The Adoration of the Magi

 Elliot Ewritt, Mother and Child

 

The magi, as you know, were wise men--wonderfully wise men--who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.

--O’Henry “Gift of the Magi (Excerpt).

 

I thought that Elliot Ewritt’s photo evoked  deep love and adoration of a child, and so…The Magi. It also reminded me of O’Henry’s wonderful story about a couple who are deeply in love, desperately poor, living in a tiny flat but willing to sell their most precious possessions to buy one another  a Christmas present. It is one of my favorite stories of all time.

 

 Barocci Federico Fiori, Adoration of the Magi 1561-63

 

I know it is not the Christmas season, but I found the first photograph and thought it bore an uncanny resemblance to the ancient scene. Such are the workings of the collective unconscious.   This second photo is an ancient chalk drawing from the 16th century, which despite its years and pale color, I found quite warm and inviting.  Mary looks tenderly at the infant in her lap and one of the Magi almost appears to be kissing the feet of the infant.

 

The following is a video by Sungha Jung playing Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring, arranged by Windham Hill. He is only 10 in this video. You may offer him adoration for his fine performance.

 

Où sont les fleurs d'antan?

White Cloud flowers—Retro camera shot Noelle Renee 8/29/10

 

Purple ballerinas retro shot—Noelle Renee 8/29/10

 

Sunlight on a Rose Veranda—Retro Shot Noelle Renee 8/29/10

 

Theme Music from “Somewhere in Time” Composer John Barry

Tina Modotti: Silver-toned Simplicity

Woman of Tehauntepec carrying jecapixtle (1929)

Manita 

Hammer and Sickle

Woman and Child

 Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and others in “Mayday”

Calla Lilies

Tina Modotti

(1896-1942)
Fine Art, Portraiture

Biography: Tina Modotti was a remarkable woman and an outstanding photographer whose legendary beauty and relationships with famous men have until now eclipsed a life integrally linked to the most important artistic, political and historical developments of our century.
In 1913 Tina Modotti left her native Italy for San Francisco, becoming a star of the local Italian theatre before marrying the romantic poet-painter Roubaix de I'Abrie Richey. By 1920, she had embarked on a Hollywood film career and immersed herself in bohemian Los Angeles, beginning an intense relationship with the respected American photographer, Edward Weston. On a trip to Mexico in 1922 to bury her husband, she met the Mexican muralists and became enthralled with the burgeoning cultural renaissance there. Increasingly dissatisfied with the film world, she persuaded Weston to teach her photography and move with her to Mexico. Her Mexico City homes became renowned gathering places for artists, writers and radicals, where Diego Rivera courted Frida Kahlo. Turning her camera to record Mexico in its most vibrant years, her photographs achieve a striking synthesis of artistic form and social content. Her contact with Mexico's muralists including a brief affair with Rivera, led to her involvement in radical politics.
In 1929, she was framed for the murder of her Cuban lover, gunned down at her side on a Mexico City street. A scapegoat of government repression, she was publicly slandered in a sensational trial before being acquitted. Expelled from Mexico in 1930, she went to Berlin and then to the Soviet Union, where she abandoned photography for a political activism that brought her into contact with Sergei Eisenstein, Alexandra Kollontaii, La Pasionaria, Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa. Returning to Mexico incognito in 1939, she died three years later, a lonely - and controversial - death.
(Tina Modotti - Photographer and revolutionary by Margaret Hooks)

Retro-Spective

Jessie Martin Age 5

I've been looking so long at these pictures of you
That I almost believe that they're real
I've been living so long with my pictures of you
That I almost believe that the pictures are
All I can feel*

 I took this picture from an old photograph of my mother. She was all of five years old. I believe that I have another post with a better and clearer replica of it, but I downloaded a “Retro Camera” on my mobile phone and thought it might be interesting to take a shot of a very old photograph and make it look even more antique than it already was. I did not expect it to come out even this well, considering that it is a picture of a picture and taken on a phone camera, but some images are so powerful that they overwhelm even technical devices. I think about my mother a lot. I miss her, and this photograph reminds me of how lovely she was and also how her image is fading from my memory. I am glad that I took the picture.  She was a beautiful little girl, and I hope that her spirit is as light now as it was in this photograph. 

