Ana on the Eighth Night

We had a wonderful mostly relaxing visit with Ariana, Jody, Noah and Toby, Sion Ben and Max, together, in Omaha this holiday season - it was a White Christmas and a bittersweet Chanukah. Aren't they all?

We are so grateful for everything, all is well. Many blessings this year.

See the photos here: Holidays 2008 Tonight is a huge full moon, stunning sight to the north of the Sandias.
Happy New Year 2009 - to all.

Spoiler Alert: Cute grandchildren Pics. No kidding they are really adorable! We had lots of fun with them, just playing, enjoying the gift of the moment.

P S Michele fell and broke both ankles November 18 - She is healing remarkably and doing very well! Send her an email miclupow@hotmail.com

LiL

I found this poem accidentally, and it calls to me to post it, which brought me back to updating this blog, which I was neglecting. I want to bring some of the beauty back from the workaday world. This poem reminds us of our options and asks us to be grateful for all of it.

It's called Waiting for Lumber

WAITING FOR LUMBER

Somehow none of us knew exactly
what time it was supposed to come.
So there we were, all of us, five men
at how much an hour given to picking
at blades of grass, tossing pebbles
at the curb, with nothing in the space
between the two red cones, and no distant
downshift of a roaring truck grinding
steadily towards us uphill. Someone thought
maybe one of us should go back to town
to call, but no one did, and no one gave
the order to. It was as if each to himself
had called a kind of strike, brought a halt,
locked out any impulse back to work.
What was work in our lives anyway?
No one recalled a moment of saying yes
to hammer and saw, or anything else.
Each looked to the others for some defining
move—the way at lunch without a word
all would start to rise when the foreman
closed the lid of his lunchbox—but
none came. The senior of us leaned
against a peach tree marked for demolition,
seemed almost careful not to give a sign.
And I, as I am likely to do—and who
knows, but maybe we all were—beginning
to notice the others there, and ourselves
among them, as if we could be strangers suddenly,
like those few evenings we had chosen to meet
at some bar and appeared to each other
in our street clothes—that was the sense—
of a glass over another creature's fate.
A hundred feet above our stillness
on the ground we could hear a breeze
that seemed to blow the moment past,
trifling with the leaves; we watched
a ranging hawk float past. It was the time
of morning when housewives return
alone from morning errands. Something
we had all witnessed a hundred times before,
but this time with new interest. And all of us
felt the slight loosening of the way things were,
as if working or not working were a matter
of choice, and who we were didn't
matter, if not always, at least for that hour.

Mark Turpin

Listen to Mark Turpin read "Waiting For Lumber"
Slate.com


Go NOW to Favorite Poem Project
Americans Saying Poems They Love

Also, please go to RedRavine Keeping the Faith - by ybonesy
Beautiful photos and thoughts on healing and collective consciousness