Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Quotes about Guests

If it were not for guests all houses would be graves. --Khalil Gibran

You must come home with me and be my guest; You will give joy to me, and I will do All that is in my power to honour you. -- Percy Bysshe Shelley

Every house where love abides And friendship is a guest, Is surely home, and home, sweet home For there the heart can rest. --Henry van Dyke

Visitor's footfalls are like medicine; they heal the sick. --African Proverb

The ornaments of your home are the people who smile upon entering time and time again. --Maralee McKee

Any celebration meal to which guests are invited, be they family or friends, should be an occasion for generous hospitality.  --Julian Baggini

If you are a host to your guest, be a host to his dog also. --Russian Proverb

The magic formula that successful businesses have discovered is to treat customers like guests and employees like people.  --Tom Peters

Few enjoy noisy overcrowded functions. But they are a gesture of goodwill on the part of host or hostess, and also on the part of guests who submit to them.  --Fannie Hurst



Friday, May 16, 2014

One more poem by Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Pilgrim

This is a road
One walks alone;
Narrow the track
And overgrown.

Dark is the way
And hard to find,
When the last village
Drops behind.

Never a footfall
Light to show
Fellow traveler--
Yet I know

Someone before
Has trudged his load
In the same footsteps--

This is a road. 


Thursday, May 15, 2014

A beautiful poem by Anne Morrow Lindbergh--The Man and the Child

The Man and the Child

It is the man in us who works;

Who earns his daily bread and anxious scans
The evening skies to know tomorrow's plans;
It is the man who hurries as he walks;
Finds courage in a crowd, shouts as he talks;
Who shuts his eyes and burrows through his task;
Who doubts his neighbor and who wears a mask;
Who moves in armor and who hides his tears.
It is the man in us who fears.

It is the child in us who plays;
Who sees no happiness beyond today's;
Who sings for joy; who wonders, and who weeps;
It is the child in us at night who sleeps.
It is the child who silent turns his face,
Open and maskless, naked of defense,
Simple with trust, distilled of all pretense,
To sudden beauty in another's face----

It is the child in us who loves.


Wednesday, May 14, 2014

The Amazing Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Anne Morrow Lindbergh, the American author and poet, who was married to Charles Lindbergh, the famous American aviator. Their life together is the stuff of legend—traveling in their own small plane around the world, the kidnapping and murder of their infant son, living in Europe to escape the subsequent media circus, their celebrity status in the USA—all detailed in the individual biographies written about each of them.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh dreamed of and attained a successful literary career in the course of her long life; she lived to be 94 years old and was a poet and author of a number of books. She also learned to fly and accompanied her famous husband on many of his flights as his co-pilot. She was likely unaware of his extramarital affairs with several German women that resulted in a number of children. If she did know, she took her secret with her in death, and coped in life in the way that she knew best--she pursued her writing. This is what she wrote about writing: 

“I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down. I am blind without a pencil……. I am convinced that you must write as if no one were ever going to see it. Write it all, as personally and specifically as you can, as deeply and honestly as you can. … In fact, I think it is the only true way to reach the universal, through the knot-hole of the personal. So do, do go ahead and write it as it boils up: the hot lava from the unconscious. Don’t stop to observe, criticize, or be ‘ironic.’ Just write it, like a letter, without rereading. Later, one can decide what to do.”

--From "Against Wind and Tide: Letters and Journals, 1947-1986", by Anne Morrow Lindbergh (2012, Pantheon) 

But it is her wonderful book--Gift from the Sea (published in 1955)--that captured me with its wisdom, inspiration and simplicity. I first read it when I was seventeen and it made a huge impression on me. She wrote about women’s lives and responsibilities and how they often conflicted with the desire to lead an independent life and to pursue a literary career. She wrote the following:

“To be a woman is to have interests and duties, raying out in all directions from the central mother-core, like spokes from the hub of a wheel. The pattern of our lives is essentially circular. We must be open to all points of the compass: husband, children, friends, home, community; stretched out, exposed, sensitive like a spider's web to each breeze that blows, to each call that comes. How difficult for us, then, to achieve a balance in the midst of these contradictory tensions, and yet how necessary for the proper functioning of our lives. How much we need, and how arduous of attainment is that steadiness preached in all rules for holy living. How desirable and how distant is the ideal of the contemplative, artist, or saint -- the inner inviolable core, the single eye.

With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls -- woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.

What is the answer? There is no easy answer, no complete answer. I have only clues, shells from the sea. The bare beauty of the channeled whelk tells me that one answer, and perhaps a first step, is in simplification of life, in cutting out some of the distractions. But how? Total retirement is not possible, I cannot shed my responsibilities. I cannot permanently inhabit a desert island. I cannot be a nun in the midst of family life. I would not want to be. The solution for me, surely, is neither in total renunciation of the world, nor in total acceptance of it. I must find a balance somewhere, or an alternating rhythm between these two extremes; a swinging of the pendulum between solitude and communion, between retreat and return. In my periods of retreat, perhaps I can learn something to carry back into my worldly life. I can at least practice for these two weeks the simplification of outward life, as a beginning”.

-- From ''Gift From the Sea''  (1955, Pantheon)

Monday, May 12, 2014

Essence

My new poem, Essence, part of the new collection of poems that I am working on.  

The flowing river does what it does best
Flows
Over rocks and stones
Rushes and roars
Over waterfalls on its way to the sea
Sprays
A delicate rainbow mist
Gem-like droplets hanging in the air
Iridescent
Like sparkling confetti tossed skyward by a child
Hovers then descends

Wanders
Through this ancient city
Weaves
Past buildings it once knew as something else
Factories and watermills
Provides
A peopled river town
History that came to pass and went
Disappears
Flowing onward toward oblivion

Flowing river
Until the day it does and is
No longer………..


copyright 2014
Paula M De Angelis

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Good morning from sunny Oslo

I'm posting this photo today because the weather forecast for the week ahead is the opposite of what you see in the photo. Rain is predicted for nearly every day this coming week, along with colder temperatures. In other words, this coming week is the spring weather we should have had in late March. However, in late March and most of April, it was almost as though early summer had arrived, with temperatures in the 60s and 70s. I hope this chilly and rainy spell doesn't last long. But at least I'll have this photo to remind me of the way it was.......


Thursday, May 1, 2014

Akrobaten and Oslo S

I was in the neighborhood of the Oslo S train station in the late afternoon. The area south of the station facing the fjord was fairly deserted today, just a few people walking around. No surprise--today is May 1st--Europe's Labor Day. It's a national holiday and most people spend it with friends or family. When I walked back toward the city center proper, there were a lot of people sitting outside in the outdoor cafes or waiting for trams and buses.

I had arranged to meet a few people at the pedestrian bridge called Akrobaten (Acrobat), but we must have gotten our wires crossed so it didn't happen. But it wasn't a lost photography opportunity.  I took advantage of the beautiful weather and the lack of people to snap some shots and to walk across Akrobaten that connects Grønland with Bjørvika. Enjoy......

standing on Acrobat bridge (Akrobaten)

entrance to the Acrobat bridge 

the photographer reflected in the glass of Akrobaten

looking upward--office buildings in Bjørvika

Oslo city buildings reflected in the glass of Akrobaten

Akrobatens nearest neighbor bridge--Nordenga bridge--for cars and pedestrians

whoosh--there goes the Train to the Plane (Flytoget) on its way to Oslo Airport

Trying to understand the mystery of life

Apropos my last post, where I talked about accepting some things in this life (like my faith) that I know I will never understand on this ea...