Cut Worm Sues Plough

"The cut worm forgives the plough," according to Blake's philosophical proverb - but I'm guessing that things have really changed.

Heroine

Tiny, tender-hearted
Mighty little girl
Tackling with innocence
The problems of the world.

To Stake A Claim

We capture and hold by virtue of our love alone. There is no other lasting claim to ownership. Things belong to the people who love them. We belong to the people who love us. All other claims are bogus phony-baloney, and ultimately annulled.

Harvest Moon Ball

Sixty-six years ago today the Harvest Moon Ball was held at Madison Square Garden in New York City. This was a prestigious annual dance competition emceed by Ed Sullivan, and one of the celebrity entertainers that year was Ray Bolger, fresh from his immortal appearance as Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

I don't know what Ed Sullivan might have gotten out of the deal, but I do know for sure that on that night Ray Bolger received a wallet embossed with his initials and the legend "Harvest Moon Ball 1940," and that he put this wallet into use and it became filled with both usual and unusual wallet-stuff over the course of the next five or six years, at which point it was retired.

After a gap of about six decades this wallet came into my possession. It took me awhile to put together the above-described facts and circumstances. It took me so long because the legend "Harvest Moon Ball" seemed so self-explanatory to me, "Harvest" suggesting the image of a scarecrow, "Ball" of course evoking dancing - a dancing scarecrow - and "Moon" adding the appropriate element of mystery and magic. It all seemed so perfectly right and descriptive and sensible that I didn't require any more explanation than that.

Needless to say, though, I did get more explanation than that - and so now the phrase means all of that other stuff too.

Give Me A Present

I have read that members of the dream-intensive Senoi culture are taught from the earliest age to confront nightmare figures by demanding a gift from them.

I have never developed a knack for lucid dreaming, and since I'd sure hate to miss out on reaping the benefits of what seems like a darn good idea, I'm now thinking that it may well be worth applying this same strategy to my regular waking life.

Rachel's Work

Last December I attended a holiday celebration where all the children created cards to distribute to the grown-ups. The one I received featured a design of paint-dipped fingerprints on the outside, and inside two crayon-drawn girls with big smiles inside a red heart and the inscription "Joy to You and Me." It's signed "From Rachel." Rachel's name has been scratched out, and above it, also in crayon, "From Justin."

This is clearly Rachel's work. I even like the "fingerprints" touch on the cover of her card. It makes me wonder why anybody even bothers to claim someone else's work as their own, when the truth of the matter is ultimately so, so transparent.

Bouquet

I once received a dozen roses, sweet little buds when they arrived, that all flared into glorious full bloom within a day or two. I had never seen that before - part of the fascination of receiving a bouquet is in watching each flower open at it's own pace and seeing them all, at any given moment, in an entertaining variety of poses. But this particular bouquet became even more astonishing, as all twelve blossoms continued on in unrelenting full bloom day after day after day. Not one of them drooped. Not one petal fell. Eventually they sort of dried out in their vase, looking rather brittle and with a dark tinge at the extremity of each petal, yet still "holding that thought," so to speak - the thought of an utterly perfect bouquet of roses.

So there you have it. That's my plan, too.

Unconflicted Joy

I'll risk the "huh?" factor so frequently brought on by King Jamesian English, and quote my favorite Bible verse in that format:

"Happy is he that condemneth not himself in that thing which he alloweth."

That's from Romans 14. The whole chapter has a "to the pure all things are pure" theme. The verse itself could say "You'll be happy if you don't judge yourself for doing the things that you enjoy," but without all of that "eth" stuff, where's the weighty, Biblical mojo that makes quoting Bible verses so satisfying?

The Real Words

When we took our family vacation to Italy, my older son was eleven. In preparation for the trip we studied up on ancient Rome, Renaissance artists, and learned a bit of Italian. After we had been there for a week, my son suddenly stopped dead in his tracks and said "I just got it."

"Got what?"

"That the Italian people think in Italian. This whole time I thought Italian was just a code that the people in Italy liked to use, but that they knew the real words!"

The Psycho

I saw a sweatshirt that said:

"It is better to have loved and lost than to live with the psycho for the rest of your life."

Boy, I'd never thought that one through before, never really considered what it means to have loved ... and won.

Walk Your Own Mile

The ever-eloquent Mr. Emerson observes that "All the mistakes I make arise from forsaking my own station and trying to see the object from another person's point of view."

That's an interesting contrarian perspective, completely opposed to the more familiar idea about walking a mile in the other guy's shoes. I guess there are so many other guys out there, though, that you could easily spend your life sympathetically walking endless weary miles, when not one of those miles was really yours to walk.

Chaos of Love

Chaos is a mighty power
Used for evil, dark, and sin;
Claim and use it from this hour
If you're good, and want to win.

