Wife of Lucas, mother of Paige and Fynn, Corinne Cunningham is a New Englander who blogs at Trains, Tutus and Tea Time. And she tells ordinary, and extraordinary, stories.
Try Navigating, where she yells at a town recreation worker.
Or something as prosaic as sugar cookies, which she turns into a love story (and recently reposted at Motherese).
Or a photo post of Paige and Fynn dying Easter eggs.
Or, one of my favorites of her posts, Cocoa Shenanigans.
Or try one of her guest posts (she’s in great demand), like at Crying Out Now. She’s told this story on her own blog, and you read it, not expecting what the story turns out to be. And you go back and read it again, and you’re stunned. Then the third time you’re hit with the reality of the story and her profound honesty in telling it. And you know why – to help and encourage others (and there are a lot of others).
Corinne struggles, like we all do, and writes about it. And then she struggles in different ways, and she writes about that as well. I read her posts, and I find love for others, love for her family and love for God.
So read her blog, follow her on Twitter, and be blessed.
(In December, a number of us participating in the “Twelve Days of Community” - see the button at the top right - sponsored by The High Calling Blogs. The purpose was to highlight the blog or web site of someone other than ourselves during the season of Advent and Christmas. I liked the idea so much that I’m continuing to do that -- highlight a blog or web site of a person whose thoughts and writing have had an impact on me and others.)
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Eight Months, Three Jobs, New Steps
Over the course of eight months, from October 2003 to June of 2004, I held three distinct and very different jobs.
Since the beginning of 2000, I had been an independent communications consultant, after 27 years of corporate life. Then, in October of 2003, I became director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools, an urban school district in the throes of extreme crisis and reorganization. In June, I was recruited back to corporate life to manage a bankruptcy issue and some related environmental issues.
Three jobs. Eight months. My head was spinning with new steps.
In the case of the school district, there was not time to take a breather and learn. My first day on the job was a total immersion in learning on the fly. I walked in the door, and hadn’t even made it to Human Resources to fill out paperwork, when the secretary informed me that Channel 4 and Channel 5 were in the lobby for a statement.
“A statement about what?” I asked.
“About the district-wide teacher sick-out,” she said.
Oh. (By the way, my first day on the job was probably my easiest day on the job.)
I went from a job with five or six major crises a day to one where it was calmer, more measured – just a mega-crisis, with large financial stakes, happening over a long period of time. No one I worked with had actually done that kind of job before, and my colleagues were thrilled to death that I was there to deal with it. So my world became lawyers and finance people and outside consultants and environmental experts and more lawyers (lots of lawyers).
For all their differences, and the culture shock of going from an urban school district to a Fortune 500 corporation, both jobs represented a kind of renewal in my working and professional life.
I was stretched far beyond points I had ever been stretched before.
I had no peer or colleague or mentor who could guide me in what I did.
I had to create new, and sometimes controversial, ways of doing things.
I moved into situations for which I had little direct experience.
In one situation, I knew what I had to do – but had no budget to do it. In the other, I had a more-than-sufficient budget – but no one had any real notion of what to do with it.
And in both situations, I had to rely less and less on myself, and often from hour to hour, and more on my faith. God knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t.
Bonnie Gray, who blogs at Faith Barista, is hosting a blog party on “new steps” – how new steps and renewal can influence your faith walk. Check out other blog posts here.
Since the beginning of 2000, I had been an independent communications consultant, after 27 years of corporate life. Then, in October of 2003, I became director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools, an urban school district in the throes of extreme crisis and reorganization. In June, I was recruited back to corporate life to manage a bankruptcy issue and some related environmental issues.
Three jobs. Eight months. My head was spinning with new steps.
In the case of the school district, there was not time to take a breather and learn. My first day on the job was a total immersion in learning on the fly. I walked in the door, and hadn’t even made it to Human Resources to fill out paperwork, when the secretary informed me that Channel 4 and Channel 5 were in the lobby for a statement.
