You are currently browsing the daily archive for April 23, 2007.
I’m running for 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere with the campaign slogan, “Vote for Helen cuz she wants ta win!” (Is that honest or what?)
I have ten votes, and I am not winning. So go to the site of Billy the Blogging Poet to vote for me.
You DO NOT have to be a poet and will not be asked to identify yourself to vote.
UPDATE: I NOW HAVE ELEVEN VOTES! 🙂
FINAL UPDATE FOR THE NIGHT: Well, I have 15 votes. So that’s 5 since I first posted this entry. Funny thing is I have 17 hits on this entry. Guess a lot of folks who don’t want to vote for me are dropping by. 🙄
AND NOW IN THE MORNING: I have 17 votes. That’s 2 more. And there are 27 hits on this entry. Do you think there are chads invovled?
I need more votes to win.
Last week I was much too busy.
So when I was tagged by artist Winsome Gunning and given a Thinking Blogger Award, I decided to postpone giving my awards until this week.
(“OH NO, ANOTHER MEME!” I thought at the time.)
But now, without futher ado, I present my THINKING BLOGGER AWARDS.
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My first Thinking Blogger Award goes to Jana Allard. Jana has the perfect position in life to be way too “preachy,” but she isn’t. She’s sweet and warm and understanding. Jana makes me think. Thanks, Jana.
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My second Thinking Blogger Award goes to Esbee. Esbee writes about her everyday life in Winston-Salem. She keeps me informed on lots of events I’d miss, if I didn’t read her blog. Esbee has a beautiful cat named Hadley. Esbee makes me think. Thanks, Esbee.
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My third Thinking Blogger Award goes to Shirley Buxton for her Devotional site. Shirley has another blog and may want to present her awards there. She and her husband have more energy than I do and are building a new church. I think I make Shirley mad or at least frustrated sometimes, but Shirley makes me think. Thanks, Shirley.
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My fourth Thinking Blogger Award goes to Terry, who presents some alternate views concerning people and places. Terry makes me think. Thanks, Terry.
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My fifth Thinking Blogger Award goes to EarthPal, who left her “real name” in a comment on my blog and then told me not to tell anyone. 🙂 She writes about environmental issues. EarthPal makes me think. Thanks, EarthPal.
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These are among the many blogs I read daily that cause me to think. And I just noticed I chose all blogs written by women. Better luck next time, guys! 🙂
Alice Parris is one of the eleven poets in the April issue of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. See her web page (for poetry) and her MySpace page (for music and song writing).
I have featured Alice Parris on Windows to the World several times. Use the Search funtion to locate them. Now read her chapbook, For a Fresh Gust of Sea-Wind, published in The Dead Mule.
“Finding peace in this world’s a daunting task. Our own government has been unmasked, revealing a naked aggression; torture in the name of freedom, an unholy alliance with corporate power and right wing religious extremists. Where are they taking our nation; what ever happened to peace, social justice and truth?”
I’ve just joined the other Peaceful Collaborators at The Peace Tree. Read my poem here.
The Merton Reflection for the Week of April 23, 2007
[For Those Who Are Mourning]
Love is the epiphany of God in our poverty. The contemplative life is then the search for peace not in an abstract exclusion of all outside reality, not in a barren negative closing of the senses upon the world, but in the openness of love. [The contemplative life] begins with the acceptance of my own self in my poverty and my nearness to despair in order to recognize that where God is there can be no despair, and God is in me even if I despair. Nothing can change God’s love for me, since my very existence is the sign that God loves me and the presence of His love creates and sustains me. Nor is there any need to understand how this can be or to explain it or to solve the problems it seems to raise. For there is in our hearts and in the very ground of our being a natural certainty which is co-extensive with our very existence: a certainty that says that insofar as we exist we are penetrated through and through with the sense and reality of God even though we may be utterly unable to believe or experience this in philosophic or even religious terms. The message of hope [I offer you, then,] is not that you need to find your way through the jungle of language and problems that today surround God: but that whether you understand or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you, and offers you an understanding and light which are like nothing you have ever found in books or heard in sermons. [I have] nothing to tell you except to reassure you and say that, if you dare to penetrate your own silence and risk sharing that solitude with the lonely other who seeks God through you, then you will truly recover the light and the capacity to understand what is beyond words and beyond explanations because it is too close to be explained: it is the intimate union in the depths of you own heart, of God’s spirit and your own secret inmost self, so that you and God are in all truth One Spirit. I love you, in Christ.”
Thomas Merton. The Hidden Ground of Love. Letters, Volume 1. William H. Shannon, editor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985 : 157-158.
We Are Virginia Tech
We are Virginia Tech
We are sad today
And we will be sad for quite a while
We are not moving on
We are embracing our mourning
We are Virginia Tech
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly
We are brave enough to bend to cry …
And sad enough to know we must laugh again
We are Virginia Tech
We do not understand this tragedy
We know we did nothing to deserve it
But neither does a child in Africa dying of aids
Neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by a rogue army
Neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory
Neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water
Neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of night in his crib in the home its father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destablized
No one deserves a tragedy
We are Virginia Tech
The Hokie nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds
We are strong and brave and innocent and unafraid
We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be
We are alive to the imagination and the possibility
We will continue to invent the future
Through our blood and tears
Through all this sadness
We are the Hokies
We will prevail
We will prevail
We will prevail
We are Virginia Tech
Nikki Giovanni, poet and University Distinguished Professor of English, VPI&SU
As students and faculty go back to class, please keep them in your prayers.
Windows Toward the World 
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