Remembering
You how you used to be
Slow drowned
You were angels
So much more than everything
Hold for the last time then slip away quietly
Open my eyes
But I never see anything

If only I'd thought of the right words
I could have held on to your heart
If only I'd thought of the right words
I wouldn't be breaking apart
All my pictures of you*

*--“Pictures of You” excerpt of Lyrics by The Cure

Sometimes the World Just Offers itself to You

Snowy Peaks on the Horizon by Danis

 

 

You need not even listen, just wait.
You need not even wait, just learn to be quiet, still and solitary.
The world will offer itself freely to you, unmasking itself.
It has no choice in the matter.
It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-franz Kafka

 

 

Haiku My Heart: Goat Girl

A girl and her goat

A Swiss Alpine tale sans fur

hooves, ears and caprice.

 The Lonely Goatherd from The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews

For more Haiku My Heart visit Rebecca's blog.

Technorati Tags: The Swiss Alpine Tale: "Heidi" by Johanna Spyri

Technorati Tags: Latin word for goat is Capra. Capricious literally means- fantastic goat leap.

September Morning

September Morning __ By: Dave K



Try To Remember

Try to remember the kind of September
when life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
when grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
when you were a tender and callow fellow,
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Try to remember when life was so tender
that no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender that
dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender that
love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Deep in December it's nice to remember
although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
without the hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December it's nice to remember
the fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December our hearts should remember and follow.


--Harry Belafonte Lyrics


Try to Remember by Harry Belafonte

Morning Glorious

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

~ e.e. cummings ~

(Complete Poems 1904-1962)

Jerusalem: A Film for the Children of Gaza by Noelle Renee

Jerusalem: A Film for the Children of Gaza from Noelle Clearwater on Vimeo.
"More than half of Gaza's population are children. Though none of them has ever voted for Hamas, they're the designated targets of Israel's military operations and more generally, of the siege imposed upon Gaza. They're resilient children, standing up against a multitude of ailments and obstacles. According to a recent report of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society, 52 percent of Gaza's children are anemic and suffer from serious nutritional problems due to the insufficiency of phosphorous, calcium and zinc in their food. The rate of respiratory illnesses they suffer is also cause for concern.


Gaza's children suffer from psychological disorders, the consequence of enduring Israel's attacks and siege. Their memories of dismembered bodies and burning buildings are indelible traumas that make them anxious and depressed, insomniac or incontinent. They live in overcrowded spaces without recreational areas. In the same streets where they now play, they remember having seen live flesh burning or rotting bodies. Missiles, destruction and death are evoked in their drawings whenever you hand them a blank piece of paper."

If the right to play is a luxury here, the right to an education is denied. Besides toys and medicine, Israel has also blocked the entry of elementary school textbooks. Unlike the majority of Israeli children, Gaza's children suffer from hunger and poverty. I see them every day pushing ploughs in the fields, or rummaging through the garbage bins, looking for recyclable material. In the unbearable heat of this damp summer, they sit atop mule-drawn carts, overloaded with bricks and stone blocks recycled from shelled buildings. Alternatively, you can find them at street crossings selling trinkets, their gazes like those of tired old men, unable to dream of green courtyards, soccer fields and ice cream vans.

It's not hide-and-seek they're playing when they disappear underground in the Rafah tunnels; risking being buried alive, they're the workforce that's most economically and physically viable to smuggle goods that would otherwise never make it onto the shelves of Gaza shops.

