was writing about the attack’s happening so close to the international climate conference that produced the Paris Accord. Hope and unity triumphed over divisiveness and rancor. I am appalled that DT has announced that the United States will leave the accord in November of 2020 and fervently hope that the decision will be overturned by our next president.
As I said in that November 2015 post:
We are all Paris. All bloodied. All in shock. All in mourning. But also united in strength. United in resolve. United in solidarity.
We must be.
The future of humanity and the planet depend on it.
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/15/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-15th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
So now my daily participation with Just Jot It January just got more challenging by a factor of two, but I couldn’t be happier! Daughter E and granddaughter ABC arrived safely yesterday evening after four weeks in London. Given the long day and the five hours of jet lag, they are both adjusting to being back quite well.
ABC was away for her nineteenth month and grew another inch while she was gone. She added more words, including a couple words of Tagalog. She is also pronouncing some of her older words more clearly. She clearly remembered us and the house – and her toys. She has been in quite a good mood, especially given that not only is there jet lag but she is also just getting over a cold.
The house is undoubtedly livelier than it has been. With more demands on my time, I’ll have to re-double my efforts to continue to post every day.
Can I do it?
Stay tuned…
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/14/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-14th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
This really will be just a jot today because we are getting ready for daughter E and granddaughter ABC to come home from London, where they have been visiting with son-in-law L for almost a month. We need to finish up the toddler-proofing that we had undone/ignored while ABC was away. There will be some time with Nana and Paco, as there usually is every day, but we need to leave for the airport mid-afternoon. Unfortunately, the flights didn’t work out to come to our local airport, which only has one carrier and three flights a day, so we will need to take an hour and a half drive to pick them up. After dinner near the airport, we will all head for home in our hybrid Pacifica. Although we will get back here between 8 and 9 PM, it will feel to E and ABC like 1 to 2 AM, so there may be napping on the way. Everyone at my house and Nana and Paco can hardly wait to have E and ABC back with us!
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/13/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-13th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
I am privileged to have several works of art that are created by friends.
The oldest of these is a watercolor by a college friend, Catherine Jennings. It’s a landscape with a pond and surrounding trees. It hangs in our dining room.
Also, hanging in the dining room is a still life in oils by another Smith College friend, Lorrie Sandel Lane. It shows an empty bird’s nest next to a vase of branches with berries.
Those are both originals. I also have two miniature prints on canvas from a set of modern icons by a local friend, Yvonne Lucia. I have seen the originals, both in a gallery setting and in a meditation setting around a labyrinth. They were inspired by some of the ancient titles for Mary, the mother of Jesus.
I also have a print of a cat by James Mullen, who is my parents’ downstairs neighbor and a retired art professor. Jim still has his press in his studio in his apartment and produces prints from plates, as well as printing cards and prints that he creates digitally. [I couldn’t find a website for Jim, so the link is to a print that was in a recent show.]
Now, I will embark on a non-stream of consciousness expedition of trying to take photos and put them in the post, as well as some websites if I can find them. Hope I manage to get at least some of them…
Postscript: My apologies to the artists for my lack of photographic skills. I promise you they all look better in person, but I wanted to share the work of my artist friends.
*****
Join us for Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday and/or Just Jot It January! This week’s prompt was”art.” Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/11/the-friday-reminder-for-socs-jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-12th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
When the Boiler House Poets get together for our reunion residencies, we have a group project that we work on together, often spearheaded by Marilyn McCabe, whose skill-set includes videopoems and more computer skills than most of us can ever aspire to.
Last fall when we met for our week together at MASS MoCA, Marilyn asked each of us to write a short poem about a work of art that was currently at the museum. She then recorded each of us reading her work and melded it with images of the artwork.
Here is the result. Enjoy! (And because I know someone will ask, my poem is “Redacted” based on a haunting large-scale work by Jenny Holzer.)
For the last several years, it has been my privilege to be in residence with the Boiler House Poets at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, Massachusetts. I grew up in the area and I am always happy to be back in a familiar and beautiful place with engaging and talented poet-friends. I usually blog daily while I am there, but, for a number of reasons, I was unable to this year, so I thought I’d do some catch-up posts about it.
