This week didn’t start out in Frantic Mode – we first had to dig out from a 12-inch snow that arrived Sunday. (A huge thank you to the young man who knocked on our door Monday and asked if we needed our driveway shoveled.)
Then on Tuesday, as if to prove exercise is bad for you, I was riding the
stationary bike at 6 a.m. prior to my workout with the personal trainer when a
partial bridge in my mouth decided to relocate. So – it was pray that the
dentist had some space to squeeze me in (he did).
And
at work, a situation that had started the previous week was continuing to
build, and build some more, until the tsunami arrived on Thursday, and ebbed
only slightly by Friday afternoon. I finally had to stop Thursday night (Friday
morning?) about 12:15 a.m.; I decided the crisis would be waiting for me when I
woke up. It was.
What
helped was watching a few Netflix videos and finding a few oases of calm in the
online world, like the Saturday Good Reads below.
First,
four poems.
Two
by Steven Marty Grant at Urbanality, whose poetry always seems to transport me
to New York City: Winter in
Midtown and God Looks Down.
One
by Chris Yokel, whose music I like as much as his poetry: Green
Arms (A Good Friday Poem).
And
one by Brian Miller, whom I first met at One Stop Poetry when it was going
gangbusters and who’s now one of the movers behind dVersePoets: I’ll have the
usual.
Am
I the only person who reads poetry when things get crazy?
Then
over at Slow Church, John Pattison posted
a reflection on the novel Silence
by Shasaku Endo, in honor of Endo’s birthday. I had read the novel three years
ago (and even blogged
about it a few times). Pattison’s article is well worth reading.
David
Mathis at Desiring God did something unexpected and truly beautiful. He visited
and interviewed the 96-year-old theologian Robert Duncan Culver, and came away
with The
Old Man and His Big Book.
I
was rather awed by Culver and his razor-sharp mind, and I was also awed by
something slightly older – a graffiti found during a 19th century
excavation of the Palantine Hill in Rome. Tim Challies at Informing the
Reforming wrote about it in The
History of Christianity in 25 Objects: the Alexamenos Graffito.
I
learned something new on Friday. Lyla Lindquist, one of my colleagues over at
Tweetspeak Poetry, has more than a slight interest in the Spanish language, and
wrote about it in The
Poetics of Learning (and Loving) Language.
And
then John Blase at The Beautiful Due wrote one of the most original articles I’ve
seen about Easter: What Do
I Know?
Finally,
Greg Sullivan at Sippican
Cottage posted a short video the likes of which I’ve never seen. Well, I
take that back. I’ve seen the actor Kenneth Branagh do it, but I’ve never seen
the “We Happy Few” speech from Henry V by William Shakespeare performed like it is by this young actor.
Photograph by Jean Sander via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
4 comments:
Thank you, Glynn...a blessed Easter to you!
Thank you, Glynn...a blessed Easter to you!
Some wonderful reads here, Glynn.
Wishing you a lovely and joyous Easter!
oases of calm
appeared beside the littered lawn
on my post tsunami online world
my fingers and my toes uncurled
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