“A statement about what?” I asked.
“About the district-wide teacher sick-out,” she said.
Oh. (By the way, my first day on the job was probably my easiest day on the job.)
I went from a job with five or six major crises a day to one where it was calmer, more measured – just a mega-crisis, with large financial stakes, happening over a long period of time. No one I worked with had actually done that kind of job before, and my colleagues were thrilled to death that I was there to deal with it. So my world became lawyers and finance people and outside consultants and environmental experts and more lawyers (lots of lawyers).
For all their differences, and the culture shock of going from an urban school district to a Fortune 500 corporation, both jobs represented a kind of renewal in my working and professional life.
I was stretched far beyond points I had ever been stretched before.
I had no peer or colleague or mentor who could guide me in what I did.
I had to create new, and sometimes controversial, ways of doing things.
I moved into situations for which I had little direct experience.
In one situation, I knew what I had to do – but had no budget to do it. In the other, I had a more-than-sufficient budget – but no one had any real notion of what to do with it.
And in both situations, I had to rely less and less on myself, and often from hour to hour, and more on my faith. God knew what he was doing, even if I didn’t.
Bonnie Gray, who blogs at Faith Barista, is hosting a blog party on “new steps” – how new steps and renewal can influence your faith walk. Check out other blog posts here.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Rouault, Fujimura and Hearts and Minds
I will be honest. I had never heard of French artist Georges Rouault (1871 – 1958) before I read Rouault/Fujimura: Soliloquies by Thomas Hibbs, which includes a “refraction” or essay by Makoto Fujimura (1960 - ). Soliloquies was written to accompany an exhibition of Rouault’s and Fujimura’s art at the Dillon Gallery in New York City in late 2009. I started reading it, and felt somewhat cretinous for not knowing about Rouault.I bought this book because Makoto Fujimura tweeted on Twitter that it was named a “best book of 2009” by Hearts and Minds. I had read Fujimura’s Refractions and posted on it in January.
What a gem this little book is. Not only do you gain a sense of whom Rouault was and what his art was about, you also learn just how important this artist was to contemporary artists like Fujimura and the idea of expression of faith and belief through art and in art.
Thomas Hibbs, who wrote most of Soliloquies, has provided what is almost a spiritual meditation on the two artists, art and the idea of “soliloquies” as almost a kind of dialogue. He reaches out to and pulls from sources as diverse as St. Augustine, T.S. Eliot, Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil.
Rouault is important in understanding Fujimura’s work because the French painter, who died two years before Fujimura was born, has had such a significant impact on Fujimura's thinking and understanding. Here is Rouault as described by Fujimura:“Like the Rembrandts he valued and imitated as a youth, and the Cezanne he celebrated in his letters and poems, Rouault paintings capture not a mere reflective, descriptive light, but Light behind the light, Reality behind the reality. They are generative and seem to grow more and more pregnant as they age. Rouault may yet prove to be the first twenty-first century painter, bringing synthesis out of an age of fragmentation.”
Soliloquies is a small book, all of 63 pages, with reproductions of some of the paintings exhibited and photographs from the exhibition. And it is a beautiful small book, a gem that contains so much understanding that I’ve read it three times, and still find new things to appreciate and ponder.
I also feel a little less cretinous than I did before. At least I know who Georges Rouault was, and perhaps is.
An Aside:
I bought the book through Hearts and Minds Bookstore’s web site. Physically located in central Pennsylvania, Hearts and Minds’ web site is – to me – exactly what it should be. The store specializes in books about faith and Christianity, and the web site includes a blog about some of the books it sells; book reviews; and news. I suspect that visitors to the web site receive the same kind of care and attention that customers in the store do. When I placed the order, I received an email confirmation and a second email (from a real person) asking me how I had heard about their store and what I was interested in reading.
Illustrations:
Top: Christ in the Outskirts (1920-24) by Georges Rouault.
