Kendall’s Quest:

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<li class="cat-item cat-item-2502"><a href="https://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/category/blogs" >Blogs and Blogging</a> (32)
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<li class="cat-item cat-item-1209"><a href="https://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/category/preparation" >Preparation</a> (8)
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<li class="cat-item cat-item-9137"><a href="https://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/category/prisons-and-prisoners" >Prisons and Prisoners</a> (17)
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<li class="cat-item cat-item-9140"><a href="https://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/category/seth" >Seth</a> (16)
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<li class="cat-item cat-item-9138"><a href="https://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/category/what-does-it-mean" >What does it mean?</a> (51)
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<li class="cat-item cat-item-9135"><a href="https://blogs.bootsnall.com/Grannygold/category/where-to-plant-myself" >Where to plant myself</a> (27)
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What does it mean? (51)

Where to plant myself (27)

Taking it in

January 19th, 2007

This has been a week of astonishment. School began. An ice storm hit Texas. We mailed out the first edition of The Midnight Special. Manko landed two jobs (hooray for Manko!). Meanwhile (how is this possible? where do the hours come from?) I have been reading Nunca Mas, and tonight I just watched, paused and re-watched key moments, and watched yet again two films: La Historia Oficial(The Official Story), filmed in 1985, about the years immediately after the Argentine catastrophe; and Estela Bravo’s documentary, Fidel. Where have I been all my life? What have I been doing? The depth of my ignorance is stunning. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books and Movies, Manko, What does it mean? | 5 Comments »

Tags: Books and Movies, Manko, What does it mean?

Prime evil

January 16th, 2007

As I continue reading about Argentina’s dirty war, I am reminded of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the hearings that it held during the years I lived there, while Mandela was President. Feitlowitz’s Lexicon of Terror features a whole chapter on Adolfo Scilingo, who holds a similar space in Argentine history to the space held by Eugene de Kok (also de Kock and de Koch, also nicknamed “Prime Evil”) in South Africa. Both were enthusiastic torturers and murderers, both followed orders, both did what they did for “love” of what they thought was right, both later felt horrible and confessed to unspeakable actions, and both are living out their lives in prison while the men who were their superiors die free, one by one. The main difference between the two men is that Scilingo tried to get out of the punishment phase of this story; he recanted his confession; de Kok, on the other hand, has become a model of enduring remorse.

Posted in About Africa, Politics, Prisons and Prisoners | 1 Comment »

Tags: About Africa, Politics, Prisons and Prisoners

A Dirty War

January 14th, 2007

Where were you from 1976 to 1983? What did you know, in those years, about the “war on terror?” This was a war, its leaders said, to protect homeland security; a war for family values, Christian values, and clean-living innocent people, against enemy insurgents, terrorists, subversives, non-believers, homosexuals, Jews, Communists, union organizers, and radicals in universities and the arts. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books and Movies, Politics, Prisons and Prisoners, What does it mean? | 7 Comments »

Tags: Books and Movies, Politics, Prisons and Prisoners, What does it mean?

What drives us?

January 7th, 2007

I heard on the radio a news story about David Petraeus, who is about to take over “training Iraqi troops” for US forces in Iraq. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at Princeton on “The Lessons of Viet Nam” and obviously did not have Thich Nhat Hanh in mind. Petraeus believes that greater violence can quell violence. The radio report, which is longer than the written report in the link above, quotes someone as saying Petraeus is “the most competitive man on the planet.” He also sounds like a man who is driven by the desire to prove himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in What does it mean? | 3 Comments »

Tags: What does it mean?

New Year’s Eve

December 31st, 2006

I got all the papers graded. I’ve laid out five of the eight pages of The Midnight Special, I’ve realized that maybe the piece of writing due January 31st can be easier than I envisioned, and I can’t bear to think about the next round of classes. Instead, it’s New Year’s Eve, a time I love to reflect on the gifts of the passing year and to hold the whole planet in my heart with gratitude, compassion, and tenderness, so how could I not blog this day? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Books and Movies, Manko, Seth | 6 Comments »

Tags: Blogs and Blogging, Books and Movies, Manko, Seth

The Midnight Special

December 25th, 2006

Here’s some shameless holiday promotion for a cause I believe in: in January the first issue of The Midnight Special, a fledgling literary magazine for Texas prisoners, edited by prisoners in the writing workshop John Speer and I have been running for three years, will appear: just as soon as our friends at the Henry David Thoreau Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fort Bend County, Texas (Thoreau for short), get it produced and mailed out. Subscriptions to the new magazine, to be published twice a year, are free for prisoners and available to people in the free world for a $10 donation within the USA, $13 for international air mail. At the moment we have nearly 200 subscriptions from prisoners but a scant 5 (count ’em, 5) from free-world people, so we’d sure like to see a few more subscriptions roll in. We need the donations to finance the paper and postage for the prisoners’ subscriptions after our support from an anonymous donor runs out. We don’t yet have a way to take donations online, but I’ll include the postal address at the end of this blog entry. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Prisons and Prisoners | 1 Comment »

