Lectio Divina

One of the most intimate scenes I've read in a novel happened in Grapes of Wrath. Ma Joad--the pillar of the Joad family in increasingly bleak circumstances--calls her daughter to help her with a task. She calls out the daughter's name "Rose of Sharon" and then repeats it over and over to herself under her breath, "enjoying the feel of it in her mouth." I've often felt a need to read quickly over that passage, as it isn't meant for the 3rd person omniscient narrator, let alone the unworthy reader.

I enjoyed Matt's Lectio Divina lesson at church last night. Lectio Divina is fancy Latin for purposeful meditation of scripture, involving prayer, silence, meditation, and memorization. I've been doing a lot of reciting to myself these days, and this was a way to focus that memorization and meditation on scripture, which I do less often than I do with other writings.

"I love you. Every atom of your flesh is as dear to me as my own. Your mind is my treasure, and if it were broken, would be my treasure still."--from Jane Eyre

"Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, protects all things."--I Corinthians 13:6

"Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." --Matthew 7:12

"For his withdrawal would have been a flight, his deliverance an accident, his reward dishonor, his future perhaps damnation. Then he would have borne witness, not to his faith or to God's mercy, but to how dreadful was the journey to the mountain in Moriah."--Kierkegaard's Fear & Trembling

Menagerie

I live in one. My dear, dear friend Andrea showed up in this hood yesterday afternoon, demanding food and shelter. Obligingly, I whipped up this sublime curry and fed it to her. My endearing, tiny apartment doesn't have a dishwasher, so I was hurriedly trying to keep up with the dirty cookware as it came off the stove. Looking out the over-the-sink windows, a squirrel appeared to be running across the backyard. Really, it was a tiny tabby-striped kitty frolicking in very tall grass. Precious! I've seen the mama cat before, thinking she was a sibling of my dearly departed Beezus. Beezus is an uncle!

I went out in the cool of the morning to water the tomatoes I didn't water yesterday. I went out through the kitchen door, seeing as how Andrea was sleeping on the couch. Something smelled funny, but Thursday is trash day, so I ignored it...until I saw the furry tail sticking up around the front porch steps. A smashed, maggotty squirrel lay dead on the steps. Mama and Baby Cat huddled sleeping in the porch corner, all of my flowerpots were turned over, and a beautiful tiny bird with tufted hair on his ears was perched in the tomato container, guarding the eggshells I sprinkled on the plant to keep slugs away.

I feel ridiculously flattered that they like my house, too.

Metablogging. I does it.

I often think of Blogspot the way I think (and most people think) about Windows/PCs. Functional, reliable, not so fancy. Could be a little snazzier. So today, searching for a little refresher for the ol' Inner Monologue, I found this layout. Summery, reminds of some good moments in the meadows of West TN. Way to go, Blogger.

To Dice a More Perfect Onion

Yesterday was Evaluation Day. Only 3 of 14 students responded, leaving me with one good, one average, and one bad eval. (I'm pretty sure who that one was, and he wasn't such a peach of a student.) I'm certain I can take away from this that the other 11 were satisfied/neutral enough not to feel the need to bleed all over me. Combine that with a big ball of internal rawr, a non-stop three week traveling schedule, and the annual let's-tally-how-much-work-you-did-accomplish v. let's-tally-how-much-you-should-have-accomplished reckoning and I morphed into one roiling, seething mass of primordial elements, a la The Blob.



I leap and glide and slip and slide my way home only to realize that I have a random smattering of groceries to pull into a cohesive, vaguely-healthy dinner. (Dieting--more later.) I have onions. This dinner is saved. My teaching skills may be questionable, but by golly, I can dice an onion. I learned this awesome trick from the Chinese cook on tv. Um...Simply Ming. (It's amazing what you can learn when PBS is coming through in any useful way.)

Slice one end of the onion off, and remove the papery skin layer. Don't cut off the other end. Make four or five slices across the onion in three directions, and voila! A beautifully cubic dice of onion. A dice so beautiful, so translucently pungent, so crisply caramelizing, such a supporter of the chickpeas and less of a competitor. The primordial ooze began slowly to retreat in the face of such brilliance. To question its ability to stand in the face of such superiority.

Squee

One of my super incredible, nerdy student workers got her dream internship today at Historic New England. I like to think I had a little hand in that. So proud of her hard work!

My work blog got picked up by speaktopower.org, topsy.com, and Curator Journal. So, you know. Yay me!

An update on TN museums in the wake of flooding

http://www.fhu.edu/blogs/archives/post/Local-museums-across-spectrum-of-flooding.aspx

This is a link to my work blog, "The Archives Weekly." I'm keeping a running list of what I can find out about museums and archives in the flooded areas of Middle and West TN. Please feel free to update by commenting or contacting me directly.

Here's the latest from Country Music Hall of Fame:
http://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/nashville-flood-update