Daily Archives: November 1, 2013

Latin

Pushing past a plateau

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Samhain                                                                  Samhain Moon

Latin.  Better today.  Greg pushing me to do sight reading at a higher level of proficiency. He wants me to read the Latin, without aids, and translate it for him during our sessions. This will entail, he says, going over each sentence or verse at least four times until it becomes embedded.  He believes this will push me off my current plateau.

(old roman)

I’m excited about this.  It will make my translation pop, he says.  At some point.  There is, though, the inevitable regression in terms of time, since this will make each sentence take longer. How much longer I can’t tell yet because I haven’t practiced it.  It does mean I’m headed in the right direction.

 

General
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A Birthday Card

by: Ted Kooser
from: One World at a Time
In her eighties now, and weak and ill
with emphysema, my aunt sends me
a birthday card—a tossing ocean
with clipper ship—and wishes me
well at forty-four. She’s included
a note—hard-bitten in ball-point,
with a pen that sometimes skips whole words
but never turns back—to tell me
her end of the news: how the steroids
have softened her spine, and now how
every x-ray shows more shattered bone.
Her hasty words skip in and out,
their little grooves washed clean of ink,
the message rising and falling
like short-wave radio, sending
this hurried SOS, with love.

Quotes

Ralph and Isadora

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“The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought of spirit, of poetry— a narrow belt.”
— R.W. Emerson
“The meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.”
— R.W. Emerson
“The man, who has seen the rising moon break out of the clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the creation of light and of the world.”
— R.W. Emerson
“The maker of a sentence launches out into the infinite and builds a road into Chaos and old Night, and is followed by those who hear him with something of wild, creative delight.”
— R.W. Emerson
“You were once wild. Don’t let them tame you.”
— Isadora Duncan

“Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The same particle does not rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and their experience with them.”
— R.W. Emerson
Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Great Wheel, Woolly Mammoths

The Samhain Bonfire, a bit more.

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Samhain                                                             Samhain Moon

Frank said as he left, “Casual gatherings.  Low key.  That’s what I like best.”  It was low key, but in its own surprising way, profound.

The bonfire stayed interesting for 3 hours plus, the last hour or so the result of the five four foot lengths of ironwood cut in the morning.  There will be a number more of those logs cut over the next few weeks as we prepare for the Winter Solstice bonfire on December 21st.

The calling of the ancestors to the circle worked.  When we finished, they stayed with us, entering our conversations, adding layers to the people gathered around the fire.  Our group of 7 grew by generations of Fairbanks and Charles’s and Wolfe’s and Perlich’s and Zike’s and Spitler’s.  Some of us called in our tribal ancestors from those days long ago before settlement of Europe and all of us gave a nod and a toast to the Tanzanian man whose y chromosome all the men share.  Mitochondrial Eve, too.  (Though I understand that picture has gotten more complicated.  But the idea is sound.  That woman and that man, far enough back to have entered all our DNA.)

Warren and Sheryl threw their names into the fire wrapped around logs from long ago cached wood for a barbecue.  When they did, sparks from the fire flew up toward the night sky.  Reminded me of Beowulf’s bier, where “heaven swallowed the smoke.”

More memories gather around this place.  It becomes richer with each event, especially with the crowd of ancients who filled it last night.  Some of their spirit will linger on, remembering us and being remembered.