Tag: SoCS

SoCS: concerts

I’m going to miss my daughter’s concert tomorrow. She is singing with the Hendrick’s Chapel Choir at Syracuse University, although she attends SUNY-ESF. They are allowed to take classes and participate in activities on either campus. When she was home for Thanksgiving, she showed me what they would be singing. I’m sure it will be a lovely concert, but it’s too difficult to attend an evening event in Syracuse, drive home for an hour and a half, and then be up early the next morning. B has a 6 AM conference call most weekdays and it seems especially early when daylight hours are so short as they are in our latitude in December.

It seems to be a weekend for missing concerts. I sang this afternoon with the University Chorus and Orchestra at the Anderson Center at SUNY-Binghamton. We sang Orff’s Carmina Burana and it went really well! Unfortunately, no one in my family was able to come hear it.

I hope next semester there will be less missing of concerts…
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Linda’s prompt for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday is”miss.” Come join us!  Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/12/04/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-dec-515/

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SoCS: too much stuff

I have too much stuff to do.

There is a lot to do between now and the end of the year with lots of family visiting and holiday preparations and decorating and baking and card writing.

There is my University Chorus concert next weekend, so we have extra rehearsals scheduled this week with the orchestra.

I have three poetry meetings in the next two weeks, two with Sappho’s Circle and one with Bunn Hill Poets.

There are also the usual chores and appointments and shopping and meal prep and what-not.

Meanwhile, what I really want to be concentrating on is solidifying the experiences from the poetry conference last week.

Theoretically, I could do everything at once, but too much of it involves an amount of brain power that I can only muster a few hours a day.  I need to trust that my brain can keep working on poetry while I am accomplishing other things, that I can continue to glean lessons from the conference somewhere in the back of my mind that I will be able to bring to the top of my mind later when I have settled the holiday stuff and can return to some semblance of normal life.

Wish me luck…
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The prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “stuff”.  Come join us ! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/11/27/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-nov-2815/

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SoCS: Paris

The only word that comes to mind as indescribable this morning is Paris.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream for Consciousness Saturday this week is “Indescribable.” Join us! Find out how here:   http://lindaghill.com/2015/11/13/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-nov-1415/

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SoCS: welcome the stranger

In my faith tradition, we are called to welcome the stranger and extend hospitality. Welcoming the stranger is also part of the civic tradition in the United States, exemplified in the Emma Lazarus poem on the base of the Statue of Liberty in the New York Harbor, although I must admit that we as a country often fail to live up to our highest ideals.

I was heartened to hear, however, that a meeting called to see if there were people interested in aiding the re-settlement of Syrian refugees in our area was so crowded with local folks wanting to help that they had to expand the meeting room to accommodate them all.

Our Greater Binghamton (New York) community has a long history of welcoming refugees and is an official re-settlement area. Over decades, there have been refugees here from diverse countries, such as Laos, Ukraine, and Iraq. It would be an honor for some of the Syrian refugees who have suffered so much to find a new home here with us as well.

I get a bit choked up thinking about new refugees arriving because one of the main organizations that will help them is the American Civic Association, which suffered a mass shooting as few years ago. Despite that, they continue to do great work, welcoming the stranger, helping them to learn English, teaching them about the United States, and helping them create a new home here.

I truly appreciate their work and their example of what “welcoming the stranger” really means.
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Linda’s prompt for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday is:  strange/stranger/strangest. Join us!  Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/10/30/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-3115/

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SoCS: grass-fed beef

I try to find grass-fed beef for our home. Cows evolved to eat grass and their digestion works best when they do. When you hear about cattle being major emitters of methane, it is often because they are being fed things like corn that they don’t digest well. The methane when it is in the atmosphere is a potent greenhouse gas and exacerbates global warming, so it is good for the environment for cows to eat grass.

There used to be a slogan about a dairy selling milk “from contented cows.” The cows probably got to eat grass! Science also has shown that cows are especially happy if they get to eat flax.

Grass-fed beef is also healthier for people to eat. It is lower in fat and the fat that it does have is higher in omega 3 fats rather than omega 6 fats. Corn-fed beef is high in omega 6 fats with little omega 3s.

