Image found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bosco
To which I've revised the riddle (I know, how lame):
Never in my lifetime will you prune me.
I take care of my shape well enough;
besides, though thornless, my leaves are so tough
and lance-like, that I'm sure you will agree,
the merest eyesight will inform the most dumb:
one foot at closest, round my parameter,
is an excellent rule of thumb.
The Conversion of St. Paul -- Jacopo Robusti TintorettoConversion implies two dimensions. In the first step we recognize our faults in the light of Christ, and this recognition becomes sorrow and repentance, desire for a new beginning. In the second step we recognize that this new road cannot come from us. It consists in letting ourselves be conquered by Christ. As St. Paul says: "I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I have indeed been conquered by Christ Jesus" (Philippians 3:12).
Conversion demands our yes, my "pursuit"; it is not ultimately my activity, but a gift, a letting ourselves be formed by Christ; it is death and resurrection. This is why St. Paul does not say: "I converted" but rather "I died" (Galatians 2:19), I am a new creature. In reality, St. Paul's conversion was not a passage from immorality to morality, from a mistaken faith to a right faith, but it was a being conquered by Christ: the renunciation of his own perfection; it was the humility of one who puts himself without reserve in the service of Christ for the brethren. And only in this renunciation of ourselves, in this conforming to Christ are we also united among ourselves; we become "one" in Christ. It is communion with the risen Christ that gives us unity.
We can observe an interesting analogy with the dynamic of St. Paul's conversion also in meditating on the biblical text of the prophet Ezekiel (37:15-28), which was chosen as a basis for our prayer this year. In it, in fact, the symbolic gesture is presented of two sticks being joined into one in the prophet's hand, who represents God's future action with this gesture. It is the second part of Chapter 37, which in the first part contains the celebrated vision of the dry bones and the resurrection of Israel, worked by the Spirit of God.
How can we not see that the prophetic sign of the reunification of the people of Israel is placed after the great symbol of the dry bones brought to life by the Spirit? There follows from this a theological pattern analogous to that of St. Paul's conversion: God's power is first and he works the resurrection as a new creation by his Spirit. This God, who is the Creator and is able to resurrect the dead, is also able to bring a people divided in two back to unity.
Paul -- like Ezekiel but more than Ezekiel -- becomes the chosen instrument of the preaching of the unity won by Christ through his cross and resurrection: the unity between the Jews and the pagans, to form one new people. Christ's resurrection extends the boundary of unity: not only the unity of the tribes of Israel, but the unity of the Jews and the pagans (cf. Ephesians 2; John 10:16); the unification of humanity dispersed by sin and still more the unity of all who believe in Christ.
The horizon of full unity remains open before us. It is an arduous task, but it is exciting for those Christians who want to live in harmony with the prayer of the Lord: "that all be one so that the world believes" (John 17:21). The Second Vatican Council explained to us "that human powers and capacities cannot achieve this holy objective -- the reconciling of all Christians in the unity of the one and only Church of Christ" ("Unitatis redintegratio," 24).
Trusting in the prayer of the Lord Jesus Christ, and encouraged by the significant steps made by the ecumenical movement, with faith we invoke the Holy Spirit that he continue to illumine our path. May the Apostle Paul, who worked so hard and suffered for the unity of the mystical body of Christ, spur us on from heaven; and may the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of the unity of the Church, accompany and sustain us.
Latest StAR (Jan./Feb. 2009) hit the mailbox today. Beauty is Truth: Faith and Aesthetics is just the kind of title to pique my interest.
These were particularly wet when collected, so you put a fan on them to dry them. If you let them sit without air circulation, they'll go mouldy.
Dried out:
I use one of my pallet knives to loosen the seeds in the cones, then use the handle to tap, tap, tap it. Some will rain out lots of seeds, others not so much. It is rare to get one that has no seeds in it. If you do get one with no seeds, which would be never, it would be because it is old and they have already fallen out.
They have a good germination rate. But you get inevitable die-offs, no matter what you do. Then you get others that make up for the die-offs - really happy-to-grow ones. The seeds will be soaked in water overnight, then stratified (put into some moist sterile soil in a sealable baggie and put in the fridge until spring).
The title of Joseph Pearce's editorial, Whatever Happened to the Catholic Literary Revival? gives you an idea of the issue's theme. It explores the writing of Pavel Chichikov, Michael O' Brien, Ron Hansen, Alice Thomas Ellis, Paul Thigpen and of course Les Murray:
The title of the article refers to this poem by Murray, entitled Poetry and Religion:
Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture
into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.
A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.
Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?
You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror:
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,
fixed centrally, we call it a religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror
that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry
or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.
***
Murray has also said somewhere else:
"Religions are big slow poems, while most poems are short, fast religions."
Of his books, I've read Conscious and Verbal, Poems the Size of Photographs, and Learning Human. There are, so far, two poems of his that can securely be counted as two of my all-time favourite poems. One is the Quality of Sprawl, which I will post in its entirety in another post, except for the delicious beginning:
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck,
The other is Noonday Axeman. Every time I read it I'm astonished at its perfection; of its oneness of sound and 'meaning' and image. Such a line as:
made what amounts to a human breach in the silence,
hits you with its own inner force so at one with the words that the silence the poem speaks of takes on this epic scale, in which you the reader are also a partaker; either one of those whose habits have been formed around the avoiding of this stillness and silence, fleeing "...to the cities, maddened by this stillness?" or one of those "...who could live in the presence of silence." This silence is like Tolkien's "long defeat of history". It's the same silence encountered by your great, great Grandfather, and by his great, great Grandfather. The same silence encountered by all figures of history, from Roman emperors to Napoleon Bonaparte to Queen Victoria to the unrecorded nameless orphan slaving in the din of a silence-hating factory.
