Caring for the birds in winter

The natural world keeps our hearts and minds calm and sane. In this poem, it is a crow that changes the mood of the observer, who is having a bad day. The simple act of shaking snow down onto the observer saves the rest of his otherwise bad day from being a total loss. Nature has a way of doing that. Of course the crow has no way of knowing that nor did it shake down the snow deliberately. Birds are interesting creatures that open a window onto the natural world. I love watching them in the garden during the summer months, as I've written about before. So many different birds--sparrows, magpies, crows, small robins, blue tits, bullfinches--the list is long. Sometimes seagulls show up, but not often. 

This winter, I'm going to go to the garden every other day to feed the birds. I haven't done that before, although I do feed the birds that land on the balcony outside our kitchen window. Those birds are mostly pigeons, although we do get a few magpies and sparrows too. They all love sunflower seeds. I bought a nice and presumably sturdy standing bird feeder station on Amazon (where else do you get such a wide selection?) and am waiting for it to be delivered. I'll find a good place for it in the garden once I get it. Here is a link to the feeder if anyone else is interested in buying something similar: Urban Deco Bird Feeding Station With Feeders - Bird Feeders Hanging Station Heavy Duty Bird Feeder Pole With Bird Feeders For Small Birds - Bird Feeder Stand With Bird Bath Tray And Bird Feeder Tray : Amazon.co.uk: Garden

Caring for the birds in winter is important for so many reasons. They are little creatures who grace our lives with their beauty and their antics. They make us laugh, but they also make us ponder nature's ways. A world without birds, without their squawking and chirping and singing, would be a dead world. They make us forget ourselves, forget our trials and tribulations, for a few moments. It is worth taking care of them just for that alone. 

Will Smith - Men In Black (Video Version)

Fun movie and fun video! One of the best ever movie songs.......

Like I've written about so many times before, there are always connections between things, whether it's songs, books, films, or a combination of them. 

Patrice Rushen - Forget Me Nots (Official Video)

Another trip down memory lane, and another favorite! Will Smith made the song his own in the film Men in Black.....

Another poem--Dreams Like Smoke-- from my collection Parables and Voices

Dreams like Smoke 

The many misconceptions 

That love would somehow 

Answer many unanswered questions, 

Fill the void-- 

Free them from unwanted deception. 

But deception in man is eternal 

And unyielding, they fool themselves first, 

Not each other. 

For they brought to love themselves, 

And the expectations of a lifetime. 

But dreams drift silently onward-- 

Dissipating upward like the rings of cigarette smoke 

In one of the many rooms they inhabit. 

They don’t stop dreaming, they just navigate 

The aimless drifting with another kind of care, 

Or lack thereof.

copyright Paula Mary De Angelis 

All rights reserved 

My poem--Train from Michigan

This is a poem from my first published collection of poems entitled Parables and Voices. You'll find it on Amazon if you'd like to read more of my poetry (Parables and Voices: A Collection of Poems 1973-2009: De Angelis, Paula Mary: 9781452838762: Amazon.com: Books). 

Train from Michigan

I dreamed then of my father, I was 

On the train; outside a yellow moon 

Full-light circle against the blue-black sky. 

His face came into memory 

As I drifted in the sleep of transit, 

That is uneasy and unsettled. 

We crossed, from Michigan into Ohio, 

The train's whistle blowing lonely 

As though miles ahead of us-- 

Yet ever with us through the night. 

I thought the thoughts of transit-- 

My father, dead these three years, 

Perhaps traveled this same train 

Bound from Michigan to New York. 

He knew people in the north of Michigan, 

Farmers and ultimately life-long friends. 

I see his face, with me always. 

My head rests lightly against the train window-- 

When I awake it is because my head has banged  

And fallen against the window, jarring me. 

I visit friends, they live in Michigan now 

Having moved there from New York; hence my trip's purpose. 

I meet new people on the way to visit old friends, 

And think about old friendships as I make my way home. 

New people I am always letting in; they find me or 

We find each other--one in particular spoke of kindred spirits 

On our way out to Michigan; his words surprised me. 

Do they, these spirits, find each other? 

Are we all in search of one? 

About trains, I know they draw me so, 

Luring me with the call to adventure, 

Like a call to arms. 

I boarded one, bound for Michigan, 

And then one back, to New York. 

Time spread out over hours of track-- 

Moving me, my life, along, 

From one point to another. 

