Tag Archives: thoughts

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the walking

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Wandering around in wonder… what’re the chances C.A. Frank’s stamp on a block of 1914 sidewalk in Denver’s Washington Park neighborhood would still be legible in 2024?

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Mothers pushed prams over these sidewalks while praying for their men fighting at Verdun… for their sons at Iwo Jima… at Saigon… and in the Gulf, they prayed for their daughters, too.

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Someone still dressed in a robe retrieved his newspaper just outside that gate, stopping on this concrete spot to read the headline Man Walks on Moon.

Sometimes I’m reading the stories I see under my feet in such depth I forget to look up at the mountains in the west… but feel them rattling their chains.

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Yesterday evening, pondering great moments in sidewalk history:

“If you truly want to understand the present—or yourself—you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.” ~ Paul Hunham, The Holdovers

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Where we’ve been matters greatly, but not more than what’s still ahead.

© Liana

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Found Art

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IMG_9053 At the Big Sea Water                                                                                                                  Manistee, 8/16

 

if Founding Fathers, I insist there be Founding Mothers

for the lost and alone, Found Families

also Found Friends, Found Loves,
Found Feelings, Found Beaches of Churches

Found Peaches, Found Porches

Found Rhapsodies
Found Fallacies
Found Remedies
Found Realities

found accidentally
found shamelessly
found blamelessly
found secret or famously

if hungering homelessly, Found Sanctuary

~ Liana

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gravitas

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My morning routine is pretty much, well, routine. Coffee (me) dog food (Nessy); read the peemail (Nessy) meditation (Nessy is better at this than me); listen to NPR’s newscast (me) and pray there are no more shootings, no more bombings, no more dystopian realities (all of us). Then I go rehang the Tibetan Prayer Flags.

These prayer flags (my second set since May) fall from the trees in the garden almost every single night now. As a result, I’m becoming annoyed instead of calmed by the sight of prayer flags. My enthusiasm for prayer flags is flagging.

Oh, I’ve tied them various ways, most recently with soft leather because gently. Still they tear and they fall from the weight of those flimsy scrolls unfurled in primary colors for family, community, country . . . just one weak link and they all go . . . maybe all the links are weak, maybe it’s all too much to bear.

I wish anything about this country felt as reliable and strong as I once thought it was. Maybe there are too many prayers hanging by a thread. Maybe I am becoming annoyed by prayer . . . maybe we all are . . . maybe we are falling (all of us). I wish apathy was the refuge it used to be. I don’t know what to do about any of this.

Maybe the person who knows how to keep the flags flying will finally wake up.

~ Liana, today

 Post Script: Thank you, Fantelius. I love this entirely.

https://systemhumanity.com/2016/08/25/fireweeds-of-survival-a-bouquet-for-liana/

 

 

 

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the things we pray for

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I give myself permission to pray beseechingly in any cathedral or church where you can light a candle . . . but then I don’t indulge.

Actually, I indulge in the candle part, the reverence part, and the prayer part, but not the beseeching part.

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Out under the Full Moon at Solstice a few nights ago, Sofia, young and blooming, asked what she should wish for and I said wish to know the things truly worth wishing for . . . then just hold them in your heart. Just feel them there, knowlingly, not fearfully.

Leave a lot of room for what you don’t know yet.
Sit in the silence of the vast cathedral of what you don’t know yet.
Place yourself on the altar of what you don’t know yet.

Offer your blood for what you don’t know yet.

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Actually, I didn’t say the last part to her . . . only to myself.

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letter to jenny

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Somewhere in the Book of Mary Magdalene it is written just like that, Jenny, a desperate prayer that must leave the room, go out behind the barn or beyond the bivouac, and remain hidden from a civilization that doesn’t want to hear it. So you get to keep it . . . take it with you now.

Never for a moment doubt that you are still on the old, old path, albeit somewhere near Detroit where your words will grow like wildflowers through concrete into a space made sacred by them.

This takes patience . . . and this is what you do when you have lost it or are just lost lost lost…………………………patiently
work the muscle of endurance.

Make an art of it, make a science of it, make light of it, make a shrine to it.

Know it for what it is: the thing you make of it. 

That’s all it is.

That’s all anything is.

And, trust me, the power of that is more than we can ever really grasp.

 

~ Liana © 6/1

 

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talking points

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IMG_6531– the point of suffering
– Israel/Palestine
– a broken childhood
– accurate translation of what was spoken in tonguesIMG_6547
– addiction
– seasonal effective disorder
– cancer in babies
– his father’s horrible advice

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After a while, I wonder (out loud) what everyone else is talking about on this beautiful day a the beach . . . he says he’s going to give away everything he owns except his djembe.

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yeah, that’s probably it, I say

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me meme

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This is L.  me, Jan.2016  L can’t read without glasses anymore and she forgets names sometimes, but according to an NPR story, this isn’t dementia which would be to not recall what glasses are for, or to refer to everyone as Suzanne which is the name she often calls out upon waking after a childhood spent being her sister’s alarm clock.

L uses her glasses to read good stories whenever she can which currently includes Adam Resnick’s hilarious Will Not Attend featuring this enticing opening sentence, “From the very first bell of first grade, I considered school nothing more than a hard dozen without the possibility of parole.”

L did good in school considering she has dyscalculia which she compensated for with good penmanship and spelling skills that continue to serve her well and will come in handy when she gets brave enough to write her own book one day that Adam Resnick won’t read but Suzanne surely will.

L is smart. Be like L. Every time you put on whatever constitutes reading glasses for you, give thanks for the people who dare to share what is real for them and also for those who have witnessed your life and not run screaming from the room of you.