Coincidentally, the poem has the words, into great silence at the end of one of its stanzas:
then died in their turn, each, after his own fashion,
resigned or agonized, from silence into great silence.
This was written way before the film of course. Interesting. I still haven't seen the documentary yet.
But here's the poem:
Noonday Axeman
By Les Murray
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Noonday silence.
Two miles from here, it is the twentieth century:
cars on the bitumen, powerlines vaulting the farms.
Here, with my axe, I am chopping into the stillness.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. I pause, roll tobacco,
twist a cigarette, lick it. All is still.
I lean on my axe. A cloud of fragrant leaves
hangs over me moveless, pierced everywhere by sky.
Here, I remember all of a hundred years:
candleflame, still night, frost and cattle bells,
the draywheels' silence final in our ears,
and the first red cattle spreading through the hills
and my great-great-grandfather here with his first sons,
who would grow old, still speaking with his Scots accent,
having never seen those highlands that they sang of.
A hundred years. I stand and smoke in the silence.
A hundred years of clearing, splitting, sawing,
a hundred years of timbermen, ringbarkers, fencers
and women in kitchens, stoking loud iron stoves
year in, year out, and singing old songs to their children
have made this silence human and familiar
no farther than where the farms rise into foothills,
and, in that time, how many have sought their graves
or fled to the cities, maddened by this stillness?
Things are so wordless. These two opposing scarves
I have cut in my red-gum squeeze out jewels of sap
and stare. And soon, with a few more axe-strokes,
the tree will grow troubled, tremble, shift its crown
and, leaning slowly, gather speed and colossally
crash down and lie between the standing trunks.
And then, I know, of the knowledge that led my forebears
to drink and black rage and wordlessness, there will be silence.
After the tree falls, there will reign the same silence
as stuns and spurns us, enraptures and defeats us,
as seems to some a challenge, and seems to others
to be waiting here for something beyond imagining.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Unhuman silence.
A stone cracks in the heat. Through the still twigs, radiance
stings at my eyes. I rub a damp brow with a handkerchief
and chop on into the stillness. Axe-fall and echo.
The great mast murmurs now. The scarves in its trunk
crackle and squeak now, crack and increase as the hushing
weight of the high branches heels outward, and commences
tearing and falling, and the collapse is tremendous.
Twigs fly, leaves puff and subside. The severed trunk
slips off its stump and drops along its shadow.
And then there is no more. The stillness is there
as ever. And I fall to lopping branches.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. It will be centuries
before many men are truly at home in this country,
and yet, there have always been some, in each generation,
there have always been some who could live in the presence of silence.
And some, I have known them, men with gentle broad hands,
who would die if removed from these unpeopled places,
some again I have seen, bemused and shy in the cities,
you have built against silence, dumbly trudging through noise
past the railway stations, looking up through the traffic
at the smoky halls, dreaming of journeys, of stepping
down from the train at some upland stop to recover
the crush of dry grass underfoot, the silence of trees.
Axe-fall, echo and silence. Dreaming silence.
Though I myself run to the cities, I will forever
be coming back here to walk, knee-deep in ferns,
up and away from this metropolitan century,
to remember my ancestors, axemen, dairymen, horse-breakers,
now coffined in silence, down with their beards and dreams,
who, unwilling or rapt, despairing or very patient,
made what amounts to a human breach in the silence,
made of their lives the rough foundation of legends-
men must have legends, else they will die of strangeness-
then died in their turn, each, after his own fashion,
resigned or agonized, from silence into great silence.
Axe-fall, echo and axe-fall. Noonday silence.
Though I go to the cities, turning my back on these hills,
for the talk and dazzle of cities, for the sake of belonging
for months and years at a time to the twentieth century,
the city will never quite hold me. I will be always
coming back here on the up-train, peering, leaning
out of the window to see, on far-off ridges,
the sky between the trees, and over the racket
of the rails to hear the echo and the silence.
I shoulder my axe and set off home through the stillness.
It is the kind of X-acto knife with the screw in blade on top. You go through a number of the blades (they come in little packs of five or so) but I find this knife indispensable. The pointed end is especially important. It is the knife that kissed my finger bones, giving me seven stitches and a four hour wait in emergency. Yes, if you decide to carve peach pits, I cannot emphasize enough: picture yourself cutting yourself and waiting in that emergency room every time you carve. Also picture yourself having to explain to everyone you meet for the following week what you did to your hand.
"What did you do to your hand?"
"I cut it carving peach pits."
"Carving what?"
Have a solid foundation to place the pit on while holding it with your hand; try not to do "free-air" carving.
The following peach pits also went through sanding and staining. I just use sand paper, no electrical tools; just a knife and sand paper. You cheat otherwise. The stain I used for these was a cherry stain. You need at least a week for the stain to fully dry.
This rose which I gave to my mom, is intended as a broach/brooch. We need to find a jeweller who can fix a pin piece on the back of it. I used the two split halves of one peach pit for the leaves. I carved at one end of each leaf a little arm so it could go into the notches made at the side of the rose peach pit. They were fixed in with wood glue. (I'm sorry, I don't know why some of the pictures will enlarge and others will not. Just try them all, and find out.)
