todayArchive

Sep 30

one might imagine god a big wave or pulse of energy/meaning in everything … at least i thought that … we’re mostly deaf or blind to it … and then one moment or thing or person jogs us open to receive it … this message/energy … & we know what matters then & all the rest sort of it shifts away … & we might think that jesus was riding that wave or pulse most skillfully & showed us how …

but this is sounding all too trite now … silly actually … but i had that thought at some point over the past few days & it mattered then … but now you just throw it away … and feel better for it

i was on a kairos retreat & it always goofs me up for a while after … but i’ll be ok

Sep 26

i’ll be out of range until late friday … or early saturday

Sep 21

in cold … neardark

one goose … three deer …

goldenrod … three ducks …

goldenrod … goldenrod …

two deer … two coyote …

one skunk somewhere …

one cardinal bird … sunlight …

Sep 19

in honor of one of my favorite golden girls …happy birthday, korie!

See golden days, fruitful of golden deeds,
With joy and love triumphing.

The Golden Rule works like gravitation.

Television is a golden goose that lays scrambled eggs.

Golden hours of vision come to us in this present life …

His golden locks time hath to silver turned;
O time too swift!

To add to golden numbers golden numbers.

Music’s golden tongue
Flatter’d to tears this aged man and poor.

I can see, and that is why I can be happy, in what you call the dark, but which to me is golden.

That golden key
That opes the palace of eternity.

Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.

The golden hours on angel wings
Flew o’er me and my dearie …

Keep the golden mean between saying too much and too little.

Orange bright,
Like golden lamps in a green night.

Living is strife and torment, disappointment and love and sacrifice, golden sunsets and black storms.

O golden Silence, bid our souls be still …

Jove lifts the golden balances that show
The fates of mortal men, and things below.

I have bought Golden opinions from all sorts of people.

The golden guess
Is morning-star to the full round of truth.

Sail like my pinnace to these golden shores.

Thou cutt’st my head off with a golden axe.

Speech is silvern, Silence is golden.

She stood breast-high amid the corn
Clasped by the golden light of morn

By the waters of Life we sat together,
Hand in hand, in the golden days
Of the beautiful early summer weather.

I speak of Africa and golden joys.

Once in a golden hour I cast to earth a seed.

Every honest miller has a golden thumb.

Gold all is not that doth golden seem.

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.

Music’s golden tongue
Flattered to tears this aged man and poor.

The Golden Rule of Parenting is: Do unto your children as you wish your parents had done unto you!

Your golden hair Margarete your ashen hair Shulamith.

A man is a golden impossibility.

I’d let my golden chances pass me by.

There are no golden geese. There are only fat geese eating the food that could nourish more athletic opportunities for women.

In books one finds golden mansions and women as beautiful as jewels.

Though gilded and golden, the serpent of vice is a serpent still.

Fasten your hair with a golden pin,
And bind up every wandering tress.

Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow.

My girl, thou gazest much upon the golden skies.

Here is a golden Rule. Write legibly.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

We are stardust,
We are golden,
And we got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.

School days, school days; dear old golden rule days.

All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide.

You must have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by.

Where children are, there is a golden age.

I should like to rise and go
Where the golden apples grow.

That’s the trouble with directors. Always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.

The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon…

Humorists are always pessimists. They’re reactionaries: because they see that every golden cloud has a black lining.

Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you is by no means a golden rule, but the best of current silver.

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will some new pleasures prove
Of golden sands, and crystal brooks,
With silken lines, and silver hooks.

When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils …

She put me into her Cabinet
And Lock’d me up with a golden Key.

The coming in of spring is like the creation of Cosmos out of Chaos and the realization of the Golden Age.

Sep 17

seen a cat lately?

o … there …

Sep 16

hello there … it’s saturday … & i’ve traded some self-flagellation for Action … in & among massive piles of paper produced by students … at my command … over the past three weeks … i’ve barely scratched the thin white surface of it all … & am still puzzling over the difficulty of just jumping into them any old time during the past weeks … as more than one of my honorable comrades do advise … but i’m always So Damn Tired when 3:15 rolls around … i cannot physically sit and read student work under that condition … BUT this morning … under the influence of a really strong mug of coffee … i roared through a good (yet ineffectual) number of pages … and found a few gems …

this evening i’m off to a colleague’s house for the rare Dinner Party … hoping they don’t expect me to dress too spiffy … since i’m all spiffed out … have been … in fact … since sometime in the late nineties …

Sep 11

Kentucky Educational Television - KET1 will be broadcasting Wendell Berry tonight at 10 est … something related to his “Thoughts in the Presence of Fear” … if yr able to tape it & get it to me, i’d be most appreciative.

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

Sep 08

if i were a few years younger & feeling just a bit zippier than i do right now, i’d jump in my car & head south to 830 N. Milwaukee Ave … 2nd Floor … where k. silem mohammad and Anne Boyer are reading … if i left right now, i’d be late … but perhaps not catastrophically … but it’s a friday night after a thursday night on which we greeted the parents in our classrooms until 9 p.m. or so … it’s friday night after a friday afternoon on which i had to perform some pedagogical tooth-pulling … its friday night just past the full moon and the world feels kind of shakey … so i wish the poets well & will re-read a bit of their stuff towards that end tonight