Father Figure

There is hardly anything more enjoyable to me than coming upon one of my literary favorites writing about another. Mark Twain's essay "In Defense of Harriet Shelley" is, as the title suggests, a beautiful, loving, fatherly perspective on Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet. Everybody knows that the love story between Percy and Mary Shelley is one of the great romances in literary history, but his first wife certainly was a lovely person who did nothing wrong.

Twain was the father of three daughters, and he had a wonderful, compassionate sensitivity to Harriet's plight. Yet his defense of her did not require him to impugn Shelley. He was able to turn the same warm, fatherly eye onto the Poet himself, in this description of Shelley's character:

"He had done things which one might laugh at, but the privilege of laughing was limited always to the thing itself; you could not laugh at the motive back of it - that was high, that was noble. His most fantastic and quixotic acts had a purpose back of them which made them fine, often great, and made the rising laugh seem profanation and quenched it; quenched it, and changed the impulse to homage."

Tough Guy

My friend Scott "The Bear" Chazdon says he was once a tough guy, until he noticed that when he quit carrying guns and knives, he quit getting shot and stabbed.

Glass Slipper

In the story of Cinderella, the heroine always knows who has her slipper - the Prince! It's his challenge to find her in the crowd.

I once dreamed that, from across a small distance, a familiar stranger held out a shoe that I immediately recognized as that slipper I'd been missing.

More To Come

Benjamin Franklin began his autobiography when he was sixty-five years old, in the form of a letter to his son. He had lived an extremely full, busy, industrious life of accomplishment; he was growing old and he wanted to capture the story of his discoveries, insights, and activities for posterity.

The year was 1771, and his truly gigantic achievements still lay ahead of him.

Broke

When I read Barbara Leaming's biography of Orson Welles, the most striking thing to me was that the guy was always broke, and yet he was living proof that there are drastically different ways to be broke. A lot of people are broke in a slum; Orson Welles was broke at Eden Roc.

Like That

Marcus Aurelius says "The best revenge is to not be like that."

He doesn't say, but I think the implication is clear, that the best gratitude is to be like that, to carry it forward by embodying it.

And The Moral Is...

It's not that I perceive a moral to the story - or rather, when I do perceive a moral to the story, something unexpectedly changes, and the moral I perceived is no longer valid, or at least not universal enough to make a fable out of it.

Still, I do wish I could write fables just for the sheer joy of being able to call myself a fabulist.

Confess!

It seems to me that by now God must have heard all the variations on the theme of sin. It's got to be dreadfully dull and boring and repetitive to have to listen to more and more of the same old thing.

Time to do what's smart, and confess your beauty.

Worthy

Now here's a surprise. My younger son has no interest in attaining heaven, on the grounds that heaven would be "too much hard work."

I pointed out that heaven is usually portrayed as being quite the opposite of hard work, but he says that in order to get into heaven you would have to prove yourself worthy. Once you'd done that, you would naturally be expected to keep on doing worthy things thereafter and forevermore. The heck with that!

(If that's what it is, though - I'll do it.)

No Time

My sons are six years apart, so I no sooner had one off to school than I had a new bundle of joy in my arms. I spent a total of twelve years at home with a preschooler. During those dozen years I read constantly - stacks and stacks of beautiful literature.

Yet on many occasions I would hear one of my fellow-moms complain that she had no time to read. It made me feel that none of us has any time to do anything; we all make time to do the things that really matter.

Her Spiritual Community

Today Martha said that she went looking for a community that would care if she died, and instead she found a community that cared if she lived.

Poem in Jewelry

When not around my neck, my diamonds are displayed against black velvet, upright in their presentation box, just as they should be. At the bottom of this box I keep the necklace I was wearing on the day I got my diamonds: a chunky sterling silver heart, torn in two and held together by three gold bands.

Imagination's The Mother

I've been told that I ought to cotton to reality more than I do, but everything begins as an idea, and reality is made out of imagination anyway. Our choice is whether to live in our own imagination, or in response to someone else's.

Conjuring to Ozzy Osbourne

I have been deeply involved in the world of magic and magicians for years, but decided to take a "secrets of magic" approach to that and say nothing about it here. This will be the exception.

I love vintage magic props - preposterous, brightly-painted things that sit on a magic table and do something clever. I find them lovably hilarious. One of my very earliest magic routines was to put on a sparkly gown, wave a wand, and put several of these things through their paces.

Enacting this scene to the Ozzy Osbourne heavy-metal classic "Perry Mason" probably wouldn't be the obvious thing to do, but that is what I did. The entire picture I was presenting struck me as so lost in a cloud-bedimmed fairyland that I felt it required major, major ballast.

Ever-Loving Dream Girl

It's just a phrase I wanted to say. Hope it made your day.

Dimension X

If you give me a hundred dollars, I feel it. But if I purchase something from you and you tell me that I saved a hundred dollars, I don't. The experience of "getting a bargain" is so flat and unsatisfying that I hope my friend Henry's theory is correct; he believes that there must be a "Dimension X, where you can finally spend all that money you saved."