Bottom: Soliloquies by Makoto Fujimura
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Place: Almost a Century Apart
I attended elementary school in a New Orleans suburb. Because we only had three seasons (summer, July and August), events like leaves turning colors in the fall or snow were theoretical concepts unless one traveled north. My only familiarity with fall and winter was a series of coloring books distributed at school, one for each month. The October one always included fall leaves, and either the December or January one would have pictures that included snow. I was always fascinated.
The changing of the leaves is one of the events that former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall describes in Eagle Pond, a collection of essays (and one longish poem) about New England in general and New Hampshire in particular, which I just finished reading. His mother’s family came from New Hampshire and it’s where Hall now lives, in a family farmhouse somewhat modernized but still close to what his ancestors knew.
As I read about the farm, the community and the state where he lives, I learned how important the sense of “place” is to him, and how it informs his poetry and writing. Place is as real to Hall’s writing as Port William is to Wendell Berry and Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner.
As I read Eagle Pond, I was strongly reminded of a children’s book I read almost 50 years ago, and which I’ve learned is still in print today.
First published in 1916, Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is still – remarkably – in print today, the latest edition published just last year. It’s the story of a 9-year-old girl from the Midwest who is sent to live with cousins in Vermont, the “terrible Putney cousins.” I was given the Scholastic Books paperback by my next-door neighbor, who had read it and wasn’t interested in keeping it. At the time, I knew it was a “girl’s book,” but it was about New England, with illustrations similar to those coloring books I worked on each month at school, so I read it. I didn’t tell anyone, but I enjoyed it.
That copy disappeared years ago during one of my mother’s garage sales. A few years back, I found a hard back edition from the 1940s at a used book sale and bought it, entirely for sentimental reasons (it was all of $1).
After reading Eagle Pond, I found my copy of Understood Betsy and read it. It’s charming, a product of its time that somewhat romanticized farm life and the one-room schoolhouse. (Little did I know, but the author is credited with introducing the Montessori Method into the United States and the schoolhouse scenes in the book are based entirely upon that approach.)
As I read it, the story came back, and vividly back. I began to remember and then anticipate the events of the narrative – how Betsy had been raised by fussy aunts and then sent to Vermont; how she got a kitten; her first day in school (“I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading!”); the wolf pit; and the county fair. I was surprised at how well I remembered the story, and its rather breathless prose.
I wasn’t surprised that it had made such an impression on a young boy living in a New Orleans suburb. It’s about a place, a specific place, and about the idea of place, in exactly the same way that Hall’s Eagle Pond is about place. Even when Canfield Fisher wrote Understood Betsy, the place she was writing about had changed forever (and to hear Hall describe neighboring Vermont, it’s now entirely inhabited by weekenders from New York and Boston who wear L.L. Bean plaid flannel shirts).
Hall says that it’s likely only native New Englanders and Southerners who truly understand this notion of place. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do know that when people ask me where I’m from, I always say “I was born and raised in New Orleans but now live in St. Louis,” even though I’ve lived far longer in St. Louis than I did in New Orleans.
But that’s what place does to you. That's what it does to Donald Hall, and what it did to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, writing almost a century apart.
The changing of the leaves is one of the events that former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall describes in Eagle Pond, a collection of essays (and one longish poem) about New England in general and New Hampshire in particular, which I just finished reading. His mother’s family came from New Hampshire and it’s where Hall now lives, in a family farmhouse somewhat modernized but still close to what his ancestors knew.As I read about the farm, the community and the state where he lives, I learned how important the sense of “place” is to him, and how it informs his poetry and writing. Place is as real to Hall’s writing as Port William is to Wendell Berry and Yoknapatawpha County was to William Faulkner.
As I read Eagle Pond, I was strongly reminded of a children’s book I read almost 50 years ago, and which I’ve learned is still in print today.
