Christmas & Poetry

  Dear (confused & sweet ) friend who spoke to me on Tuesday.

For me Christmas is always happy... because it rests upon Christ, not upon the different things in my life. If I was irreligious, each Christmas would only be a reminder  of not having a family. Don't know what it means to you.

I wanted to say thank you for talking to me...Am all smiles now...Didn't know what to say...copied a poem for you instead. :) The first poem reminds me of you. (by someone a little confused religiously, yet not totally rejecting God.) The second is a poem you once said you liked. It has a similar feel to the poem you wrote which you once showed me.

The Oxen - Christmas Poem by Thomas Hardy

Make it Snow !

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
"Now they are all on their knees,"
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
"Come; see the oxen kneel,

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,"
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so’

THE CONVERT

        After one moment when I bowed my head

        And the whole world turned over and came upright,
        And I came out where the old road shone white,
        I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
        Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
        Being not unlovable but strange and light;
        Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
        But softly, as men smile about the dead.

        The sages have a hundred maps to give
        That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
        They rattle reason out through many a sieve
        That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
        And all these things are less than dust to me
        Because my name is Lazarus and I live.


                                                --G. K. Chesterton

my rat

My pet rat started eating his Clementine slice right away. Awwww!

Break

I am enjoying this break so dang much!

More Time to Write

Finals are over for this semester. Also, I've got a two week break from work. Now I can start writing again. Yes, I was writing for a couple of college classes; now i can write the stuff I really want to. What is that? Man, all sorts of stuff. Stuff, about my life, posts for this blog, etc. In the past, I toyed with fiction. That was fun, but very time-consuming. I could start again, but once school starts, work and study would take to much time to allow for any mind-consuming type of writing project. So I shall stick to the more important task of documenting my life. Plus, there is so much philosophy to read. Such as, the Summa in latin (side-by-side with an English translation) not to mention tons of other philosophers: Plato, Aristotle & Boethius of course, also Gilson & Simon etc. But right now, and probably for several years, due to its size, the Summa predominates.

Comments by Readers

So far, no one has made a comment on any post. Come on guys, get with it!

Aristotle quotes

Aristotle quotes:

'via Blog this'

rat feet

Life is good when your paper is misspelled  because of tiny rat feet scampering around on your keyboard.

Monday

Monday was a busy busy day, but really good!
     I had an extra class teaching first-graders. I teach music at an Elementary/Middle school. The kids are so sweet in every day. But the little kids are especially charming. Some of the first grade girls always want to hug  me. As I was trying to begin class on Monday, one started hugging me, then the others got their arms around me at the same time. And they wanted to remain in that position, but i had to start class. I never see this happening to the other teachers and sometimes I wonder what they think of it. Have never heard any remarks or anything.
     The class lasted an hour. It was mostly improvised. Partway through, I ended up holding up kids' drawings one by one for the others to see. Everybody was so happy. There's no need for rock hard boundaries between subjects. 

Our Lady Of Guadalupe | Relation of the Apparitions | www.sancta.org

Our Lady Of Guadalupe | Relation of the Apparitions | www.sancta.org:

'via Blog this'

Weird quote

This makes me smile... :)

"We are all a little weird. And life's a little weird. And when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness, which we call love."

-Unknown

Dr. Who

I cried during an episode of Dr. Who. (from season 4)
How embarrassing. :) Especially as I didn't cry for a year and a half (til a few weeks ago) and not for four or more years before that. And season four isn't even my favorite. Season five is, because that Doctor is so sweet and so nice.

How Often Does This Happen?

I was with a friend, much older than me, who was telling me "I always went for guys who were bad, and not for the nice guys I actually liked." I told her "I read that sometimes people from divorced families have this feeling of impending loss. And they sometimes pick people they don't like that much because it won't hurt so much to lose that person as to lose someone they really care about."
My friend said her parent's weren't divorced, rather, her mother had died when she was four. My friend wondered if she had done what I had described; rejected those she liked and could love, for fear of loss.
I wonder how often this happens and how many people do this.

