The Stone and the Pilgrim (5)

This is pretty cool.

Sun in Gemini

We stumbled upon the Preston Pele Tower, fifteen miles south-west of Bamburgh, back in February, 2018. My wife and I had seen a reference to it on a noticeboard in a cafe some distance to the north. It’s quite hard to find; tucked away down a tiny country lane not far from the A1 – the main road through Northumberland to Edinburgh. We’d never heard of a Pele Tower, either… We got out of the car and stared at it, never having seen anything quite like it. Was it a castle – or the remains of one? The location suggested not. It looked purpose-built, yet somehow incomplete….

Right up to the time the Castles of the Mind group approached the building, I didn’t know what part of the ‘self’ we could use it to describe. I entered the (to me) familiar building and trusted that the answer would reveal…

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Washington Post on Kavanaugh: “What Goes Around Comes Around”

THIS.

Diane Ravitch's blog

In a column by Post opinion writer Helaine Olen, she points out the “staggering hypocrisy” of Brett Kavanaugh.

He has said he doesn’t want to answer questions about his personal life, yet when he worked on the investigation of Bill Clinton, he zealously pursued prurient details about the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky.

“Kavanaugh was not only a part of special counsel Ken Starr’s investigation into President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he was also one of the lead Torquemadas of it — zealous in the pursuit of his goal to the point of cruelty. If Kavanaugh’s nomination survives till Thursday’s scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, at least one senator should ask him why he thought it was so necessary to ask Clinton such graphic questions about Lewinsky.

“Let me be clear: Kavanaugh not only thought Clinton needed to be questioned about his relations with Lewinsky; he also…

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Witch

Maybe it’s taken from us, but we can get it back.

Peedeel's Blog

We’re all born a Witch. We’re all born into magic. It’s taken from us as we grow up.

Madeleine L’Engle
The Crosswicks Journal

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“What Would Happen If One Woman Told the Truth about Her Life?” by Carol P. Christ

Feminism and Religion

According to poet Muriel Rukeyser, “the world would split open.”

This poem accurately describes what many women experienced in consciousness raising in the 1970s and what many women experience today in the #MeToo movement.

For many of us the world did split open. We began to take ourselves and our experiences seriously. To do so we had to question received wisdom encoded in such questions as: “What was she doing there in the first place?” “Was she drinking too?” “Why didn’t she change out of her bathing suit?” Underlying these questions is the assumption that: “whatever happened, she must have asked for it.”

A lot of people are wondering why congressmen and voters who claim to uphold Christian principles are not more outraged about credible allegations of sexual assault against a child whose name was Christine Blasey.

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what the storyteller does

Peedeel's Blog

I believe strongly that what we do as poets is but a variant of what the musician does, what the historian does, what the storyteller does, what the painter and what the sculptor does and what film makers do. My work as a poet relies on interdependence. I write in solitude but my work is not solitary. I am partner at one time with painters in whose work I see poems, in other times with composers’ work in which I hear the lines of poems, even in critical pieces containing the language of poetry.

Darrel Bourque
Call and Response: Conversations in Verse

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beyond speech

Peedeel's Blog

The language of poetry specializes in doubt. Without the doubters, everyone is cut off at the first question. Poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view; it aims to rightly identify what is looming; it intends to interrogate whatever is already in place. Poetry, whose definition remains evasive by necessity, advocates the lost road; and beyond speech — waiting, listening, and silence.

C.D. Wright
The Poet, the Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, a Wedding in St. Roch, the Big Box Store, the Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All

(How’s that for a title, boys and girls?)

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sense of eternity

Peedeel's Blog

If I lived by the sea I would never be really sad. I get an immense sense of eternity and peace from the ocean. I can lose myself in staring at it hour after hour.

Sylvia Plath
July 1951 letter to Aurelia Plath

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A Thousand Miles of History XXXX: Seeking sanity…

Another place of beauty

dare to put words on paper

Peedeel's Blog

What made me be a writer was that I was a passionate reader. I began reading at a very, very early age, and I’ve been a reading junkie ever since — I read all the time. I probably spend more time reading than any other thing I’ve done in my life, including sleeping. I’ve spent many, many days of my life reading eight and ten hours a day, and there’s no day that I don’t read for hours, and don’t ask me how I can do all the other things — I don’t know. The day has pockets — you can always find time to read.

Reading set standards. Reading opened up to me all these norms, or — to put it in a more naive and probably truthful way — ideals. So that to be part of literature, to be even the humblest, lowest member of the great multitude…

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turned into writers

Peedeel's Blog

Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. I sometimes think the test is not so much talent, which is not as rare as people think, but purpose or vocation, which manifests in part as the ability to endure a lot of solitude and keep working. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Rebecca Solnit
The Faraway Nearby

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