Sep 06

a good day with the sophomores, i think … & the class consisted of two parts …

in part one we/they looked at the quality of their discussion board posts … homework was to find a post that could receive full credit and one that would only receive half credit … individually they i.d.’d the characteristics of each type … then in small groups they discussed their judgements of the found posts … then in the big group we surfaced benchmarks for full & half credit posts … i like this occasional attention to how things (like the students’ own work) are valued … partly because back in the day this was never an option … teacher marked based on whatever teacher thought without the slightest bit of input from students … & i liked this process because it drew out from the students something that i knew they knew but needed to know more attentively … more actively

then in part two we had a roundtable on the second act of the crucible … not my favorite play by any means … & it falls in my least favorite section of the course (beginnings with native americans & puritans & all) … but the conversation (in at least two of the three sections) was rich … & i enjoyed watching them pose a problem or a wonder & then consider the possibilities & then come to some new understanding … cool when that happens … & it kind of did today

Aug 26

well … there’s “my” garden out the window past the kitchen sink … and in it there’s a young rabbit nibbling the decorative weeds … two goldfinches feasting on the late august coneflower (no longer gorgeous, but useful) … two small white butterflies (moths?) in the lavender in the nasturtiums … three brown doves pecking the mulch for bugs i guess …

when i step out the back door to clip the used-up roses the critters mostly run off … in their own ways … but up close i hear another level … the garden of buzzing life … whirring & clicking in on over under & around the flowers & leaves … wild life in the old mint … tiny things that need what’s here … at least three kind of bees … black wasps & brown … japanese beetles in the roses … spidery things in red orange yellow flowers … if you stop & look at nothing in particular but rather at the whole … you see it moving … currents of animal life … arranging & rearranging the air about all these vegetable surfaces …

& i say howdy … welcome all … to each part & every whole of it all … howdy

and then there’s the garden in the mind … that never quite ever shows up in any year … mostly resists all invitation …

fine … stay put

Aug 24

the ap classses had some worthy discussion of a wendell berry essay … “Men and Women in Search of Common Ground” …

But we need a broader concept yet, for a marriage involves more than just the bodies and minds of a man and a woman. It involves locality, human circumstance, and duration. There is a strong possibility that the basic human sexual unit is composed of a man and a woman (bodies and minds), plus their history together, plus their kind and descendants, plus their place in the world with its economy and history, plus their natural neighborhood, plus their human community with its memories, satisfactions, expectations, and hopes.

it’s probably not possible to assert anything about the nature of anything these days (let alone the nature of marriage) without stirring up a myriad of qualifications, objections, refusals, approvals & denials … but vive la discourse … the classes raised some useful & necessary questions … we had fodder for at least a two or three-hour discussion … had to settle for about forty-five minutes … i’m trying to track the conversation without knowing the names of all participants yet … they are humoring/helping me with their discussion board usernames taped to their desks … funny that these folks who are so new & unknown to me now will be familiar as my old brown shoes in a couple weeks

Aug 23

me … today … many years ago …

with profound gratitude toward all who were/are involved in the production and continual maintenance of …

me

Aug 22

had an eventful weekend just past … travelled down to petersburg to visit with family & celebrate a few birthdays … found myself with a sudden big whopping pain on sunday morning & my sister meg drove me … most quickly, i’m told … in … to springfield & the e.r. … where after two quick shots of morphine, a cat scan & some x-rays we ascertained a stone … in the kidney … then back to petersburg … feeling no pain … supplied with flo-max & vicodin …

missed school yesterday (monday) & my brother pat drove me home … where stone passed without pain … i will not post a picture of the little critter that made me hurt so bad … i brought him to my doctor this afternoon where he’ll be crushed & analyzed to determine a course of action … & got some therapy for my aching (not too bad) back … since i’m no fan of the side effects of vicodin … it makes me too talky (though we - pat & vernon & i - had some fun with that at dinner … did you know that the … uh … fixtures in the men’s room at the olive garden talk to each other in a secret language?)

in class a full day today & it was pretty good … i can hardly wait until it gets really good

Aug 18

this was pretty good … we had the first run-through of the school day … but it wasn’t regular because we ran a B schedule for the back-to-school mass …

what had to happen happened … no crises … but i felt a little distant … like i was talking to them (my students) from inside a green bottle … really sharp satisfactory beginnings are fairly rare critters … of my 31 there’ve been maybe 8 to 10 that felt absolutely solid … reverberated to the thump … beginnings aren’t all … we get middles too … & i like middles the best …

i’ve got the usual sore throat from talking more in a few hours than i have in the past month …

& o … the shift to new class discussion boards that i mentioned a few days ago has come off wonderfully well through the efforts of eric crump & his interversity … some students are already registered (i’m hoping most will be by monday) … and i’ve already solved one kid’s problem … so i’m feeling … empowered … & am discovering lots of good things about the inner workings of the boards … nifty little bits of control … & we all know how i yearn for CONTROL

Aug 09

passed the best parts of the day here on the computer … trying to get some power over this new (to me) Adobe® GoLive® CS2 … redesigning my front page … and then maybe some of the others … probably do it in patches as i go … & i know this is not the wisest way … but my site is so rambly all over the place … i wouldn’t know where to begin (or have enough time to) …

pretty dense … i spent almost an hour of my life seeking out the thingy that would let me create a tiny arrow … i could’ve quit … but one must not be daunted by the lack of a tiny arrow … and it was - of course - right there in front of me al the time … as we know it always is … the Line Tool … i might have heard it giggling

this evening i stumbled into the wacky world of css (cascading style sheets, mom) … first time ever … and actually … think i understand the little bit of it that any newbie is entitled to understand … how fairly ordinary typing goes all electrical … for us

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