Reconnection

 I reconnected with an old friend who lives in another state. Calling her was such a little everyday decision, something that occurred to me to do, all of the sudden.

Why I Love my Job

Imagine a six year old is walking in your direction. When she sees you, she shouts your name, and starts running. She reaches you, stretches out her arms for a hug and hugs you for a long long time.

A Speculation About Affection

Here is a thought. I don't know if it is true, or not.
Maybe there is no real distinction between types of love; only between types of relationships.
It seems for me that, on the emotional level, there is sometimes only differences of intensity with regards to the people I love. But I think again about it, and am not sure. There is differences of degree of tenderness. There is differences with how much I think/obsess about the person. (I always obsess about something. I am not able to escape that; it seems to be an unshakable part of my personality.) But aren't differences of tenderness and frequency of thought, again, differences of degree? I suppose different types of love means different combinations of quantities of the elements of love.
I will do research on brain scans and stuff and see what turns up.

Most important

"People who envision having a baby often forget that they are creating an entirely new human being who will leave in a few years as an adult." (???) I read this as part of an argument against having children. Was the person satirizing himself?
"People who envision having a baby often forget that they are creating an entirely new human being who will leave in a few years as an adult."
 This is exactly why one has a child. It is because a human being is the most wonderful thing in the universe.
Dr Who:"An ordinary man, that's the most important thing in existence."
More so, if the soul is immortal.
Gaude, Maria!
"The World is so full of a number of things/ I am sure we should all be as happy as kings -Robert Louis Stevenson
(I'm sane and sober, dear reader! Want to dance?)

As of Now

My room is now the messiest room I have ever seen.
Not that that relates to anything. I will not take time away from writing  to clean.
Keep reading each day. We've got some Amazing life-changing posts coming up. Wait til you see the one about self-inflicted misery.
Dear friend,
please follow my advice and become an amazing holy person. You can do it!
remember Our Lady. She'll appreciate it.

seasons and scarring and beauty and stuff

 Thoughts from Tuesday morning.
I feel at home in California. Why? Because there are people I care for who live here. But I miss seasons. I miss snow in winter.
I miss Fall. I miss cold cloudy Fall days. Gray days are under appreciated, yet they have a peculiar beauty.
     What I think of most is lying with my sister and our best friend under an apple tree. It must have been Fall because there were apples. The image of that apple tree keeps returning.

Do you know that according to scholastic philosophy, Beauty is one of the Transcendentals? This means that everything that exists, insofar as it exists, is beautiful. The transcendentals transcend all categories. The four Transcendentals are the: One, Good, True, Beautiful. Everything that exists is each of those things insofar as the thing exists.Evil, is a lack of the good that could have been. The same goes for Falsehood and Ugliness. Disunity means disintegration, the end of all. One, Good, True, Beautiful. Everything that exists is each of those transcendentals insofar as the thing exists. Those four things, I mean those transcendentals, belong to existence itself.
       
     But not everything that exists is each of those transcendentals to the same degree.
If there was one word that could describe my life growing up, everything that surrounded me, the whole atmosphere in which I was immersed, the word would be Beauty. Not just as a transcendental but in the sense of "More beautiful than most places, most communities, most surroundings and cultures." (don't get offended, anyone. I'm not making an objective judgement or comparison.)
How can I convey this? More beautiful than what I've seen since. I remember a song from choir at my parish Regina Caeli Jubila/ Gaude Maria. 

     Can I explain the astounding beauty of the Tridentine Liturgy, drawing on deeper and deeper into the mystery of its dark and beautiful folds? No, this cannot be explained and can only be sensed by some.

     If there was one word that could describe my life growing up, everything that surrounded me, the whole atmosphere in which I was immersed, the word would be Beauty. 

How do my past and present receptiveness to such things, (existence and the beauty of existents) compare to each other ? I had a past amazement. It is not the same now. Yet, maybe not worse, now. I had all this wonder and amazement. I am different now. Yet, maybe I love existents (that means things that exist) now, too. I'm just different. Existence has a different feel now. maybe better. I am older, and not just chronologically.