First published in 1916, Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher is still – remarkably – in print today, the latest edition published just last year. It’s the story of a 9-year-old girl from the Midwest who is sent to live with cousins in Vermont, the “terrible Putney cousins.” I was given the Scholastic Books paperback by my next-door neighbor, who had read it and wasn’t interested in keeping it. At the time, I knew it was a “girl’s book,” but it was about New England, with illustrations similar to those coloring books I worked on each month at school, so I read it. I didn’t tell anyone, but I enjoyed it.That copy disappeared years ago during one of my mother’s garage sales. A few years back, I found a hard back edition from the 1940s at a used book sale and bought it, entirely for sentimental reasons (it was all of $1).
After reading Eagle Pond, I found my copy of Understood Betsy and read it. It’s charming, a product of its time that somewhat romanticized farm life and the one-room schoolhouse. (Little did I know, but the author is credited with introducing the Montessori Method into the United States and the schoolhouse scenes in the book are based entirely upon that approach.)
As I read it, the story came back, and vividly back. I began to remember and then anticipate the events of the narrative – how Betsy had been raised by fussy aunts and then sent to Vermont; how she got a kitten; her first day in school (“I’m second-grade arithmetic and seventh-grade reading!”); the wolf pit; and the county fair. I was surprised at how well I remembered the story, and its rather breathless prose.
I wasn’t surprised that it had made such an impression on a young boy living in a New Orleans suburb. It’s about a place, a specific place, and about the idea of place, in exactly the same way that Hall’s Eagle Pond is about place. Even when Canfield Fisher wrote Understood Betsy, the place she was writing about had changed forever (and to hear Hall describe neighboring Vermont, it’s now entirely inhabited by weekenders from New York and Boston who wear L.L. Bean plaid flannel shirts).
Hall says that it’s likely only native New Englanders and Southerners who truly understand this notion of place. Perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration, but I do know that when people ask me where I’m from, I always say “I was born and raised in New Orleans but now live in St. Louis,” even though I’ve lived far longer in St. Louis than I did in New Orleans.
But that’s what place does to you. That's what it does to Donald Hall, and what it did to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, writing almost a century apart.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Panes
Glance, leftward, from the screen, and
see, refracting through the pane, a
building, a wall of marble and glass; a
cloud of fog floating from
the smoker’s bench and
dissipating through a tree, an oak,
most likely;
a sky of blue beyond.
Another, leftward but different,
glance, different screen, past
my shelf of books anticipating being
read, to the pane, through the pane, to
holly, magnolias, river birch, cherry,
garden, across the fence to the
neighbor next door;
a sky of blue above.
Two panes, two skies: reminders of
the paned sky within.
see, refracting through the pane, a
building, a wall of marble and glass; a
cloud of fog floating from
the smoker’s bench and
dissipating through a tree, an oak,
most likely;
a sky of blue beyond.
Another, leftward but different,
glance, different screen, past
my shelf of books anticipating being
read, to the pane, through the pane, to
holly, magnolias, river birch, cherry,
garden, across the fence to the
neighbor next door;
a sky of blue above.
Two panes, two skies: reminders of
the paned sky within.
"Eastern Washington," photograph by Nancy Rosback. Used with permission.
(This poem was written for the March offering of the Cunning Poets Society, led by nAncY of Poems and Prayers. The prompt was to write either about something you really like or about something happening around you when you are writing. I chose the latter; what's usually happening around me when I write -- at work and home -- is what can be seen through windows.)
Saturday Good Reads
Many good things happened online this past week. Here are a only a few of them, including links to three videos and a painting.
Poetry
“Whispering Words,” by Shaun Masterton.
Louise Gallagher’s “Soul Dances.”
Two by Melissa at All the Words: “Redbeard the Pirate Cow” and “Nothing More.”
Kathleen Overby's "Sprouting."
“Dreams” by Susan Etole.
"Eternal" by Erin at Together for Good.
“Haunting” by Justinian at Discount Verbiage.
nAncY’s “On Top of the World” at Poems and Prayers.
Phoenix Karenee’s “Pray.”
Leslie Moon’s “Drowning My Sorrows.”
