Dudley Field Malone

In my book, you get m ore credit for being a feminist if you have a Y chromosome, and more credit yet if the year is 1915.   Born this day in 1882, Dudley Malone was a feminist before his time.   After inheriting a position in New York’s Democratic machine, he resigned his appointed position and the Party in order to protest Woodrow Wilson’s failure to support women’s suffrage.  He later ran third-party campaigns to support his progressive agenda.

‘I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.’

Clemency of our children

‘Parenting has to be monstrously difficult.  Every parent lives with the pain of compromise and regret for things they wish they had handled differently…

and yet most young people are so resilient, they come out great!’

– Chris McGinley

When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it's over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

~ Mary Oliver ~

This poem is a first for this page.
Death is a difficult subject for me, and I have not known how to treat it in the context of inspiration, except by denial.

We pass our lives learning to accept, but not just to accept: also to trust, for acceptance without trust is resignation.

Death is the hardest thing to trust.  (But what else can we do but trust?)

— JJM

Expanded senses

A moth can smell its mate from as far off as seven miles, and a shark can scent blood in the water two miles away. A bloodhound can detect the scent of an absconding criminal for scores of miles among thousands of other scents left by animals and human beings that have walked the same way. Bees find their way by polarized light imperceptible to human beings, and whales locate their prey with sonar echoes thousands of feet below the ocean. What worlds are hidden from us we cannot even imagine!

— Gopi Krishna

Shall any gazer see with mortal eyes,
Or any searcher know by mortal mind?  
Veil after veil will lift — but here must be
Veil upon veil behind.

— Edwin Arnold, born this day in 1832

Unconventional choices

Richard Hayes Phillips is a modern-day minstrel with a PhD in geology, but what he loves to do most is to work in the wild with the Adirondack Trail Improvement project . 

‘The reason why most people cannot do what they want to do, or what they are called to do, is because their time is not their own. Most of us have a full-time job, or are looking for one, or are studying in preparation for one. Most of us struggle to pay the bills and cannot possibly finance a serious investigation, even on a shoestring basis. Most adults have dependent family members in need of income, care and sustenance. And most of us shun controversy because we fear criticism, ridicule, intimidation, retaliation, and ostracism; or because we doubt that we can do what we have never done before; or because we think that nothing we can do will make a difference.’

Phillips has recently completed a meticulous, 3-year investigation of the 2004 election in Ohio

Triad

FROM the Silence of Time, Time’s Silence borrow. 

In the heart of To-day is the word of To-morrow.

The Builders of Joy are the Children of Sorrow.

— William Sharp

‘He who wonders discovers that this in itself is wonder’

“Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible.” — M. C. Escher, born this day in 1893

Aristotle spent his days writing

‘We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions...We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.’

 — Aristotle

We imagine that we take control of our lives in those defining moments when we choose a partner or a city to live in or a career or a college major.  But in reality those choices are dictated (to a greater extent than we are comfortable admitting) by our temperaments and our history.  It is the small choices we make each day that determine our habits, and the habits that form our essence.

Aristotle was right.  If we can wrest control of our habits, we can take charge of our destiny.

He wrote over 300 books, of which 50 have been preserved.

Veils of Silence

Three veils of Silence, Summer draws apace.
The noon-tide Peace that broods on hill and dale,
That passes o’er the sea and leaves no trace,
That sleeps in the moveless clouds’ moveless trail:

The wave of colour deepening day by day.
The yellow grown to purple on the leas,
Blue within there beyond the dusky ways;
A green-gloom dusk within the grass-green trees.

The third veil no man sees. She weaves it where
Beneath the fret and fume tired hearts aspire
And long for some divine impossible air.
Out of Man’s heart she weaves this veil of Rest—
Sweet anodyne for all the feverish quest
And ache of inarticulate Desire.

— William Sharp (1844-1905)

— Henry Ward Beecher, born this day in 1819.

An advocate of women’s suffrage, temperance and Darwin’s theory of evolution, and a foe of slavery and bigotry of all kinds, religious, racial and social, Beecher held that Christianity should adapt itself to the changing culture of the times. Later, in the 1870s and 1880s, Beecher became a prominent advocate for allowing Chinese immigration to continue to the United States, and is credited for delaying the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act until 1882.  (Wiki article)

Achiles’s heel:  As a preacher, he denounced the practice of free love, and was hoisted on his own petard when caught in an extramarital affair.

The artistic temperament

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive.

To him...

a touch is a blow,
a sound is a noise,
a misfortune is a tragedy,
a joy is an ecstasy,
a friend is a lover,
a lover is a god,
and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him.  He must create, must pour out creation.  By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

~ Pearl S. Buck, born this day in 1892, was one of the most popular novelists of the 20th century, a Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner who has fallen into near obscurity.

“...the novel in China was the peculiar product of the common people.  And it was solely their property.  The very language of the novel was their own language, and not the classical Wen-li, which was the language of literature and the scholars...The real reason why the Chinese novel was written in the vernacular was because the common people could not read and write and the novel had to be written so that when it was read aloud it could be understood by persons who could communicate only through spoken words...From such humble and scattered beginnings, then, came the Chinese novel, written always in the vernacular, and dealing with all which interested the people, with legend and with myth, with love and intrigue, with brigands and wars, with everything, indeed, which went to make up the life of the people, high and low...

“A good novelist, or so I have been taught in China, should be above all else tse-ran, that is, natural, unaffected, and so flexible and variable as to be wholly at the command of the material that flows through him.  His whole duty is only to sort life as it flows through him, and in the vast fragmentariness of time and space and event to discover essential and inherent order and rhythm and shape.  We should never be able, merely by reading pages, to know who wrote them”

You name it, and exercise helps it

“The single thing that comes close to a magic bullet, in terms of its strong and universal benefits, is exercise.”
— Frank Hu (Harvard School of Public Health)

I have written often about the protective roles of exercise. It can lower the risk of heart attack, stroke, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, depression, dementia, osteoporosis, gallstones, diverticulitis, falls, erectile dysfunction, peripheral vascular disease and 12 kinds of cancer.
— Jane Brody (NYTimes Health Columnist)

“The data show that regular moderate exercise increases your ability to battle the effects of disease,” Dr. Moffat said in an interview. “It has a positive effect on both physical and mental well-being. The goal is to do as much physical activity as your body lets you do, and rest when you need to rest.”
— Marilyn Moffat, NYU Dept of Physical Therapy

“With every increasing decade of age, people become less and less active...But the evidence shows that with every increasing decade, exercise becomes more important in terms of quality of life, independence and having a full life.”
— Miriam Nelson, Director, John Hancock Ctr at Tufts University

When my father had a heart attack in 1968, he was kept sedentary for six weeks. Now, heart attack patients are in bed barely half a day before they are up and moving.
— Jane Brody