In honor of the Epiphany/”Little Christmas”/Three Kings’ Day, here are poinsettias in their natural habitat, which, in this case, was Burma! They put my potted version to shame.
These were growing wild on a walk I took last year in the town of Kalaw. I wasn’t expecting them, didn’t know they grew there. Which was even better than if I’d been looking for them.
They were tall, a bit gawky, but their deep crimsons and maroons stood out among the greenery. It was my only afternoon of leisure and I was able to walk into town, mosey around the market and find a path on the way home that led into the hills.
They were the natural part of that country’s beauty. Here’s another part: the Golden Pagoda seen on a balmy night last November.
One of my favorite scenes in the movie “Darkest Hour” follows the rousing speech Winston Churchill delivered to Parliament on June 4, 1940. This is the speech where Churchill exhorts his countryman to stand firm against the Nazi threat, the speech in which he says, “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets … we shall never surrender.”
This scene was constructed to give us chills … and it does. It’s by no means guaranteed that Churchill will be able to build momentum for his plan, which seems almost daft. A flotilla of pleasure boats to evacuate soldiers across the English Channel? Fighting Hitler’s army to the death if need be?
The lines I loved most came right after Churchill’s speech when a member of Parliament asked, “What just happened?” and Viscount Halifax responded, “He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.”
At a panel discussion about the film, Director Joe Wright said the movie is a “recognition of the power of the word and the power of political speech to move nations.”
I tried to imagine that speech being given today, the sort of sacrifice it was asking for, the moral purpose it presupposes. It came from an era of words, not of pictures. Maybe that had something to do with it.
(Photo from “Darkest Hour”: Wizardworld.com)
Read more here: http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article190595739.html#storylink=cpy
Two blog posts in a row about weather. Hmmm… Must be winter!
This morning I’ve been reading about the Bomb Cyclone, a winter storm with super low pressures that has brought snow and ice to Florida, freezing rain to South Carolina and blizzard warnings to parts of my own state. Here it’s a windy snowstorm with beastly cold to follow.
What I’m thinking about (snug in my warm house) is whether naming weather systems makes them more formidable. Used to be, it was just hurricanes. Now we name snow storms (“Snowmaggedon”) and cold snaps (“Polar Vortex”), too. Every year we have Super Storms and Storms of the Century.
Whether this is due to the extreme weather patterns or Weather Channel proclivities it’s difficult to say, but one thing I know for sure: Weather hype makes a difference. I’m much colder in a Polar Vortex than I am in an ordinary chill.
The weather is making me think back to the old winter days in Chicago. I never ventured out of the apartment without two pairs of socks, hat, scarf and mittens, and two or three layers under my coat.
Temperatures here are Chicago-winter-worthy, and wind chills respectable even by Windy City standards. Commuting as I do via public transportation, I have plenty of opportunities to feel that wind chill as I stand on a breezy street corner waiting for the bus.
It’s best to wait actively rather than passively, I’ve found. The toes numb more slowly when they’re in motion, so I pace back and forth or bounce up and down to keep myself warm.
Cold is a miserable business. You can say what you will about its bracing qualities, about its crispness and clarity. For me, it’s just something to be endured.
The supermoon woke me at 3:37 a.m., poured its rays into
the room, feigning daylight. No wonder my stay-asleep mechanism was
overwhelmed. Nothing to do with the fact that this is my first day back in the office since December 21.
I read a while, ignored the moonbeams and drifted back. All the while this meteorological marvel, what astronomers call the perigee syzygy, was beaming down on the frigid landscape. It was lighting up the salt crystals on the road and the little patches of snow still left from last week’s dusting.
By the time I left for work, it was low in the sky, just above the treetops, and I quickly snapped the shot above. (Quickly, because it was 7 degrees outside and I was anxious to put my gloves on.)
We’re closer to the moon during a perigee syzygy than we are otherwise. And tomorrow is the perihelion, the point in earth’s orbit when we’re closest to the sun. Thanks to these heavenly bodies for lighting our way, and for making the dark, cold hours so much more bearable.
