The seasons of our lives, love to birth to death, bring moments of joy, of hope, of loss, occasions by which we learn to be in others, ourselves. These occasions, the courting, the marriage, the birthday, the anniversary, the funeral and that final epitaph each deserve words appropriate to the occasion, suitable to the person. …
The homes of the gods are most often constructed near their sacred springs, the site of their miracles, their births, or the location of some occasional visitation. Most often, at home, there was a table for feasting, then, as now, known as an “altar”. There was a porch, maybe two, and within the main room…
For most of us, Aeolus is difficult, if not impossible to see, being “Wind”, as he is. Even so, watch the leaves, as on this October day I have done. If you will do as I have done, you will see, as did Leonardo, the pattern of the god, the twist and the turn of…
Many years ago, beneath nine, lovely, star-snowed nights, Mnemosyne [ne-mos-ie-ne] enjoyed the favor of Zeus-shepherd, each night bearing forth from love a Muse, as Hesiod in Theogony relates. Before the Muse History (Clio), before Love Poetry (Erato), before Song (Euterpe) and all the rest, there was Memory (Mnemosyne), god borne, corporeal, beautiful. We muse in…
A Review of Civilization in Little Songs: You, friend, ascend from many victories. All who read these words shall know we won, that we through three millennia have won upon the bloody fields of contest; that through rolls of papyrus, through vellum folios, through books stitched in hard-covered paper we won the sharp battle of…
The dancing step, the telling gesture, memory in movement; we can imagine the joy, the ritual, the sacrifice to God in our days cave-safe, firelit some 40,000 years before this day, creatures as now we are yet without advantage, without these past millennia of humane tradition, the gift of thought, the accumulation of wisdom that…
Reality is a mundane enchantment, a make-believe typical to creatures of our type, to sensate creatures who cannot see over the horizon, who cannot hear through walls, who feel but by direct touch, whose peculiar quality of taste can be known only to the self, alone. We are pretty creatures, flesh alike pearl, geometric in…
Words, in their way, might help us see the objects of creation, those creations which grow in beauty from the mind of man. Statues, pictures, et cetera, we understand by words, those vessels of ideas before, beyond the things themselves. Words contain the universe, a universe which knows itself by the mind of man. We…
