Vonnegut at Cornell University: two eyes and a quote

art by Kurt Vonnegut as seen at Cornell University. 2015

 Do you like being asked about favorites? What is your favorite cake, flower, 80's band, color, ... author?  To say one is a favorite seems wrong to me. Really are Cosmos better than Dahlias?

There was a time period where Vonnegut was one of my favorite authors. His writing spoke to where I was in my early and mid twenties and I read everything I could get my hands on. I am not sure if I would enjoy it as much these days, maybe.

art by Kurt Vonnegut as seen at Cornell University. 2015

I did not go to Ithaca to see his art. I was much more interested in seeing waterfalls, which I did. But it was there on a steep campus and now I can remember my younger days. Legs and spirit that would have carried me about a campus that now looked better suited for mountain goats than humans.

But here is a Vonnegut quote shared by the museum currator, and at this moment in time, as brief as moments can last... It is my favorite. Maybe it needs to be taken within me when I enter my studio.

quote by Kurt Vonnegut as seen at Cornell University. 2015

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Of Jazz and Mysteries: A jazz pickup at the Doylestown public library

As usual, I am checking some out again and taking chances on some new ones. They will hang out in our studio for about nine weeks. We dig libraries. Since I made my students write poems inspired by William Carlos Williams, this week; I will give it a try.

So much depends

Upon

A well funded

Library

Filled with splendid

Jazz

Beside the spiritual

mysteries

 

Mosaic Woman found the next in this series, in which

an Episcopalian priest helps solve crimes in her town.

The Jazz:

Jason Moran

Bill Frisell

Great Jazz Trio

Chick Corea & Bella Fleck

Ahmad Jamal

BillyTaylor & Gerry Mulligan

Vijay Iyer Trio

Edith Piaf

Donald Harrrison

Bob Mintzer Big Band

 

 

My answer begins in Consider the Birds by Debbie Blue

I left my examen hopeful that it was a start to answering the questions about jazz in my church, but clearly without answers. That is when I picked up the book I am reading, Consider The Birds. Here is the second paragraph I ventured into, then stopped, and reread, then stopped and read outlook to Mosaic Woman.

There's no logical or geographical reason for it to take forty years to get from Egypt to the Promised Land. We sometimes believe the shortest path is the best one, but maybe (God knows) there is a need to wander. There is unmapped territory that needs to be explored -- desires to be let go of, renounced, or transformed. God's seduction is not a crass come-on, nor is it smooth. The path to intimacy may be long and complicated.

Indeed...

 

The 12 Days of Christmas Shout Outs: Frederick Buechner for day nine

The conversation this past Sunday began like this...

Me ~> peace

Lay preacher friend ~> what would we do without Buechner? How would I ever end a sermon without him.

My friend knows I dig Buechner. She has been to many an adult discussion led by me in which the man was quoted. I don't like being asked what my favorite this or that is because I tend to have many a favorite and don't enjoy ranking things much. With that said, Buechner is near the top. I have read his theology, his sermons, his autobiographies, and his novels.

So here are some things I have learned from all of that. Tell your story if you hope to heal. Find what brings you joy and if it matches a need of this world, you have discovered your vocation. You and I are peculiar treasures loved by a God that will search us out no matter where we go to hide.

When I went missing for a decade or two, I fled a religion that I wanted nothing to do with. When I returned, Buechner and the man who recommended him, showed me a different side of that religion. And for that I am grateful.

What would we do without him?

 

The 12 Days of Christmas Shout Outs: Sharon Creech for day three

Here in our one bedroom two studio row, a tradition has come about; every year I buy Mosaic Woman a young adult novel for Christmas. I just squeaked it out this year as I bought her present during the final moments of the Scholastic Book Fair at my school.

And here we are on the third day of Christmas, and we have both finished the book. In fact Mosaic Woman had it read by the time I got home from the Christmas morning Eucharist.

I am no expert on the genre, I just wait for a book to catch my attention. And the cat did that. Sharon Creech's book does feature a rather hard to like cat and a boy who is missing his dog. But through a wise teacher, fine parents, and poetry, especially that of William Carlos Williams, the boy does come about to the understanding that not all cats are worthy of hatred.

I am also seeing uses in my classroom...

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow (electron, DNA molecule, gravity, mass, predator, root, seed ...)