I wish that farmers in the US would change their practices to go back to the older practice of cows eating grass. It would be better for the climate, the cows, and the people.
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Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “beef.” Join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/10/23/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-2315/ SoCS badge 2015

SoCS: still away

I am still away on a long weekend trip with B to celebrate our Third of a Century wedding anniversary. We had to be apart on the anniversary date in June, so we – okay, I – came up with this commemoration plan instead.

We had a lovely breakfast at the B&B this morning, featuring fantastic apple cider pancakes and a maple apple crisp that was one of the most delicious things ever. The innkeeper joked that because they didn’t serve it with ice cream, it was a breakfast food rather than a dessert. Of course, we agreed. As native New Englanders, we know things like fruit pies are perfectly acceptable breakfast foods!

Not sure what else we will be doing today. I still wanted to participate with SoCS, but didn’t want to devote much time to a long post.

Can you blame me?  😉
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This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. The prompt this week is “still.”  Join us! Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/10/16/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-1715/

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SoCS: Singing

Singing has been a constant in my life. As a child I sang at school and at church. In high school, I sang in the mixed chorus and in my final year made the Girls’ Ensemble. I could sing, do (simple) choreography, and smile all at the same time! I also was in a few musicals, nearly always in the chorus.

I really learned to be a good choral singer in college. At Smith, I finally learned to sing classical music, everything from Gregorian chant up through newly composed work. Granted, in those days, we sang Western music only. Today, I would probably get to do some world music as well. I also got used to singing in different languages. While I had sang mostly in English, with a bit of Latin, before college, I sang frequently in Latin and German, with some Hebrew and French.

For the past 33 seasons, I have sung with the Binghamton University Chorus, which is a town-gown group, meaning we have students, faculty and staff from the university, and community members participating. Some of our members are in their 80s; I know of at least one who has reached her 90s!

I hope that I will still be singing, if I am blessed enough to reach that age.

As the hymn says, “How can I keep from singing?”
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This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. The prompt this week was to begin the post with a word ending in -ing. Please join us! Find out how here: http://lindaghill.com/2015/10/09/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-1015/

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SoCS: both expected and unexpected

This past week’s calendar was filled with lots of expected tasks and commitments, with fall activities back in full swing after summer hiatus. Of course, the unexpected has a way of springing in. Here are some of the unexpected things that cropped up this past week.

  • One evening I got back from an activity and put on my Chromebook to see an instant message from my daughter warning me that her hair was now purple. She wanted me to know before I saw it on Facebook. This led to a Skype call so I could see it better than in the photo – and also so we could visit as she is thousands of miles away. Her hair looks nice purple, but it is not a long-time commitment as it will fade out in six weeks or so. This is helpful as her hair is quite long, so a permanent color would take a very long time to grow out.
  • I had expected to have an appointment for a flu vaccine study that I had agreed to participate in, but it got cancelled so I got to attend an excellent lecture on climate change and its impacts in our state instead. This also gave me material for a poem that I wrote from a prompt at Binghamton Poetry Project this week. Serendipity strikes again!
  • My spouse B had an unexpected day off on Friday. Upper management gave them the day off to reward them for the release of a recent product, so we scooted off to Oneonta to attend the opening of an art exhibit that featured works of a college friend of mine. I had not told her that we would be there – and we almost missed her as we arrived early and she had had quite a drive after work to reach the reception – but it was fun to see the look of surprise on her face when we connected.
  • Unfortunately, this week also afforded the both expected and unexpected news of yet another mass shooting here in the US. The details and timing are unexpected, shocking, and tragic. That it will happen again is sadly expected. And disturbing. And tragic. I can’t understand how the interpretation of the Second Amendment to our Constitution has become so warped that some people think it means that anyone can have a gun anytime, anywhere. These people totally ignore the first clause of the amendment, which talks about a “well-regulated militia” and sets the context for the part that follows about the right to bear arms. At the time, the United States did not have a standing army, so the defense of the country was left to state militias. The men who made up the militias were not professional soldiers, but farmers or tradesmen or whatever, so they had to have guns available in case they were called on to defend their town, state, or country. The amendment didn’t intend that any person could have any weapon anywhere anytime. The mass shootings get attention, which masks the smaller scale tragedies of gun violence that happen every day across the country, and nothing happens to reign in the problems. Definitely, people who hunt or target shoot or have guns for legitimate needs should be able to have them, but we need to get them out of the hands of the mentally disturbed and those intent on killing people, whether strangers or family or neighbors.  [I can’t bring myself to write any more than this about mass shootings, but I will provide this link to a piece that I wrote about a mass shooting in my area and how it relates to other similar-but-different tragedies.]