Jasmine Whitbread, Director General of Save the Children explained that "Gaza's children are hungry on account of the considerable difficulties met by the entry of food into the area. They're dying because they cannot leave Gaza and receive the medical attention they so urgently need. Hundreds of thousands of children are growing up without an adequate education because scholastic buildings were seriously damaged. Due to the restrictions on the access of building material, those buildings can't even be fixed. Children pay the highest price for the siege."

Besides advertising such neglected data, it's worth drawing attention to the fact that the Gaza Strip's children have just broken two Guinness book records in seven days. On Thursday, 22 July in the space occupied by the remnants of Gaza's airport -- destroyed by the Israeli Air Force in 2001 -- the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) organized a summer camp for more than 7,200 children who each bounced a basketball simultaneously for five minutes. A few days later, on 29 July, Gaza's children also registered the record of the greatest number of kites flown at the same time.

On the beach of Beit Lahiya, in northern Gaza near the boundary with Israel, the sky was adorned by thousands of multicolored hexagons, a vivid metaphor of the freedom craved by Gaza's youngest citizens. More than seven thousand children flew their kites, doubling last year's official record.

At the end of the day, John Ging, UNRWA's chief of operations in Gaza, said that "Breaking two world records in just one week is in itself an astonishing achievement. This is a demonstration of what Gaza's children can do, if only they're given the chance. These kids are exactly like all others the world over; they wish to live a normal life, far removed from the adversities they're forced to face, day in, day out." Ging concluded: "This day of celebration is an expression of a request for freedom on the children's part."

Unlike the basketballs used in Rafah, the kites flown over Beit Lahiya were not industrially produced, but handmade by those same children who then released them into the sky. Some were brightly decorated, while many proudly wore the colors of the Palestinian flag. It was like a scream of resistance in visual form, flying in front of the Israeli surveillance towers only a few hundred meters away.

After the kite flying event was officially registered as a new Guinness world record, an Israeli warship appeared on the horizon, slowly advancing towards the coast of Beit Lahiya. It was a cruel reminder that recreation time was over."

Vittorio Arrigoni is a journalist in Gaza City.
This essay was translated from Italian by Daniela Filippin. 
From Gaza's record-breaking children 
Vittorio Arrigoni writing from occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 16 August 2010 

---

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Haiku My Heart: Bear Reflections

Polar Bear by Jack and Jill  For more Haiku see Rebecca’s Blog

A Reflecting Pool

Draws Light to What is Hidden

Bearing Tender Souls.

--Noelle Renee

 

 

Rose Meditation by Noelle Renee

Sometimes it is essential to simply pause, breathe deeply, listen to the spirit within and smell the roses. Relax and get what is needed.
Rose Meditation from Noelle Clearwater on Vimeo.

The Flower School

"When storm-clouds rumble in the sky and
June showers come down,
The moist east wind comes marching over the heath
to blow its bagpipes amongst the bamboos.
The crowds of flowers come out of a sudden,
from nobody knows where,
and dance upon the grass in wild glee.

Mother, I really think the flowers go to school underground.
They do their lessons with doors shut,
and if they want to come out to play before it is time,
their master makes them stand in a corner.
When the rains come they have their holidays.
Branches clash together in the forest,
and the leaves rustle in the wild wind,
the thunder-clouds clap their giant hands and
the flower children rush out in dresses of
pink, yellow and white.

Do you know, mother, their home is in the sky,
where the stars are.

Haven't you seen how eager they are to get there?
Don't you know why they are in such a hurry?

 
Of course, I can guess to whom they raise their arms,
they have their mother as I have my own."

This poem is from 'The Crescent Moon' by 

Rabindrath Tagore

Flower Photographs are by Noelle Renee

Flowers courtesy of the Creator. Heavenly Music Courtesy of Delibes and Molly Sander (an excellent photographer in this film –much better than moi ).

Cloudy

You: you are the cloud I never name,
The language that I cannot learn, the game,
I neither lose nor altogether win;
Illusion of another world above
The world beneath, outside the world within.
I squint, I blink -- but still I see you, love.

