Glass

The new issue of Glass: A Journal of Poetry is here, and I have a poem in it!

So does Sandy Longhorn, a poet and blogger I admire, and Garth Pavell, whose work I found and enjoyed in Leveler. 

And so many more! What an honor, what a thrill! This is a lovely online journal, and be sure to see the cover image of a house! Many thanks to editors Holly Burnside and Anthony Frame.

Thanks also to Mogens Engelund for this image of a window in Sweden (1742) with the glassblower's mark in the center. (Like a belly button. And this window is the Adam and/or Eve of glass production.) And thanks to Wikipedia for information on glass and windows. As my Glass contributor bio reveals, I've had a glass collection since seeing the play Glass Menagerie as a child.

I love glass, and I respect transparency.

Goldfinches

Today, from the air-conditioned kitchen, I stood, riveted, at the sliding glass door, watching goldfinches feast on the stalks of catmint, blossoming and going to seed.

Wow! Bright, bright tiny amazing birds.

Thanks to Wikipedia for both of these shareable images, the goldfinch and the catmint, by Gideon Pisanty, a great name!

By chance, I had promised some of the catmint to the church garden this morning, if it survives the heat. I realize now I should have added "if it survives the goldfinches."

But they are as light on their feet as they are on the wing, not even taking the stalks to the ground as they fed. And now they are gone. Until we meet again!

The Heat

Yesterday's beach scene art and beach umbrella used as a parasol to shade a little girl...still applies today, in the beastly heat. Or ...

I called my parents to encourage them 1) to stay in air conditioning 2) not to golf in the afternoon (golfing achieved in the morning) 3) not to mow the lawn (even on a tractor mower). I believe my loving advice was heeded.

Tonight my dad will tell bedtime stories to kids for a Night at the Museum! I think it will be cool enough there, in all senses of the word!

The heat, which, at Wikipedia, can refer to a number of things, is dragging us down for sure, making it a Cranky Doodle Day and a Slattern Day at once. There is a breeze coming in through my lower-level office window, usually a cool area of the house, but it is like the breeze when you open the oven door to take out a bubbling apple pie.

Thanks to Facebook for the 100+ heat image and to the Supreme Court for saying healthcare is Constitutional.

Natural Buoyancy

Today the pool felt great. I felt so naturally buoyant! "Buoy," "buoyant," and "buoyancy" are words that always look weird to me, and I pretty much always have to look them up to make sure I put the "u" and the "y" in the right place.

Today I needed to type it to tell you about the new poetry feature, by Peg Duthie, up at Escape Into Life, with collage paintings by Karin Miller. This one is called Natural Buoyancy, but I see that whoever labelled it at EIL (when you hover over the image there) left out the "u," though natural "boyancy" sounds pretty fun, too.

It's so much fun to pair poems and art at EIL. When I saw the Guess Who? painting, I knew that was a perfect fit with the secret-admirer valentine poem, and everything felt, well, naturally buoyant from then on!

And I had fallen in love with Let's Do Lunch when I first saw this Artist Watch feature in mid-June. Generally, I go back a little further, to make sure readers/viewers see some of the previous artists featured at EIL, but this was too perfect a pairing to pass up.

But back to buoyancy! As Archimedes said, in 212 B.C., so he could not have been discussing my early-morning lap swimming, "Any object, wholly or partly immersed in a fluid, is buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid displaced by the object." I am the partly immersed object!

(See gray ball in Wikimedia Commons diagram.)

Also, I have been remembering that lover's note, in a famous movie, a romantic comedy, I think, that reads, "You are my density." What is that movie, please?

(That guy was naturally boyant.)

The Empty Protest

Oh, how I love The Sun. I've been reading the July issue, excerpted past interviews with the late James Hillman, so much to think about.

Today I am thinking about his concept of the "empty protest" and find much comfort here. Some context: the interview starts with some criticism of the self-absorption of modern psychology, its tendency to focus on a "fixing" of the self, not the self's engagement with the world. He's trying to say feelings are important, but so is social justice; so is political action. How can the individual validate his or her feelings and act in the world, and maybe by acting in the world?

Near the end of this interview, Hillman says:

It's better to go into the world half-cocked than not to go into the world at all. I know when something's wrong. And I can say, "This is outrageous. This is insulting. This is a violation. And it's wrong." I don't know what we should do about it; my protest is absolutely empty. But I believe in that empty protest.

Now the "half-cocked" might be a little disturbing as an image, related as it is to firearms in our overly-violent, and often half-cocked, as in "inadequately or poorly prepared" definition, in American society, except that "half-cocked" is safer, as firearms go, than fully-cocked. The gun can't go off yet at half cock.

But Hillman's image is simply underscoring his point about 1) lack of a fully-thought-out solution (I like his honesty in knowing he doesn't have a solution for everything) and 2) his relative lack of power against, well, the "big guns," the power structure.

He goes on:

You see, one of the ways you get trapped into not going into the world is when people--usually in positions of power--say, "Oh, yeah, wise guy?" What would you do about it? What would you do about the Persian Gulf crisis?" I don't know what I'd do. I don't know. But I know when I feel something is wrong, and I trust that sense of outrage, that sense of insult. And so, empty protest is a valid way of expressing feeling, politically. Remember, that's where we began: how do you connect feeling with politics? Well, one of the ways is through that empty protest. You don't know what's right, but you know what's wrong.

I love that: his encouragement to express the feeling, openly, that something is wrong. His own willingness to express outrage, to speak up. We know, from history, what awful things can happen when people sense something wrong but don't speak up.

But, yes, the powers that be are always telling us to shut up, in subtle or overt ways.

So I'm going to keep speaking up when I feel that something is wrong. Even if I don't know what to do about it. Speaking up is a way to start (the ball rolling toward the kingpins).