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This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. This week’s prompt was “expect/unexpected.” Please come join us!  Find out how here:  http://lindaghill.com/2015/10/02/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-oct-315/

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SoCS: really now, peat?

Linda’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this week is “-eat.” She says, “Use the word ‘eat’ or add letters to it to make a different word.”  So, in true stream of consciousness fashion, I am starting off with the word “peat.”

Which probably seems like an odd word for my brain to settle upon, but I was listening to the radio the other day and they were talking about peat and permafrost and how they are such massive carbon sinks for the world and how, if the permafrost melts and all that carbon gets released into the atmosphere, the planet will heat so much that, well, it will be really bad for humanity.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that this was where my mind went. After all, writing/thinking/reading/discussing carbon emissions and climate change has been part of my daily life (or almost daily life) for several years now.

It started with joining the fight to keep high-volume hydraulic fracturing of shale formations out of New York State and inevitably led to educating about the broader problems with carbon emissions and global warming and increases in severe weather, droughts, fires, etc., sea level rise, melting land and sea ice, and the increasingly urgent need to end reliance on fossil fuels and convert to renewable energy sources, especially those that are no/low carbon emitting.

I could – and have – gone on and on about this, but I will spare you today!

I will, though, send my thanks out to Pope Francis, currently 200+ miles to my south in Philadelphia, PA, for spreading the message around the world about the urgency of fighting climate change and the effects it has on the planet and the human community, particularly the most vulnerable people. His solution is to develop an “integral ecology” that serves to both protect the environment and ensure the dignity and needs of all people are met.

We are all in this together. Let’s clasp hands and forge ahead with the work needed to save the planet and ourselves.
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This post is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays.  Join us! Find out how here:   http://lindaghill.com/2015/09/25/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-sept-2615/

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SoCS: Pope Francis

I heard this morning that Pope Francis is en route to Cuba, where he will spend a few days before arriving in the US.

His route here will take him to Washington, New York City, and Philadelphia. There will be high profile speeches to the US Congress, UN General Assembly, and at a conference on the family in Philadelphia. There will also be several public Masses with attendance in the thousands for the indoors ones and hundreds of thousands when outdoors.

I have been eagerly anticipating his arrival and plan to watch the coverage, including a group “watch party” for the Congressional address.

I was reading an article by Father Tom Reese in NCR the other day, asking if people would really hear what Francis has to say while he is in the US.  I know that I will be listening carefully. I also know that, while I will agree with many of the Pope’s points, I will disagree with others. For example, Francis, though he means well, does not understand women’s lives. While he is wonderful about acknowledging social justice issues with those in poverty or on the margins, he fails to notice that this group is disproportionately female and that sexism and sexual violence/exploitation play a large role in their plight.

I am especially interested in how the Congress, many of whose leaders are Catholic, will react to what is sure to be a challenging speech to them, probably on the grounds of climate change, militarism, lack of care for the country’s and the world’s most vulnerable, rampant consumerism, and greed.

I am hopeful that Pope Francis’s voice on environmental issues and systemic marginalization of those with the least economic resources, especially in the global South, will spark conversation that will lead to a strong US voice for the climate and environment and for justice, for “integral ecology” as the Pope terms it, so that there will be a strong international accord coming out to the Paris climate talks at the end of the year with full US participation in the implementation.

That sounds like I’m asking for a miracle.

Maybe I am.

But I think there is hope through Francis, who speaks not only to Catholics but to “all those of good will” and maybe even may reach those who are not especially “of good will.”

Godspeed, Francis. May you have a safe and fruitful journey.
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This is part of Linda’s Stream of Consciousness Saturdays. This week’s prompt is route/root.  Join us! Find out how here:    http://lindaghill.com/2015/09/18/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-sept-1915/  SoCS badge 2015