Prose
"What Keeps Me Here" (in the Catholic Church) by Jessica Griffith at the Image Journal. (For the record, I'm not Catholic, but this is worth reading by all of us.)
Thinking about Columbine, Sandra Heska King’s “Faithful to the End.”
What we often miss: “Life’s Great Tragedy” by Billy Coffey.
The need to be gentle with a son: Jeff Johnson’s “In Sickness and in Health.”
"Do I Still Get a Lollipop at the Doctor’s Office?" Matt at The Church of No People takes a look at the health care legislation debate.
How Emily Dickinson’s poetry speaks to leadership: "The Poetic Language of Leadership," interview of Prof. Roger Lundin of Wheaton by Christopher Benson at Evangel.
Learning, as an adult, that you have Attention Deficit Disorder. "Being me (and being you)," by Kathy Richards at Hey Look, A Chicken.
“Gardening as Autobiography” by Amy Sorrells.
Video
Every family has moments like this one, and they're priceless: "Nowhere Man Gets a Little Lost," by Sippican Cottage.
If this were a novel, it's title would be "The Rich Also Have a Sense of Humor." Slate V: Warren Buffett as Axl Rose in an ad for GEICO.
Set whatever feelings you have for the health care legislation aside, and look at the sheer creativity of this: "Something Wonderful: Patrick Henry Redux," posted at American Digest.
Artwork
"Across a winter field," oil on panel, Randall David Tipton. And Maureen Doallas has part 1 of an interview with Tipton on her blog, Writing Without Paper. (If you've never read her interviews, you will discover that they are works of art in and of themselves.)
Poetry
“Whispering Words,” by Shaun Masterton.
Louise Gallagher’s “Soul Dances.”
Two by Melissa at All the Words: “Redbeard the Pirate Cow” and “Nothing More.”
Kathleen Overby's "Sprouting."
“Dreams” by Susan Etole.
"Eternal" by Erin at Together for Good.
“Haunting” by Justinian at Discount Verbiage.
nAncY’s “On Top of the World” at Poems and Prayers.
Phoenix Karenee’s “Pray.”
Leslie Moon’s “Drowning My Sorrows.”
Prose
"What Keeps Me Here" (in the Catholic Church) by Jessica Griffith at the Image Journal. (For the record, I'm not Catholic, but this is worth reading by all of us.)
Thinking about Columbine, Sandra Heska King’s “Faithful to the End.”
What we often miss: “Life’s Great Tragedy” by Billy Coffey.
The need to be gentle with a son: Jeff Johnson’s “In Sickness and in Health.”
"Do I Still Get a Lollipop at the Doctor’s Office?" Matt at The Church of No People takes a look at the health care legislation debate.
How Emily Dickinson’s poetry speaks to leadership: "The Poetic Language of Leadership," interview of Prof. Roger Lundin of Wheaton by Christopher Benson at Evangel.
Learning, as an adult, that you have Attention Deficit Disorder. "Being me (and being you)," by Kathy Richards at Hey Look, A Chicken.
“Gardening as Autobiography” by Amy Sorrells.
Video
Every family has moments like this one, and they're priceless: "Nowhere Man Gets a Little Lost," by Sippican Cottage.
If this were a novel, it's title would be "The Rich Also Have a Sense of Humor." Slate V: Warren Buffett as Axl Rose in an ad for GEICO.
Set whatever feelings you have for the health care legislation aside, and look at the sheer creativity of this: "Something Wonderful: Patrick Henry Redux," posted at American Digest.
Artwork
"Across a winter field," oil on panel, Randall David Tipton. And Maureen Doallas has part 1 of an interview with Tipton on her blog, Writing Without Paper. (If you've never read her interviews, you will discover that they are works of art in and of themselves.)
Friday, March 26, 2010
Grandparent Fix
Travis, Janet, Glynn and Cameron Young
March 25, 2010
Uncle Andrew Young and Cameron Young March 26, 2010
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