While we met as the first group of poets in residence through a collaboration with Tupelo Press and the Studios at MASS MoCA, we are now a self-directed group and, for our week together in October, we decided to do manuscript reviews. I am relatively new to giving feedback on chapbooks/poetry collections and to putting my own manuscripts together, so I appreciated the opportunity. It involved a lot of preparation before the residency as we shared manuscripts, read, and prepared comments. I was very busy with sandwich-generation caregiving and was concerned I wouldn’t be able to prepare, but I managed to get sick, the silver lining being that I needed to rest and stay away from people for their protection, so I holed up in my room and did manuscript work.
I was so impressed by the work I was reading and learned a lot from the discussions about each manuscript. Mine was the last manuscript to be workshopped and I was super nervous. It was a new version of my manuscript that deals with generations of family, our relationship to the North Adams area, and the massive changes that have taken place there over time as it moved from being home to mills, then to electronics, and eventually to the largest modern art museum in the country. The discussion was very helpful and led to the realization that I need to re-focus the collection again.
I have a lot of work to do on it, but I haven’t gotten to do much with it yet. The week I was in North Adams was the one in which hospice decided to decertify Nana. Things became even busier than they had been and I still haven’t been able to find time/brain to go over all the comments, digest them, and start revisions. I did get to do a bit of work before I left North Adams and I am pondering somewhere in the back of my brain here and there, so I hope that I will be able to make progress when I can get back to work.
Will 2019 be the year that I finally manage to get the manuscript ready to send out?
Fingers crossed…
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/10/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-10th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
“Why struggle to open a door between us when the whole wall is an illusion?”
~~~Rumi
*****
Join us for Linda’s One-Liner Wednesdays and Just Jot It January! Find out how here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/09/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-9th-and-one-liner-wednesday/
More information on JusJoJan and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
I decided to postpone my planned post for today to respond to the Just Jot It January prompt of the day – “self.”
As my parents have aged and encountered more health problems, I have taken on more of their household tasks myself. Because they have lived for a number of years in a continuing care senior community, some of the cleaning and cooking is taken care of, but I have been helping with laundry, shopping, banking, etc.
Today, I represented my parents at the funeral of one of the other residents, who had lived there almost as long as my parents. She was also a stalwart of our church. She had been able to be very active until the last few months, when she had a stroke and other complications.
I was able to speak to a couple of the other residents after the service. They were upset, as one would expect. One of them told me that she had told my father he needed to live at least another ten years, which given that he is turning 94 in March, is a bit of a tall order. Still, there is one woman who is in independent living who is 110, so who knows?
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January! Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/08/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-8th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
Our family has taken another step in reducing our carbon footprint. We replaced our 2005 Honda Odyssey with a new Chrysler Pacifica hybrid. Having had a minivan in the family since E was an infant thirty-two years ago, we like their versatility for transporting people and cargo. We wanted to keep that utility but cut back on emissions.
As it turns out, the Pacifica is the only plug-in hybrid minivan on the market. It has a full gasoline-powered engine plus enough battery to travel thirty-ish miles. That means that most days, we can run on battery power but have the flexibility to go on long trips without having to plan on stopping at a rapid charging station as we would have to do with our Chevy Bolt.
As it turns out, in order to get the most advanced safety features, we wound up having to get a lot of other bells and whistles, too. I admit that I am having a bit of trouble adjusting to nearly everything happening by touch screen. Sometimes, buttons and knobs are easier!
It is nice to not have to go to a gas station very often and I appreciate that we have so drastically reduced our transportation greenhouse gas emissions. For those of us who live in places without much mass transit, transportation is one of the most difficult areas to achieve reductions, so I am grateful to have gone mostly electric, especially as most of our electricity comes from our solar panels.
It’s fun to go green!
*****
Join us for Just Jot It January. Today’s pingback link is here: https://lindaghill.com/2019/01/07/jusjojan-2019-daily-prompt-jan-7th/
More information and prompts here: https://lindaghill.com/2018/12/31/what-is-just-jot-it-january-2019-rules/
Joanne Corey 