Spreading me out, thin, fluid, 

Over time which is suddenly the merger 

Of past, present, future. 

Like liquid spreading I see my life 

Moving over these tracks, out and beyond, 

Expanding to assimilate Michigan 

As I have before incorporated other states 

And other countries, American and European. 

A fear that I can never belong to someone-- 

How could one keep me from flooding 

Past the walls and out into the open spaces? 

It is an abstract love of world I feel, 

A pull to know what is unknown, but knowable. 

To care for it, about it, accept it for itself,  

The planet, the globe, its rivers and its land, 

The farms and their greenness in the summer-- 

The land you pass through while travelling on a train. 

Small towns and the people in them, suburbs and large cities, 

Unknown, but knowable. 

I look out, I know this river-- 

I grew up along it, knowing it stretched 

For miles, out of my reach--I see it now 

In places I never knew before 

And feel the vastness of its beauty. 

Back in New York, I grew up here, 

But I have grown beyond it.

copyright Paula Mary De Angelis

All rights reserved 

Heather Nova - Aquamarine

And another one from the same compilation. Easy listening.....

Aquamarine 

Aquamarine

All that glitters lies beneath

Deep blue,

Shallow green

I won't let it go

Aquamarine

You're my sexy little daydream

Deep blue,

Shallow green

I don't make it sound

Now there's a dream

Aquamarine

Send it up into the gulf stream

Deep blue,

shallow green

I won't let it go

Now there's a dream

Now there's a dream

Aquamarine

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Alexander David Puttnam / Christopher John Mellor / Heather Allison Frith

Aquamarine lyrics © Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.

Goloka - Give Me Loving

Another really good song from the Ibiza Summer Chillout Classics from 2009. 

SLEEP by Amanaska

One of the many good songs on a collection of chillout classics from a compilation called Ibiza Summer Chillout Classics from 2009. 

Listening to the songs on this album relaxes me and puts me in a good mood......What else can you ask for in these troubled times? 

Sleep

A sign drawn in the sand

And a touch of a stranger's hand

I wonder what it means

Time spinning round and round in this space

Then it's gone without a trace

I wonder where it goes

Deep in the night when I hear no sound

I feel my heartbeat slowing down

My mind's released and free to wander

As I sleep

The past buried deep inside my head

All the words that have gone unsaid

I just want to let them go

Life on a distant star

Or a boat to where the wild things are

I just want to let it flow

Deep in the night when I hear no sound

I feel my heartbeat slowing down

My mind's released and free to wander

As I sleep

If you're quiet you'll hear the sound

Bits of the world as it spins around

We feel lost and we feel found

When we sleep

When we sleep

Sleep

Two worlds colliding in my head

I watch you as you sleep

Two worlds colliding in my head

Two worlds colliding in my head

Two worlds

Colliding in my head

Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Simon Lewis

Sleep lyrics © Sentric Music, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Are you a dreamer or a realist or somewhere in between?

Today's Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis..... 

Perhaps better to be a realistic dreamer? Or an optimistic realist? Are they 'realistic' possibilities in our black-and-white, have to choose one side world? Probably not, but they should be, since most people are dreamers sometimes and realists at other times, or somewhere in between.

 

 

My new poem--Friday afternoon

Friday afternoon

Friday afternoon

Sitting on a park bench
On a hill overlooking the river
Watching the autumn sky
The shifting colors of the clouds
From gray to blue to white and back to gray
The world looks inviting on a Friday afternoon
People hustling and bustling here and there
Voices of schoolchildren in the background
Playing happily
Crows and magpies hopping about on the wet leaves
Looking for an insect or two 
In the mild autumn weather

I think, isn’t life a beautiful gift
To hold in one’s hands
A fragile one to be sure but beautiful just the same
Being this age, knowing that most of life is behind one
Not a care in the world, really
I can sit on a park bench 
On a Friday afternoon
After a long walk
Free these past three years
From the stresses of a worklife
That I do not miss
That I grieved the loss of years ago
The loss of something that made it work 
Until it no longer did

I think, this is the way to live life
To be able to be outdoors, to walk
To appreciate the ability to be able to
To have gratitude
Is it such that we must age
In order to be grateful
Or can we learn gratitude 
At any age
It would behoove the world
To learn gratitude
To get on its collective knees
And thank the divine for all that it’s been given

The world is not very good at that 

Copyright 2024 Paula Mary De Angelis 

All rights reserved 

The series My Brilliant Friend has come to an end

As I have written about in previous posts, the Italian author Elena Ferrante wrote a brilliant series of books, My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child (the Neapolitan quartet), that were turned into a television series called My Brilliant Friend that currently airs on MAX (formerly HBO Max) (A New Yorker in Oslo: Elena Ferrante's brilliant Neapolitan quadrilogy; A New Yorker in Oslo: My Brilliant Friend is a brilliant HBO series). 

