Posts
Friday, December 12, 2025
Sunlight
by Seamus Heaney
For Mary Heaney
There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed
in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall
of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove
sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.
Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails
and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.
And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.
__________
From North, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985.
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Build a bowl of soup!
We took leftover brown rice, kale, squash, beans and liquid from home cooked beans and added drops of sesame oil and soy sauce to build a bowl of soup!
Skating Away
While families often get the rinks for their kids to enjoy, the parents enjoy them, too. White admits he finds peace on the rink after a long day.
“I go out there when my kids go to bed and skate around for an hour,” said White. “My wife’s like, ‘You’re really going out there by yourself right now?’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, gotta do it!”
“We must become so alone, so utterly alone, that we withdraw into
our innermost self. It is a way of bitter suffering. But then our
solitude is overcome, we are no longer alone, for we find that our
innermost self is the spirit, that it is God, the indivisible. And
suddenly we find ourselves in the midst of the world, yet undisturbed by
its multiplicity, for our innermost soul we know ourselves to be one
with all being.”
“When someone seeks," said Siddhartha, "then it easily happens
that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find
nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the
thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed
with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being
free, being open, having no goal.”
“For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow.
Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.
A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail.
A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live.
When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. Let God speak within you, and your thoughts will grow silent. You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother.
So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
― Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte
it’s important that democracy is defended at every turn
“Authoritarian systems give the appearance of performing, but their solutions are not thorough, they are not sustainable, and they are not fair,” she went on. “They will decay because the way they function is to exclude, abuse, and allow massive corruption.”
But she says she’s also learned to never underestimate the autocrat.
Whether it’s undermining the judiciary or intimidating local governments, “In many cases, you think, ‘No, they won’t do it,’” she says. “But we have seen how [centralization of power] has advanced very quickly. So it’s important that democracy is defended at every turn,” she said.