This supermoon is from November 14, 2016. I saw it glinting on the Java Sea from the island of Sumba, Indonesia. Photo: Wikipedia
There was dancing last night to ring in the new year, and so many desserts that I was forced to take a bite of each one. Woke up this morning to a bright new year and a temperature of six (6)!
Weather like this requires a roaring fire, a bit of the bubbly … and dancing, all of which were in ample supply at last night’s gathering.
Add some sparkle and glitz … and it’s not a bad way to enter the new year.
The Christmas music season is drawing to a close. My favorite classical station stopped the carols cold-turkey on December 26, though we’ll be singing holiday hymns at church for another couple of weeks. Time to give a nod to a song I’ve heard often this season, a relatively new entry to the Christmas canon, “I Wonder as I Wander.”
It’s a haunting melody in a minor key, more “We Three Kings” than “Joy to the World.” But it is lovely and soft, a light snowfall on a still night. And … it was written by a Kentuckian, John Jacob Niles, a noted balladeer who collected Appalachian tunes later popularized by folk singers in the 1950s and ’60s.
I met John Jacob Niles several times at a Christmas Eve gathering hosted annually by my kindergarten teacher, Grace Cramer Webber, who became a friend of my mother’s. Like Niles, Webber was both behind and ahead of her time.
It isn’t easy to have your carol enter the Christmas canon — but Niles’ song has done just that. As I listen I wonder, too. Not just about the birth of the baby Jesus, but about the power of music to take us places we otherwise couldn’t go.
Here at the short end of 2017, I awake as always with writing on my mind. I have my mentors, my sages, ones whose words lead the way. So this morning as I struggle with the words on my screen, I turn to words already set down by another. Words that reach across time and distance to encourage me, to set me straight.
No one has yet made a list of places where the extraordinary may happen and where it may not. Still, there are indications. Among crowds, in drawing rooms, among easements and comforts and pleasures, it is seldom seen. It likes the out-of-doors. It likes the concentrating mind. It likes solitude. It is more like to stick to the risk-taker than the ticket-taker. It isn’t that it would disparage comforts, or the set routines of the world, but that its concern is directed to another place. Its concern is the edge, and the making of a form out of the formlessness that is beyond the edge.
Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost.
Pale Blue Dot (Earth from Voyager 1, 1990) Courtesy NASA
As mentioned below, yesterday I posted in the past. Though it was strange for me, for time travelers it was just another day in the space-time continuum. That would be those who zip to ancient Babylon in a wormhole, or who believe in the Many Worlds theory, which posits that everything that ever could happen actually has — in another universe.
“We have achieved a temporal sentience that our ancestors lacked,” writes James Gleick in Time Travel, a book he penned in his past, my (then) future. “No one bothered with the future in 1516.” In fact, time awareness was dim until the 19th century, and the phrase “turn of the century” wasn’t used until the 20th.
But once we had temporal sentience we could have time travel: H.G. Well’s Time Machine and Robert Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, Ursula Le Guin’s Lathe of Heaven, Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life — and scads of other books and films, including “Dr. Who,” the original of which debuted shortly after Time Machine was made into a movie.
What was most fascinating (but difficult to understand) was the physics behind the yarns, the fact that time travel, though it remains science fiction, cannot be totally ruled out according to some interpretations of the universe. Or, as Einstein said, “People like us who believe in physics known that the
distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
One might wonder why we need time travel in an age of cyberspace. “All answers come down to one,” says Gleick. “To elude death.”
It’s below freezing here with a sky that means business (snow business). Birds flit from feeder to roost, keeping warm, I imagine. That’s what I’d do if I were a bird.
Instead, I sit in a warm room observing my feathered friends, trying to work up the enthusiasm for a morning walk. Will the temperature rise past 32? That might trigger some movement on my part. Otherwise, I may have to sit a while longer, have another cup of tea.
Absent from the blogosphere for two days, I notice that the entry I thought I’d posted on Christmas Eve never published. Because I scheduled it for December 24, though, its time stamp makes it appear as if I published it on that day.
It’s a vote against auto-pilot … but a vote in favor of time travel. About which more will be said … in the future.