 

The 12 Days of Christmas Shout Outs: Ken Doyle for day one

In the past 40 days, I blogged one time. I thought this blog just might have died and it might be on its way. But I had a thought and decided to make something of it. 12 days of Christmas, 12 shout outs.

And why not start with a friend I met while blogging in the early days of Stratoz. I now know Ken via other social media and I know a few things about him, but what has been clear from the beginning is that the man loves to write. I knew if his words were ever published, I would take the time to read them and I am glad that I did. His collection of stories took me into the people of Bombay and I met characters who filled me with hope for their future. Ken took me places, which I will likely never see and far from anything I have ever experienced. It was a wise choice to take the journey and it delights me that he has received positive reviews on goodreads. Keep writing.

 

Delighted: Alice Munro wins the Nobel Prize for Literature

Back in the day, a biology professor handed me a book of short stories by Raymond Carver. It may have been the first collection of stories I ever read. I was hooked. Two years later, I met Mosaic Woman, who introduced me to many things Canadian.

There was a writer of short stories in that introduction, Alice Munro. Her stories amazed me. Someone once said that Munro did not have to write novels because she could get more into a short story than what is found in many novels.

I have at times searched through fiction settings in libraries and bookstores for stories. I find novels and novels and novels... and then at some point a collection of stories. The pressure must be intense. Forget stories. Write novels. Munro just kept writing stories and that impressed me.

So, I was delighted. An author, who tells stories in short splashes of color and who reminds me of those glorious days of falling into love with Margaret, was on the news. Good news indeed reached my spirit as I commuted this morning.

 

Meeting Mosaic Woman

 What mattered was the book inside the red pannier

It was 1986 and I may have been lacking direction. I had just earned my BS in Biology and chose to ride my bicycle to the Catskills. Info on 20-30 graduate programs were being examined. I was at home with my parents. I began to tutor at a community college where i had turned my life around a few years earlier. It was in a room attached to the library.

If memory serves me correct, I saw her first in the library, but I knew I would later see her in the tutoring center. I was tutoring science. Mosaic Woman was tutoring philosophy. I remember telling a friend I had seen someone special before I could say I had spoken to her.

In college many a friend had recommended that I Read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, so I read it while I camped in the Catskills. There was something in that book that reminded me of something she was tutoring, so one day I asked her if she had read it. Were we at the cafeteria?

How long was that initial conversation? Long enough, for many more would happen.

and here we are... 

at a Christopher Ries exhibit, looking reflective and blue

at a Great Lake, looking jazz festival hip

at the Oregon shore a few years after we met, looking slightly less gray

After the Ugly Oyster, a new beginning for silence

Wernersville Tree ~ as I approached 

Having left the arts and crafts pub in Reading, it was a direct route to the Jesuit Center but a road not yet travelled.  I would be filled with thoughts of riches and poverty and how crossing one boundary can lead to such radical changes as I simply drove out of Reading into West Reading.  Do people drive this everyday? Do they get used to it?

The brain will get used to silence.  Thirty hours in I woke up and felt it.  I had made the transition.

I am not a fan of superlatives... Questions like who is your favorite band can baffle me.  I used to be able to say I never read a lot on retreats.  But I fell into the writings of (let me be safe here) one of the most influential authors in my life, Frederick Buechner.  

I came across his book The Clown in The Belfry as I weeded my bookcase of spiritual writings recently.  It is a collection of essays and sermons thrown together for the sake of making a book.  Not my most favorite thing.  But I hadn't read it.  

It proved to be a path into the many ways he has influenced my faith.  By the time I woke up 30 hours into the retreat, I realized that I only had three chapters left.  It made sense ~  one for that morning and one each for the last two mornings of the retreat.  I could not have planned it better.

As I look back at the book, I see that the last essay I read, before I woke up feeling the silence, had ended with this paragraph.  And this may be the coolest thing ever ~ 

Let us instead tell a story which is the story about every one of us,  It is a story about a pig, and a fox, and an ass under his holy and appalling burden.  It is the story about a mouth pushed crooked, about a voice breaking.  Let the rest be Christ's silence.

Wernersville Tree ~ about to step inside

Nick Hornby and two of the fruits

I don't take novels on retreat.  In fact I tend to read very little on retreat.  In fact I rarely pick up a novel at anytime.  Apparently I have decided that novels are a distraction while art supplies are a path to God.