--From “The Clouds” by Thomas Disch

Cloudy by Simon and Garfunkel

Keeping in Touch

 http://1x.com/v2/#member/4606/renato-manzi/

"I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."--Didion from On Keeping a Notebook

I remember a very shy, lonely nine-year-old girl who used to sit inside the Catholic Church during recess at the parish school she attended. She was afraid to be laughed at, afraid the other children wouldn't want to play with her, and she found comfort in the dark, musty smell of the old nave with its burning wax candles and the faint scent of incense from last Sunday's mass still in the air. As she sat in a pew by herself with her head in her hands, she could see through the cracks of her fingers, sunlight streaming through the wine-red, mustard and azure-blue stained glass windows that opened near her. She could hear, beyond the windows, the sound of children laughing at play outside.  Somehow, that multi-colored light held promise and safety. As she looked up, she saw a statue of the infant Jesus of Prague in princely robes holding the earth in his hands. "Such courage, she thought, to be a child and carry the world like that all by one's self."

There is another girl I remember, older, more sure of herself, who moved to Santa Barbara at age 21, found old friends with whom to live and made many new ones. Most significantly, she found a new identity, a name that gave her life meaning and promise. She lay in the sun on nude beaches, drank wine and rode horses in the surf, Lady Godiva style. She acted in amateur radio shows and even on stage at a local theater where she performed in a play with able-bodied and deaf and disabled actors.  She met and fell in love with a man, almost got married, and then fell out of love. She lived in a college town, in a spiritual community of people young and old, and helped tend a communal garden. She decided at age 23 to return to college and found her passion in English literature, eventually to become a teacher of the same.

That little nine-year-old girl, sitting in the darkened church, alone, bereft of a father and with few close friends could not imagine how life would change for her. But strangely, it is she whom I recall most vividly.  I still see her in my dreams and often when I am sad. And so I would like to say to her now, "It is going to be alright. You will grow up and be an amazing woman, kind, creative, compassionate and generous of spirit. Know that you are worthy of love." Yes, I think Joan Didion is right, "We are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not." And so I nod to her now, and she smiles back at me and waves, from a distance.

Josh Groban: You're Still You

Rainforest God

http://pixdaus.com/single.php?id=257229&from=email

Rainforest Ubud, Bali Cuba Gallery@post by Connie

(carving completely embedded in nature)

In the Forest's Heart

Bathed in a Numinous Light

We Meet the Sacred

--Noelle Renee

Rainforest Sounds

Haiku My Heart:The Dreams of Horses

posted by Zafar1


The dreams of horses

are glazed with dusty sunlight

and smell of sweet hay

--Noelle Renee

America, A Horse with No Name

Pretty Tail by Noelle Renee Clearwater

Photo Edward Curtis "Lucille" 1907

Pretty Tail

by Noelle Clearwater

Hawk soars and Eagle flies!

You, a young man with all the world in front of you—

God! If I had only known you then--

Sitting in a 1940’s diner, gray sport coat and baggy tweed pants,

A smooth, felt hat cocked jauntily on the back of that scraggy head.

Grey, stormy eyes and squared jaw give you that look of conscious determination

All but lost in later years.

Across from you sits a military private—your best friend,

It is a long way from reservation, yet you hear the beating of the pow-wow drum

Like blood coursing through a river of veins,

The dust rises and hangs thick in the Montana plains, making your native blood boil.

I could have loved you then, you who seemed afraid of little else than loving me.

I would have loved to hear the great old stories—held in check—behind those still, dark eyes

And determined fists ready to strike at the first man who called you Crow.

You spat fire when you were angry and blood upon a page when you were drunk—

Language was your gift; liquor your nemesis,

Ill-treated and imprisoned—your story yet unpenned,

You dug ditches in the rich brown earth that lies, still, as fallow as your grave.

Betrayed by pride and burning with rancor, you would not defend

Those who bent to lick the boots of whites, who held your neck so near the ground.

No, you would not defend your people, nor would you defend me.

