A Franciscan Benidiction

This is a great prayer for the mornings.

May God bless us with discomfortAt easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationshipsSo that we may live from deep within our hearts.

May God bless us with angerAt injustice, oppression, and exploitation of God's creationsSo that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace.

May God bless us with tearsTo shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war,So that we may reach out our hands to comfort them andTo turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless us with just enough foolishnessTo believe that we can make a difference in the world,So that we can do what others claim cannot be done:To bring justice and kindness to all our children and all our neighbors who are poor.Amen.

Coffee

Now brewing Fair Trade Organic Costa Rican from Central Market. A good coffee to buy in small amounts and brew on weekends. Highly recomended.

The Classroom and Community

I was thinking today about first year teachers frustrations with discipline and management. Many choose sarcasm, threats and fear to achieve unity; that works for a time but it kills community and in the end the students hate you. It also subverts any productive learning that can and should take place in a classroom. So here's my thought- this is initial and I have done no research so bear with me- the classroom should be a community. It should run like, feel like and look like a community. Everyone has a part to contribute and every voice counts. The voices of my ninth graders are stifled many times by bureaucracy and arrogance. For them to be heard and understood is a blessing they long for and rarely receive. Over the next month I will continue with this and come up with a few experiments in my classroom at community building.

The poem below reminds me every day that sometimes we need to be reminded of our loveliness, and I think that the classroom is a great place to start.....(more to come....


Saint Francis and the Sow
by Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Poems

I have been reading over this poem for a couple of weeks and it still yeilds suprises everytime I go over it. Such technical language at the begining and then flows into more imaginative fluid language near the end. The lists at the begining are constricting and robotic, whereas the end is fluid and full of alliteration.


When I Heard the Learned Astronomer

by Walt Whitman
When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide,
and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with
much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

More to come....

More to come.....