However, this summer a new assistant popped up in my classroom, who was just a bit enthusiastic about reading novels.  So when I was at the library a week before retreat, I checked out a Nick Hornby novel and then made the mistake of opening it before packing.  But with the exact number of short chapters left as days of the retreat, I figured I could treat myself to one chapter a day.  Then prayed for self-control.

How To Be Good, gave this man of silence some things to think about while on retreat.  The family centered in the novel needed some of my hope and while the last paragraph begins with a promise of that hope, the last line sends one into despair.

 

But that is life, isn't it.  You hope and hope and sometimes you are given a gift that lifts that hope; than an e-mail, a blog post, a news story, or a random thought can send you in the opposite direction.  Somehow those moments are generally not as strong as my desire to live in hope.  And that is a blessing I don't care to forget.

And I only read one chapter a day.

7 for the weekend--- snow

Holy Trinity Lansdale, PA: Snow on Slate Roof

1. Above: a photo taken yesterday showing snow doing funky things on the slate roof of my church: Holy Trinity in Lansdale .

2. Lesson Plan Nonsense: With another storm appearing to possibly cause delays and or cancellations of school this week, I really feel like scrapping the whole lesson plan thing. Anyone willing to discuss this with my supervisor?

3. The emotional unrest: I am generally OK with uncertainty, but along with medical test results, I do not do well with snow. The idea of driving out into what may be a nightmare or may be a smooth commute unsettles me. On Wednesday while stuck at a red light, I watched cars making right hand turns down a rather steep transition to the road where I sat. Then I hoped that the garbage truck also kept its traction as it came down in my direction.

4. Snow Days: I don't love them as much as many of my colleagues, because if it snows that much it means I will be:

sore the next day
annoyed by parking in my neighborhood for days if not weeks
and stir crazy from being snowed in

4 b) However:

I don't have to live out that anxiety of driving to work
I can have bonus time in the studio: come back on Tuesday and Thursday for details of what transpired this past Thursday.
Mosaic Woman and I can usually walk to an open restaurant (unless it is a truly amazing storm) and leave a big tip to a brave waitress, who made it to work on a day that I was given off)

5 Snowcatcher's snowcatchers

I had visited this blog a few times before I saw why it is called snowcatcher. Check out her snowcatchers then take a look at the blog as a whole to see some amazing nature and bicycling photography.

6. Snow Lightning: We had some Wednesday night, which is not a good sign if you desire just a dusting (think of a thunderstorm that only produces a drizzle). I had Thursday off from teaching. Have you experience it?



7. Snow Leopards:

an animal which will likely not be seen by many of us for two reasons: one needs to get above 10,000 feet and they are becoming very rare. Years ago I read a book about them by Peter Matthiessen that I may just want to revisit. What I remember from the book was the passion for nature expressed by the author and being shocked by a map that used swastikas to mark off where Buddhist temples were located. I had not known the long history of the symbol and to this day I wish we could steal it back from the hatred it has become associated with because of Nazi Germany.

Science Mondays--- ALL

Mosaic Woman gave me All of Science for Christmas. She just may know me very well.

In the past few years, I have taught the following courses: Biology, Physics, Anatomy, Geology, Ecology, Earth & Space, Zoology, and something I have come to call Social Science.

"What, no Chemistry'" you say, well you would have to go back to my very first year of teaching to see that on my resume.

"No Meteorology, no Botany, no .... " well give me time I do have to keep the horticulture program flowing.

I dig science. And I have a job where a small group of students, who need a bit more attention than the average group, get to spend a few or several years experiencing my passion. Maybe it is a good thing I never got that doctorate I planned on but never even started.

Chronology of Science by Lisa Rezende - Science Mondays

Sometimes things fall into your life when you aren't even looking for them, but there I was passing under...

to get to the Science and Religion section of a great bookstore in Harrisburg, PA- The Midtown Scholar Bookstore. Just weeks before our trip to the jazz festival trip I had suggested a history of science class for this summer. Chronology of Science by Lisa Rezende has been a time saving life saver of a random find while browsing shelves. Have you ever had such a find?

We have been concentrating on the most recent 50 years to show the students what has happened since The Pathway School opened its doors, but today I had the students throw out random page numbers so we ended up visiting several centuries before the period was over.

What this book has shown me is my general ignorance when it comes to chronology. I keep telling myself that surely that was invented/discovered/performed/ well after that date.

Anyone with an interest in how science has unfolded would truly dig this book.