Hopkins' Hymn to Diversity

               PIED BEAUTY

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him

This is one of my favorite poems because it celebrates the unmatchable abundance of Creation.  Often I have been struck by the sheer excessiveness of the world's beauty --it seems almost gratuitous. This poem tackles that fact  head on.  What it seems to do  for me is to clear the way for each and everyone of us  to be loved in the eyes of God.  God made so much  difference in the world--each snowflake, each blade of grass, each DNA,--he made all that difference because he likes difference. HE  is all one and that means that he contains  multitudes. He contains all the possibilities, and he wants to see each and every one of them flourish. HE does not play favorites He created everything and  He pronounced everything that HE  made as GOOD.
I am watching  Pope Francis slowly ride through a crowd  of people many of them special needs children at the Madison Square Garden.  How great  god is to have sent a leader that  shows such receptivity  and inclusiveness to all that  humanity.  It is overwhelming and so obviously right once   we see it.  Why is it so rare?  How can we bring that love and acceptance into our daily lives?

Pope Francis Speaks of aging

One of the surprising and touching aspects of the Pope's remarks to  the American  public has been  his emphasis on the  process of aging.  He mentioned the loneliness of the aged and also to day to Congress he reminds us of the wisdom of the aged.  One of the  most poignant  insights is his  stressing of the  mixed nature of all things and of all of us. This thread of the  ways we should examine polarity and refuse to see everything  as either black or white.  He directly  points to the inadequacy of seeing reality always as  a duality. In  calling for a  universal global ending  of the death penalty, he  focuses on the fact of its  finality--that it erases  the chance of change and  rehabilitation.  I believe that applies to the  experience of aging and dying--as long as  we are breathing we have  within us the potential to change, to repent, to seek forgiveness and like the Prodigal Son to  turn back  to the loving arms of our FATHER who is always watching for us  on the road with arms ready to embrace us.
There is a golden thread that weaves  through every remark of the Pope-- to be at the service of dialogue and peace.  We must not write anyone off, must not declare anyone  as finished or hopeless. Especially we must not numb our hearts to the tender  mercies that flow constantly from God to each and every one of us on this planet. Each of us so different in our  circumstances and our DNA but each of us united by our  human dignity and our participation in the divinity that we each carry in our immortal soul.

Making new neural pathways--DAY ONE

Just read  that it takes 45 days of daily activity to create a new neural pathway in our  brains.  Another good reason not to  stay in a negative  space with negative  thinking for too long lest it become habitual. I  know that this blog has not been habitual  for me.  I  feel as if the  content is not as focused and sometimes I am not  sure if there is any  interest  or coherence in  what I  am writing.
My other  Blog "BACK IN THE BUCKET" contains  thoughts, memories and experiences  connected with my life in Pawtucket--where I was born and lived  until I went to  graduate school in 1966.  In 2009 when  I returned to Pawtucket  to  care for my aunt  who lived there,  I  retired prematurely --or maybe just in the nick of time--from  my  professorship at the University of Cincinnati.  I found so much the same in Pawtucket and so  much  that had changed. And I wanted to  react to it all.

This  Blog "MAKE SOMETHING OF IT' comes from a different inspiration.  I  was suddenly  plunged into the world of retirement, care giving and decreased mobility.  I also  was facing  and seeing for the first time the limits of my own  energy and  possibilities.

I wanted to explore the experience of aging and to see  what the tasks were that occupy  me now and how they are shaping my identity. In other words I wondered what to make of this sudden emptying out of  all or most of the activities that had filled my  life before. Also I wanted to  discover what I could make of this new experience.  I want  to make something of it--but gradually I  have come to see that the experiences were making something of me.  I was changing and I was not in charge of the changes.  Then I began to understand that change is the nature of living and that  I have never been in charge of the changes.  But I had an illusion that I was in charge.  I have lost much of that illusion now.  I want to make sense of what is left and what  use  God and  society can  make of me and the millions like me--people who are now over 70 years old and  feeling their energy and certainties diminishing and their questions  expanding.
So for the next 45 day--starting  with this entry I will  explore the experience and the  reality of racing towards eternity.