Tags: Prisons and Prisoners

Watching X-Men in a room full of cons

December 22nd, 2006

Last night John and I had the end-of-semester holiday party with the prisoners in our writing workshop. We brought a movie (two movies actually, though we only had time for one and a half-hour of the other), and they gave us a holiday card with messages like, “Thank you for my little oasis of sanity.” The story of how we ended up with X-Men is worth telling, and the experience of watching that movie with this particular group of men was wrenching. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Books and Movies, Prisons and Prisoners, What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

Tags: Books and Movies, Prisons and Prisoners, What does it mean?, X-Men

The Promise of Joy

December 17th, 2006

As I drove to the park for my walk this morning, Handel’s “For Unto Us a Child Is Born” came on the radio, and suddenly I was twenty-eight, pregnant with Seth, and full of joy. Throughout that pregnancy I played the Messiah, danced to it, hummed it, and grinned. The baby I was carrying had excellent genes, and our life was going to be one surprise after another. The joy of that music is the joy of possibility. Sitting in the parking lot on this warm Texas morning in December, it came to me clearly that I have spent most of my sixty-one years living in joy, expecting something wonderful. Expectation is not necessarily, as some Buddhist texts warn, the seed of disappointment or suffering. It is its own fulfillment. Anticipation fills life with wonder, hope, a vibrating YES that is not (for me) ever diminished by fulfillment. When the anticipated event arrives, it is what it is, never what I thought it would be. Sometimes it’s better; sometimes it carries a hidden load of pain. But nothing can erase the joy of anticipation. Those times in my life when I have been joyfully expecting some event, change, or beginning (pregnant, about to move to a new place, on the brink of a new project, packing my boxes and giving away my possessions, half my body already over another cliff-edge)–those times I was IN JOY. I was not living in the future but living in joy, in anticipation of possibility. The promise of joy is joy itself. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Buddhism, Seth, What does it mean? | 1 Comment »

Tags: Buddhism, Seth, What does it mean?

House of Sand

December 16th, 2006

Early yesterday evening I watched the Brazilian film, House of Sand with my friends Ruth and Gerri. They hated it. Gerri thought it was “amateurish.” Ruth found it slow and thought the time changes were awkward, the character switches gimmicky; she became restless and paced around her living room, waiting for it to be over. Some friend I am. I hung on to the last minute and am still haunted by the slow power of the film, by its visual gorgeousness (not since Daughters of the Dust have I seen such composition), and by its questions: given life’s impermanence, what can we hope? what exactly does it mean to “make a life” in the harshest possible circumstances? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in About Africa, Books and Movies | 1 Comment »

Tags: About Africa, Books and Movies

Continuing

December 16th, 2006

Points of clarity arrive. Last night a great sea-fog enveloped Houston, and swirling mists in the urban sky arranged themselves in auras around pink-orange spotlights towering over Highway 59. I gazed out the glass wall between my living room and the balcony, gazed into the night in wonder. Fog! If I could draw or paint, I would. Writing is another way to meet the moment. It has its ironies–by the time I find words for this moment, another has arrived. Now it is Saturday morning, the sky is thick with curling grays and whites and smudges of blue; the spotlights over the expressway are merely chrome against the sky, and the magic has passed. The Friday night sky-scape disappeared before I found words for it. However words are the medium I have reveled in since I was six; writing is part of how I breathe and be. Writing gives me focus, slows me down, concentrates my attention, allows me to meet the moment and savor it. Fog. Inner and out fog are miraculous. Maybe there will be a time for me to let writing go, but that time hasn’t come yet. So I continue. Why blog? Blogging is how I connect with other people, known and unknown, who happen to be on the planet with me in this dot of time. The comments from David, Lynda, Christopher, and Constance gave me joy and were a comfort, much as Pooh’s friends’ hanging their clothes over his legs consoled him when he was in a tight place. My community of good friends and like-minded beings is flung wide over the globe, and I note with some surprise that I have become a solitaire. When did that happen? I see students every day, of course, but I’m happy with the boundaries around our relations. I see John once a week when we go to the prison together, though we will now take a break till mid-January. Other than John, there is no peer or comrade I see or talk to as often as once a week. That comes as a surprise to me and is, I know, unusual in American culture. I don’t have a cell-phone, seldom use a LAN phone, don’t in the course of my day announce my whereabouts to anyone. The quiet in my life suits me. I have time to read, watch movies, walk, and go my quiet way without having to explain myself to anyone. That has not been easy to arrange for myself, and I cherish the odd life I’ve created. But there is something in human connection that is nourishing, warming, consoling. The blog feeds that sense of connection. And so here I am. Continuing.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, What does it mean? | No Comments »

Tags: Blogs and Blogging, What does it mean?