a small paper for a small planet
‘Twas the perfect day for an off-season wedding. Clouds blanketed Cannon Beach with sufficient wetness to justify rain pants. Enough bluster was present to dispense with hair styling.
Family members and friends huddled together on the sodden sand south of Ecola Creek. For the first time in my life, I was asked to officiate a wedding. The betrothed couple said they wanted me, even though I’m not an ordained anything, because of my core commitment to marriage.
Give me this moment and write, asks Natalie Goldberg, in “Writing Down the Bones” – ok I can try that. Just write about what’s on my mind.
“But what have I been thinking about?” I ask myself as I search for a writing topic.
To be honest I was thinking about panty hose. Yes, panty hose –I remember when panty hose first came out on the market and I remember my first pair of panty hose. I begged and pleaded, stormed and fumed, cajoled and demanded. Finally, at the age of 12 my mother wore down and said I could have a pair. I think she finally relented because it was pretty obvious that I wasn’t going to. I’m not sure now what the big deal was, for her or me. Perhaps it was because panty hose were a pretty new thing at that time or perhaps it was because I wanted to grow up all at once and she didn’t want me to or perhaps it was because we were both just stubborn. I don’t know. But I remember that first pair of panty hose, I got to wear them to Mass.
It snowed the winter I moved to Cannon Beach. When I made my final trip to the Oregon coast the day before Christmas, it looked like the beach in winter dressed for the holiday season. Twinkle lights and mock snow drifts surrounding shop windows, haloed street lights tousled with circled boughs of cedar; the scene had all the visuals of a winter-set romance or a cozy mystery prowled by a granny sleuth. It looked like Christmas all right, but my spirits failed to lift and all I wanted to do was park, unload the boxes of books, take my dog Banjo for a stretching walk and hold to my plans.
Thanksgiving cheer and inspiration came from an unlikely source for me this year – “A Very Gaga Thanksgiving” which aired on ABC Thanksgiving night. And while I can in no way be labeled a ‘little monster’ (as she calls her true fans), I admit to being wooed by this 25-year-old superstar.
The curtain has not only risen on the new Rosie O’Donnell talk show on OWN – it’s disappeared. And now there’s no better source of cheer, community and astounding good will on daytime TV. Allow me to explain.
On the first show, Rosie came out from behind a curtain and did some standup comedy before taking questions from the audience and interviewing her guests. That format has stayed the same, but the curtain hasn’t been seen since.
Occupy Portland is in its very uniquely Portland end game and it’s time to think a little. Because of some family health issues I have only been marginally attached to the flow of Occupy events, so my reflections are… pure. Something that the Occupy Movement is not. Occupy is made up of wildly diverse groups […]
Can stories help us remember who we really are? Can they offer fresh hope for our lives? ABC’s new series Once Upon A Time thinks so, agreeing with some of my favorite storytellers: Jesus, Charles Dickens, and Walter Brueggemann.
It was Jesus who once said, ‘Suffer the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.’ That came to mind while watching Once Upon A Time last week because the whole premise of that series hinges on a child.
Today is cool and crisp, with a peek of sunshine, and there’s probably 300 people in the park surrounding the Vancouver Art Gallery(VAG), where Occupy Vancouver has existed since October 15. There are about a hundred small tents, from one-to six person size, mostly distributed around the periphery of the encampment, with a so-called “gated community”(not really, of course) of tents in a sheltered area behind the Food Not Bombs(FNB) kitchen tent, which puts out meals fifteen hours a day. There are larger tents for “information”, “media”, “medical assistance”, “peacekeeping”, a”tea house”, and a very well-stocked lending library with comfy sofa and chairs, where I borrowed a copy of Manda Scott’s Boudacia–to take back on Saturday, of course. Hand-written posters everywhere remind us of the shenanigans of the banksters and the governments, the evil and waste of the illegal wars being waged against poor people all over the world, and how these crimes are impacting every one of us.
I’ve been reading books, articles and e-mails about complexity, the economic and political situation, and technology for years now, trying to get a handle on what is going to happen to life on earth in the near future (while I might be alive). I get all kinds of mixed signals, and I seem to change my mind almost daily about what it all means.
Near the center of Athens you can walk through large tracts of public land covered in rocks, ruins, wooded areas, and dry-land vegetation. Go in one direction and you’ll find the Hill of the Muses. It’s a cool place to take a break from news of global economic decay.
My family wandered there one afternoon during a recent trip to Europe. On the hillside facing the Parthenon we could hear the roar of 100,000 citizens outside the parliament building, protesting cuts in worker pensions, reductions in the minimum wage, increases in taxes, and other bloodletting demanded by eurozone financiers.
