Divine

I understand it so well, and know what you must have suffered. I have been through similar storms and trials myself. I suppose we gain something from them. Would the person one loves ever seem divine if there were no difficulty in winning their love? How wonderful when the Gods appear to us poor mortals—even in the faces and figures of those who say Farewell to us!

EDWARD CARPENTER, responding to a friend’s distress about a thwarted love for another man.

Nicholas, originally uploaded by snoopvac.

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What a beauty you are.

“It’s so easy to laugh, it’s so easy to hate
It takes strength to be gentle and kind…”

Photo: Kirby – Justus

Steeple

Here is the church and here is the steeple…

Sugar, Fat, and Salt Make Us Eat More Sugar, Fat, and Salt

“Breaking it down, [it's] a load of fat on fat on fat and sugar that’s then layered with fat on sugar and served with fat, salt, and fat.”*

Contemporary food technology, [restaurant/food designer John] Haywood said, “gives us the tools to deliver the product… Processed foods give you more freedom. You can add anything you want. You can turn the dials to get the fat right, to get the sugar right, to get the salt right.”

Dialing in the sugar, fat, and salt. I hadn’t thought of food manufacturing in quite those terms before, but that’s exactly what’s going on.

“All of this has been processed [prechewed] such that you can wolf it down fast
. . . chopped up and made ultrapalatable. . . . Very appealing looking, very high pleasure in the food, very high caloric density. Rules out all the stuff you have to chew.”

By eliminating the need to chew, modern food processing techniques allow us to eat faster. “When you’re eating these things, you’ve had 500, 600, 800, 900 calories before you know it… Literally before you know it.” Refined food simply melts in the mouth.

DAVID A. KESSLER, MD from The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable North American Appetite ; Toronto : McClelland, 2009.

10 Simple Things You Can Do

*As one food consultant calls their salads, “fat with a little lettuce.” Okay, so I haven’t stepped foot into a McDonalds in years (it helps that upon entering, the overwhelming smell of disinfectant they use kills any appetite I thought I might have had for a Big Mac) and they’re an easy target (Dr. Kessler actually takes aim at that “eatertainment” establishment of “hyper-processed” digestibles, Chili’s). The most dramatic shift in our food culture (and, subsequently, our health), the past fifty years, came with the introduction of “fast-food” chains. What would happen if a mass majority of us ceased to frequent/support any/all “fast-food” outlets (even one less day a week)? The only thing “fast” about fast-food is how quickly it’s altered, not only the way we eat, but the kinds of foods made available to us.

But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint—
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.
For most of us, there is only the unattended
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight.
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

T. S. ELIOT, from the fifth part of The Dry Salvages



I can’t imagine a better prescription for what ails us: Prayer, observance, discipline, thought, and action. Beyond these things, life consists of hints and guesses, and perhaps those unattended moments when we hear something lovely, or smell something odd or memorable, or stumble on a line of poetry that sticks, or meet someone who moves us, or discover in the patterns of nature the lineaments of our own spirit.

I would mark especially the last word in Eliot’s prescription: action. “And right action is freedom,” he says. Right action leads to “freedom/From past and future.” This freedom is the ultimate liberation, betokening release from the wheel of time. Right action must be subject to the individual conscience as well as communal norms. One comes to action last, as Eliot notes, having moved through prayer, observance, discipline, and thought. Without the previous four things, right action is difficult of access, perhaps impossible to discern. And right action, always, occurs in time, as choices are made, paths taken or refused.

JAY PARINI, Why Poetry Matters ; New Haven, CT : Yale UP, 2008.

This book was yet another gift I received while doing my placement at Northern Secondary in Toronto with a generously knowledgeable teacher-librarian, Geoff Vanek.

, originally uploaded by [ج.] [ر.] [ك.].

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My library was dukedom enough.*

Every reader is either a pausing wanderer or a traveler returned.

It’s late at night. It’s raining heavily. I can’t sleep. I wander into my library, take a book off its shelf and read.

ALBERTO MANGUEL, The Library at Night ; Toronto : Knopf, 2006.

*William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Necessary

It is the responsibility of libraries to guarantee and facilitate access to all expressions of knowledge and intellectual activity, including those which [sic] some elements of society may consider to be unconventional, unpopular, or unacceptable. To this end, libraries shall acquire and make available the widest variety of materials.

Librarians believe in intellectual freedom because it is as natural to us, and as necessary to us, as the air that we breathe. Censorship is anathema to us because it inhibits our role in life—to make the recorded knowledge and information of humankind freely available to everyone, regardless of faith or the lack of it, ethnicity, gender, age, or any other of the categories that divide us one from the other. I strongly believe we should hold fast to intellectual freedom and carry out our tasks without reference to our own opinions or the opinions of those who want to restrict free access to knowledge.



MICHAEL GORMAN, Our Enduring Values: Librarianship in the 21st Century Chicago : ALA, 2000.

Two of Suzanne’s favourite sayings covertly expressing her motherly views were, “Are you sure?” or “I don’t think that’s really necessary.”

All I can say is that I’m forever grateful that as a boy of fifteen (circa 1974) at Rogers High School in Toledo, Ohio, our library carried a subscription to The Village Voice where I finely combed the personals for any reference to “GWM” and counted on the small print ad appearing in every issue for The Adonis ALL-MALE Cinema where the tiny line drawing of a naked male torso fueled my fantasies and launched me towards my first grand adventure as a gay teen in search of…

Him

“As the bees collect honey, so we collect what is sweetest of all and build Him.”

Apollo revisited

A wind

“the awesome”

Thing of beauty

4BD

Mine all mine, originally uploaded by *Aemaeth*.