:: back at it ::

As is typical lately, health issues have given me a run for my money. It's made research a challenge, that's for sure. But I find that God helps me just in the nick of time. Like today ~ sun-filled, hopeful, notable brain activity, and I can't help but see inspiration ....

Mr. Sock Monkey keeps popping up everywhere, never failing to make me smile. That PaperBlanks journal is an eye-catcher, too, filled w/my wretched penmanship. And the book re^mark .... I love visuals:



I'm oh so grateful for my comfy chair:



I'm writing about a poet for my next Curator article, so the left hand inspiration wire is full of beautiful words:



Such as, a handout from an HBU conference I attended ~ "Credo: the Arts as Expressions of Belief." The quote by Marilynne Robinson is on my brain:

"It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? .... Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm."
[from her must-read book, Gilead. I should mention that Marilynne Robinson was at that conference. IN PERSON. She read aloud from Gilead. I stupidly did not talk to her b/c I'm too shy.]

[directly above lamplight]

[L to R] 1. A card from my Mom w/a funny quote by Flannery O'Connor:

"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."

2. A Guerilla Poetics Project broadside with a pretty blue heron (J. and I saw a blue heron while on a neighborhood walk last week). It reads:

Blue Heron

This is what I left behind--a blue heron
in a perfect chaos of trees. An estuary
for wintering. The sweet
old troubles.

A small boat
on the tide.

A long figure
waving.

Tell me this, blue heron:

Can one make a life
small enough to take
anywhere, and live in,
even as it looms
over us
darkly, at times?

--Sharon Kessler

[I am sadly behind on hiding poems]

I'm happy to say that I've nailed down my Curator writing topics through January '09. They are very inspiring subjects, semi-distracting me from this poet-article. Such a lovely problem, though.