Healing

Art convenes. It is not just inspirational. It is aspirational. It pricks the walls of our compartmentalized minds, opens our hearts and makes us brave.
~Anna Deavere Smith

Celebrating Joe Biden's inauguration today!

I love what they have done with flags in the National Mall. (If you haven't seen them, check them out.)

Sharing an excerpt by an Irish poet in his honor, since President Biden's ancestry is more than half Irish.

Eavan Boland from "A Habitable Grief":

This is what language is:
a habitable grief. A turn of speech
for the everyday and ordinary abrasion
of losses such as this

which hurts
just enough to be a scar.

And heals just enough to be a nation.

P.S. Time to revisit A BLESSING FOR ONE WHO HOLDS POWER by John O’Donohue?

On Being Studios · "A Blessing for One Who Holds Power" by John O'Donohue [bonus track]

Infinity Song

Look inside your heart, I'll look inside mine.
~Steve Winwood/Will Jennings

For Music Monday, Infinity Song with Steve Winwood's Higher Love:

Whistling in the dark

I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it.
~Clara Barton

For Poetry Friday, Maya Angelou with "Life Doesn't Frighten Me." Time to muster up some courage!

brainpicker · Maya Angelou reads "Life Doesn't Frighten Me"

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Reflections on the Teche has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Margaret!

Kometenbuch

The president is a lethal danger to the American republic and the American people.
~Jamie Raskin

I haven't really posted since the attack on the Capitol because I just don't know what to say. The above quote from my beloved representative Jamie Raskin sums up a portion of my feelings.

Instead of thinking about the world on the ground, for Art Thursday here are some illustrations from an anonymous medieval book on comets. This predates the first telescope by about twenty years and has a poetic touch.

The Comet Book (1587):

Holding my breath

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell.
~Christopher Browning

For some reason, this song started going through my head this evening. I am hopeful! And grateful.

Whatever your heart says to say

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
~C. S. Lewis

I have never chosen One Little Word for a year, but I did end up having one for 2020 anyway: flexibility. I feel like that might also be my word for 2021, but I will have to see. (Apparently the word chooses me, not the other way around.)

When I was thinking about what poem to share today, I liked the pairing of Sally Heilbut's "Order on the Phone to a Large Department Store" with Tom Hunley's "If You’ve Met One Autistic Person, You’ve Met One Autistic Person" because they both offer that jolt of seeing things in a new way and embracing surprise. I couldn't find Tom Hunley's poem online, though, so I can only share one stanza of "If You’ve Met One Autistic Person, You’ve Met One Autistic Person":

Who asks how much you weigh? How fast you’ll grow?
Who says whatever their heart says to say?
Don’t let him bend to suit the world, I pray.
Who dreams up paths where no one else can go?
My son’s the only person that I know.

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Lily Einhorn shared on Twitter:
My great aunt Sally died on Tuesday night of Covid, 8 days after testing positive in her care home. She wanted to be a poet. She wasn’t really educated, she never had a tutor, an editor or a publisher. But she self-published a pamphlet.

Here is one of Lily's favorites of her great aunt Sally Heilbut's poems:

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Wishing you the best in 2021! xo

There's No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Ruth!

The Bells of St Genevieve

At first a faint tinkling passes from church to church...see how, all of a sudden, at the same moment, there rises from each steeple as it were a column of sound, a cloud of harmony...Say if you know anything in the world more rich, more joyful, more golden, more overwhelming than that tumult of bells, than that furnace of music, than those ten thousand voices of bronze singing all at once from flutes of stone three hundred feet high, than that city which has become an orchestra, than that symphony which roars like a storm.
~Victor Hugo

That quote from The Hunchback of Notre Dame makes me want to start reading it asap. Poetry, I'd say. I have a song today, but I also have one painting since it's Art Thursday:

Marin Marais by André Bouys, 1704

Interesting bits about Marin Marais (1656–1728):

Marais is credited with being one of the earliest composers of program music. His work The Bladder-Stone Operation, for viola da gamba and harpsichord, includes composer's annotations such as "The patient is bound with silken cords" and "He screameth." The title has often been interpreted as "The Gall-Bladder Operation," but that surgery was not performed until the late 19th century. Urinary bladder surgery to remove stones was already a medical specialty in Paris in the 17th century.

Also, he had 19 children.

Hope y'all have a good last day of 2020!