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Forever in the Stream
In the Fall my appetite leads me away from prose and seeks out verse. As the earth turns brown and the trees turn red and gold, it feels natural to reach for the kaleidoscopic lens of poetry. The poets Mary Oliver and T.S. Eliot are personal favorites – her love of nature and living and the cadences of Eliot’s Four Quartets, “Murder in the Cathedral” and other poems. I feel the rhythms of the poor people of Canterbury as they mirror persons left behind in our world. What can I do to better understand Eliot’s powerful cycle of life (renewal) and death? How can I walk in the woods seeing…
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In My Beginning is My End
Boboli Gardens, Florence, Italy Many years ago one of my colleagues said to me that her mother was completing her life the way in which she had lived it. She was critical of everyone and unhappy. I was younger then and I thought this was a rather startling thing to say. However, I understand it better now. Life is a continuum that once begun can continue in a similar fashion. T.S. Eliot wrote in “Burnt Norton” (“East Coker”) “In my beginning is my end (Line 179).” Things change, houses come and go, civilizations rise and fall, but time past and future and time present are the same. Here it is…