Father, had I met you in that diner, I would have drunk a gin with you,

I, an honored warrior at your table, would have asked you for the stories of the Old Ones—

Of Plenty Coups and his visions of white alliance,

Of Great Grandmother with her silver-plaited hair and soft, deer-moccasined feet,

Of brown, and hopeful children who knew their fathers’ blood and the plains where they were born,

Of the tradition called the Sun Dance whose god I never knew, and you wished forever to forget.

But those stories are buried with you Old Man,

No nightmare-ridden sleep, nor need to hear your voice will bring them back,

And your words, like frail whispers—

fall to the dying earth,

like so many ashes over Little Big Horn.

I was twenty-three when you crossed over,

And I can never remember hearing those three words spoken,

That would have healed my heart.

Hawk soars and Eagle flies!

I wipe my tears alone, and walk away.

--Noelle Clearwater (all rights to poem reserved by author)

Note on the poem: I wrote this poem in a day after looking at an old black and white photo of my friend's father in the company of his best friend, a marine. Pat's father, whose tribal name was "Pretty Tail" was Crow Indian, an alcoholic and had been in prison for several years before Patrick was born. Theirs was a difficult relationship. From that information and a little more on the Crow nation, I wrote this poem. It has had some revisions since but not many.

The Beauty of Nature Music by Spiritual Flutes

Daniel Duvall Mayers: Moon River Memories

When I was nine years old I remember my father coming to visit us one day, quite unexpectedly.  I knew my father for only one complete year of my life, and this was one of the four times within that year’s span that I can recall seeing him. I remember him walking up, tentatively, to the open front door of our small apartment and embracing the curly-headed little blonde girl, who stood boldly in the doorway and called him “Daddy.”

Not long after he had arrived, he sat down at the small, mahogany veneer piano, on which my sister practiced religiously, and he began to play a soft, melancholy tune that hangs in my memory still. Moon River.  As his fingers traveled in a trance over the familiar black and white keys to his childhood, I realized that this man, my father, drank tears as other men drink their coffee of a morning.

There was a sweet sadness in his playing that I have not heard since.  My mother told me later--rather mockingly I thought--that my father had the ability to play almost anything he had heard once, provided he could transpose it into the key of ‘C’.  It was as if he must bring all musical expression, I supposed, to that central place on the keyboard where sharps and flats are tonically subdued—such was the pain that made up his life.

When I turned twenty-three, nine years after my father’s early and rather senseless death, I watched the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time.  It is one of my favorite films to this day.  The image of Audrey Hepburn singing the words to Moon River accompanied by the soft strains of an acoustic guitar, made me see my father’s peaceful face and graceful hands once again.  As I watched Hepburn’s character “Holly Golightly” gaze longingly beyond the window of her tiny flat, set in a building flanked on either side by the high brick walls of New York City, I identified her sadness with mine.  She too had run away from home a long time ago and had no real place in the world to call her own.

I thought of my father as he must have been before he died, lying in his bed, looking out the window—with only a burning cigarette in his hand for company—his spirit flanked on either side by the sterile walls of an eastern state sanitarium.

 He was a long way from home, even when he returned for a visit.  And the dramatic emptiness that made up his life is the space that I’ve been left to fill.  I still cry when I see the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s. And I realize that Life is a long song that swells and ebbs on waves of yearning and discord, and though it rarely reaches resolution, its music must always be heard.
--Noelle Clearwater (all rights reserved by the author).

Moon River

Moon river, wider than a mile

I'm crossing you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There's such a lot of world to see

We're after the same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend

My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

(moon river, wider than a mile

(I'm crossin' you in style some day

Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

Wherever you're goin', I'm goin' your way

Two drifters, off to see the world

There's such a lot of world to see

We're after that same rainbow's end, waitin' 'round the bend

My huckleberry friend, moon river, and me

--Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini 1961

Breakfast at Tiffany's "Moon River" (Window Scene) Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard

Nota Bene: Pictures above are not my father or me.