It was only last week that I could feel scar tissue crossing and criss-crossing throughout my heart. The scar tissue was in the evening, and in the morning I lay in bed and I could feel it.
I will mention someday what else happened as I lay there.

Had to get a boring post in

I've discovered that if I write a message for this blog, save it as a draft, and post it on another day, the blog dates it as if it were posted on the day I wrote the draft. For example, my earlier post about "The Power of the Tongue" was posted on Tuesday. It made mention of"yesterday." Yesterday was Monday. The blog registered it as being posted Monday, and I had to go back later and change "yesterday" to today.
This boring post is to make you appreciate the other things I write. :)

The Power of the Tongue

Someone said something to me Monday. He used five words. I'm not quoting what he said here.
   Language, words, think about them. Language changes things. The face of the world can be changed, wars started, countries destroyed, through verbal or written commands given by persons of authority.
   Yet, the thing that fascinates me, is the power of words even when nothing external is changed. It's like magic. Nothing can change externally, nothing, yet everything can be different because of a sentence. Isn't there someplace in Frankenstein, a book I never read but may have flipped open and came across this passage, isn't there someplace where he has been observing these people in an Alpine cottage. They speak a  language he does not understand, maybe he doesn't understand language. He observes them making vocal sounds. He sees that these sounds effect them, change them, causing joy sometimes, sorrow, anger, all this when nothing changes externally.
   Someone said something.  It was one sentence, spoken spontaneously. And everything was transformed.

Genius

Dr. Who presents a man, The Doctor, who is, according to the screenwriters, a demigod, extraordinarily charismatic,
and he really is! The viewer is fascinated.
Dosteoevsky presents a person, Alyosha, who is supposedly beloved by all, amandus,
and he really is! The reader knows why all the characters love him.  The reader loves him too.
True genius.

Insect

alder lace bug
photographed by Jim Baker, North Carolina State University, Bugwood.org

These things are just so cool. An Insect should be enough to shake us out of our habits of being all blase about stuff.

Seen After Mass

There's this guy I've been noticing at Mass. Small, dark-skinned, in a wheelchair. He holds a statue of Jesus, nine inches high, maybe modeled on the image known as the Divine Mercy image; he kisses it sometimes. After Mass today, I went into the Adoration chapel (with the Blessed Sacrament exposed in a monstrance   Here's Pope Benedict with the Blessed 
Sacrament in a monstrance. He looks a little spacy, butI'm sure he's actually deep in prayer.)


This guy's in the Adoration Chapel. I notice him after he's moved himself out of his wheelchair onto the ground. I've never known what kind of disability he might have that necessitates a wheelchair. He's sitting on the ground with one of his legs straight in front of him. He moves the other with his hand, so both legs are straight in front of him. 
     Then, he turns his whole self around with his hands. He had been facing the normal direction, facing the exposed Host in the Monstrance. Now he is facing towards his wheelchair. I assume he's going back into it. No, he needed to get his legs facing that direction, so that he can roll onto his stomach, and lie facing the Blessed Sacrament. He is prostrating himself. 
In our culture, it seems weird, eccentric.
A thought comes to mind. This guy is one of those people who appear weird and strange (because they are not worried all the time about what other people expect) and who give signs of being very very good people. Yet, one sometimes doesn't want to get to know them too well. Why is this? Are they scary?
Easier to respect than to love, sometimes.

Reading Project Re-Begun

A few years back, I decided to read the entire Summa Theologica. As of yet, I have not succeeded. Okay, I really slacked off. I have not been reading anything that expands or deepens the mind. That will change! My recent rash purchase of the Summa in multiple volumes, latin and english will prove to have been wise. One of the greatest works of history will serve its purpose of assisting one more person to touch reality in a deeper way.

...creative juices bubbling...

so exciting to start a new blog... now I can show the world my charm, talent and charisma. Hi, to everyone reading this. I'm talking to you especially, dear friend-who-caused-me-to-start-this. If you get mentioned in here, I'll give you a new name, don't worry.