The series is one of the few television series that manages to capture the intricacies and the emotional depth of the books and to describe the complicated and often warped friendship between Lila and Elena. It also manages to capture the heavy and claustrophobic atmosphere of the Naples neighborhood where they live, in an almost perfect way. Each book was filmed as one season, so there were four seasons in all. Each season, with the exception of season four, consisted of eight episodes; season four was ten episodes long. We watched the last episode tonight, which was an emotional experience for me, knowing that the story of Lila and Elena's lives has now come to an end. We will never know what happens to Lila; she disappears from Elena's life without a trace. Elena, now in her sixties and living in Turin, has had no contact with Lila for a number of years prior to her disappearance. Apparently Lila had not wanted that, even though they parted as good friends when Elena left Naples with Imma to move to Turin. Lila's son Gennaro is understandably upset about his mother's disappearance, and calls Elena to ask if she has heard from her. She has not. It is at that point that Elena decides to write the entire story of their lives together--when she knows that Lila has left her life for good. She is angry at her for disappearing, but at the same time I think she realized she was finally free. 

There are several ways to interpret the ending. One afternoon, after Elena has been out walking her dog, she returns home to find a medium-sized package in her mailbox. When she opens it, she finds the dolls that she and Lila had when they were children, and which they threw into a damp dark cellar at Lila's prompting. When they went to retrieve them a day or so later, they couldn't find them. Lila said at that time that she knew who had stolen them, but as it turns out, it was likely Lila who had retrieved them and hidden them away for many years. Why, no one knows. The motif of the hidden doll reminds me of Ferrante's other book--The Lost Daughter--where the protagonist, a middle-aged woman, finds a doll on the beach and hides it away in her vacation apartment, fully knowing that there is a little girl on vacation with her parents who has lost that doll. There was an evil streak in Lila that surfaced from time to time; she could be mean and spiteful, and then suddenly nice and even kind. She pulled Elena toward her and then pushed her away. It was that kind of friendship, and Elena let it evolve that way, even accepting her role in its evolution. She rarely stood up to Lila, choosing more often to observe and reflect on the ups and downs of their friendship (and to eventually write about them). So if it was Lila who sent the dolls to Elena, why then? It was Lila's way of admitting that she had lied all along to Elena about what happened to the dolls. It was Lila's way of letting go of the past, of apologizing, of moving forward with her life after all the suffering she had been through (the disappearance of her daughter Tina) and all the suffering she caused others. But what happened to Lila? Did she 'disappear' in order to live the rest of her life on her terms? Did she commit suicide (she had talked about wanting to be deleted from society)? Did she meet an unhappy end? Did she reunite with Enzo and did they live 'happily ever after'? Did she spend the rest of her life wandering around Italy searching for her daughter Tina? Or did she accept that Tina was probably dead? If so, then she could move on with her life, live and travel without the burden of grief. And to be a bit provocative, is Elena Ferrante (a pseudonym) really Lila, or Elena? I have always thought Elena. We'll never know the answers to these questions.  

I think that with the arrival of the lost dolls, Elena understood that she and Lila were now free of each other, free to pursue their lives independently of one another. It was a strange complex friendship and a rather unhealthy one. They were both dependent upon each other for different reasons; Elena on Lila because Lila encouraged her to write and forced/challenged her to have confidence in her abilities, even though she was envious of her. Elena was also driven by fear--fear that Lila would capture Nino's heart, and a fear (that she never completely shook) that Lila was (or would have been) the better writer. Lila needed Elena because Elena provided her with emotional and mental stability and a sense of normalcy. She could depend on Elena. Lila was emotionally-unstable, whereas Elena was more rational and cold in the sense of being the observer. 

