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How to Greet a New Year
Wherever you are, even if you’re feeling a bit lost, you are sure to find yourself in the final essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser. It’s a lovely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us. Enjoy: Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away. There’s a windy, perilous…
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When the sun stops for a moment . . .
Dawn light began stealing Through the cold universe to County Meath, Over weirs where the Boyne water, fulgent, darkling, Turns its thick axle, over rick-sized stones Millennia deep in their own unmoving And unmoved alignment. (from A Dream of Solstice by Seamus Heaney) This morning, once again, the sun paused for its moment of solstice before changing direction to move northward. From the Latin, solstitium, the apparent standing still of the sun, the Winter Solstice is a turning point, something I look forward to each year. The day after my daughter’s birthday, it is a lovely reminder that the light is coming. At Newgrange, a neolithic burial tomb even older than Stonehenge, in the Boyne valley outside…
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Silent Nights – from Scotland to Sandy Hook.
December 14, 2012 Cold and lifeless, the bodies of twenty little children lie where they were gunned down that morning at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The crime scene, a day before, was a school. The medical examiner’s team begins its work through the night to make sure there are no mistakes, no shadow of doubt about the names of those children – 12 girls, eight boys – along with those of six women shot at close range by a 20 year-old man, whose name everyone now knows. Later, a state trooper is assigned to each anguished family in close-knit Newtown, Connecticut, as they wait for confirmation of what they already know. And, stunned families all…
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Belfast Peace Lines, Borders, Dr. Martin Luther King, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights Movement, Human Rights, Ireland, Justice, Marriage Equality Referendum, Memoir, Northern Ireland, Politics, Seamus Heaney, Themes of Childhood
A Lesson in Domestic Affairs – Northern Ireland style. (P.S. Thank you Louise Kennedy)
It is the morning after Thanksgiving, uncharacteristically rainy and gray in the desert southwest. Relishing my solitude and a second cup of coffee, I settle in to read the Irish Times. When I spot this headline, I put down my cup. She doesn’t know it, but writer, Louise Kennedy, has just made my Thanksgiving complete. She doesn’t know me either, but she knows something about me, something I had until this very morning discarded as trivial. Indulge me while I tell you about the Hamlyn All Colour CookBook nailed here by Kennedy: The book seems hideously kitsch now, but there was something heart-breakingly earnest and aspirational on those pages. There…