I will miss this series, miss the depiction of women's lives in Italy over many years, starting in the 1950s when Lila and Elena were children in Naples. How painful it was to see how difficult it was (and still is) for women to write and raise a family under a patriarchal system (personal and societal) where men ruled, and the often disturbing family dramas and conflicts. Elena, despite her success as a writer, is foolish when it comes to her love for Nino, who is nothing but a shallow womanizer like his father--an intellectual pretender. Nothing I write here can really do justice to either the books or the series; they have to be experienced in order to understand the depth of the emotional lives of two Italian women who each considered the other to be the more brilliant friend. But it was Elena who wrote the books, and who considered Lila to be her brilliant friend. Lila was fiercely intelligent, even brilliant, but her talents were thwarted from a very young age by an unsupportive and abusive father and by the subsequent mistakes she made as she grew up. Watching the series, you realize how important it is that children get a supportive and loving start in life and the chance to amount to something. Without that, their lives are often stunted and damaged. Elena's father gave her that chance despite the patriarchal rigidity of their generation, Lila's father did not. 

Fjord Oslo Light Show--some videos

 

Fjord Oslo Light Show

We went to see the Fjord Oslo Light Show (FJORD OSLO) this past Saturday evening, along with many others. Aker Brygge and Tjuvholmen were crowded with young and old people alike, all wanting to see the cool light installations placed strategically along the harbor area. 

I'm glad I got a chance to see it. It's a great use of the darkness that descends upon this country at this time of year. The darkness is very dark, if you get my drift, and the lights light up the darkness in a wonderful and comforting way. Plus there's something fun about being together with other people, all of whom want to see the same thing. It was a chilly night, but we found our way to a nearby Italian restaurant afterward where we could warm up and eat a good dinner. 

Here are some photos that I took. I'll post some videos in my next post. 

Reflections on the two greatest commandments

I reflected on this passage from the New Testament yesterday, which was the gospel reading at mass, after listening to the priest's sermon yesterday morning. 

Matthew 22:36–40

[36] “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” [37] And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. [38] This is the great and first commandment. [39] And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. [40] On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” 

In these unsettling days of political rancor and vitriol, I thought about what the first commandment means for each of us. The priest said it best. It means that every aspect of our daily lives is infused with a love of God. Every aspect. That means that we live aligned with the precepts of God. We live aligned with the life of Jesus. It is the goal of our short life on this earth. It was the way that the priest said it that made me sit up and take notice. Every aspect of our life should be infused with an awareness of God, in the sense that what we are doing at any given moment could be an opportunity for the recognition of God in our lives. God is in the wings of our daily activities. God is the background, God shows us how to love. It means being aware, awake, having a good heart, being kind, humble, and respectful, and willing to serve others, because by being all these things, we show our love for God and for ourselves. That makes possible the second commandment, to love our neighbors as ourselves. Because it is not possible to love others without first loving God and then ourselves. That love of self is what provides the basis for all other earthly love. Love of God comes first, and because God loves us, we can love ourselves, and can thus love our neighbors. 

We are not loving God, ourselves, or our neighbors when we promote hatred and deliberately seek turmoil, when we are instigators of hate and vitriol in our lives and the lives of others. I have known a number of Catholics up through the years who felt that their church attendance on Sundays made them good Catholics. The other six days of the week they could do and say as they liked. They could make racist statements, be foul-mouthed, could behave unethically at work if necessary (the ends justify the means), and could be aggressive, domineering and even violent toward family members. I cannot presume to know the mind of God, but I have a hard time as a human being understanding that church attendance alone made them good Catholics. Yet I've never, in all my years of church attendance, heard this theme discussed in a sermon. Why? Why are priests afraid to take up this topic? Nowadays, the same can be said for the anti-abortionists; if you are anti-abortion, you are a good Catholic/Christian. But if you are against social welfare plans for taking care of young children in need, elderly people in need, sick people and disabled people in need, when you criticize sick people for being lazy, where are your Christian values then? Doesn't being pro-life mean being pro-all life? 

My father used to quote GK Chesterton, who said that The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried. My father passed away nearly forty years ago, and my mother over twenty years ago. They were both Christian people who tried in the best way they knew how to instill Christian values in their children. They never had much money, never owned a home, and were never the top dogs in the workplace. But they were good, solid people, with solid values and kind hearts. I cannot ever remember them verbally attacking people of other races and creeds. They were not foul-mouthed people. They were generous and hospitable and literate, interested in good books and good conversation. Were they perfect? No. But they were people who were aware of the presence of God in their daily lives. I've written a lot about my parents through the years and will continue to do so. They are my inspiration when it comes to living a Christian life. 

My laugh for today

Thank you, Stephan Pastis!