Ode to Billy – Collins, Not Joe

The more I delve into Billy Collins’ poetry, the more I appreciate his style, particularly his ability to mix the right amounts of seriousness and irreverence and shake them gently into a pleasant cocktail.  As the concoction goes down smoothly there arises that pleasant reminder that while life is indeed serious shit, one needs to be wary of taking it too seriously.

From Nightclub:

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

to be in love with you

is a theme that keeps coming up

in songs and poems.

There seems to be no room for variation.

I have never heard anyone sing

I am so beautiful

and you are a fool to be in love with me,

even though this notion has surely

crossed the minds of men and women alike.

You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool

is another one you don’t hear.

Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful. That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

Threads and Truths

So last night, watching the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony I had recorded (how can one miss Joan Baez and Garth Brooks?), I heard Garth Brooks say this, which I promptly wrote down on a post it note and stuck on my desk as food for thought.– “The truth is we all become who we are by somebody else.”  


Sitting down this morning at the same desk, post it note nearby, I opened a book to this from Howard Thurman, and had one of those “Okay, God, I get it” moments I felt was too good to not share:

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The Thread in My Hand – Howard Thurman – Meditations of the Heart


Only one end of the threads I hold in my hand. The threads go many ways, linking my life to other lives.
One thread comes from a life that is sick; it is taught with anguish

And always there is the lurking fear that the life will snap. I hold it tenderly.  I must not let go….

One thread comes from a high-flying kite;

It quivers with the mighty current of fierce and holy dreaming

Invading the common day with far-off places and visions of bright….

One thread comes from the failing hands of an old, old friend. Hardly aware am I of the moment when the tight line slackened and there was nothing at all — nothing.

One thread is but a tangled mass that won’t come right;

Mistakes, false starts, lost battles, angry words — a tangled mass;

I have tried so hard, but it won’t come right….

One thread is a strange thread — it is my steadying thread;

When I am lost, I pull it hard and find my way. I am saddened, I tighten my grip and gladness glides along its quivering path;

When the waste places of my spirit appear in arid confusion, the thread becomes a channel of newness of life.

One thread is a strange thread — it is my steadying thread. God’s hand holds the other end….

*

All of which leads to two questions now on the same post it note — 

What threads am I holding?

What is my steadying thread?

Weltschmerz

Continuing with his riff on Matthew 6:25, Howard Thurman writes this:

“Take no thought for your own life.  What a strange thing it is, this injunction.  Up to this period in my life, I have seemed to survive by taking thought for my life.  Upon deeper reflection, I begin to see that my lie is not now, nor has it ever been, my own.  I did not create nor have I sustained my life through the years.  In so many ways, without my own plans and purposes, hard places have been made soft and rough places smooth.  It is a source or immeasurable satisfaction and comfort to me to know that God, who is the Source and Sustainer or life, can be trusted to see me all the way to the end and beyond.  Take no thought for your life – it is in God’s hands and ever, when I am obeying the laws of life, it is God who works through me.

Take no thought for your life.”

Take no thought for your life.  That’s a BIG ASK for a stubborn old man, especially given, as Thuurman notes, “I have seemed to survive by taking thought for my life.”  “Seemed” being the operative word. But it occurs to me that this is perhaps a potential benefit of age – to become weary to the point that those ideas and thoughts that have been knocking at the door for years finally find a door left ajar, if only because it seemed too much effort/trouble to get up and close it. (See one of my favorite German words, “weltschmerz.”)

Take No Thought

In Meditations of the Heart Howard Thurman takes on that conundrum in Matthew 6:25.  You know (in the King James): “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear.”  Though in some versions the translation is not “do not worry” but “take no thought.”  Which is where we pick up Thurman:

“Take no thought.  This day I shall desert my anxieties.  I shall forsake them – cut the off from the food supply of my spirit.  Confident am I that if I do not feed them they cannot long survive….  Into God’s hand do I yield myself this day, with all that it involves for me, with he faith that I can take complete refuge in the knowledge and the love of God.  For me this will not be easy, nor do I lightly undertake it.”

Boy, he said a mouthful there!

My anxieties – “if I do not feed them they cannot long survive.”  Well, intellectually, I know that to be true, but damn, my Jabba the Hutt anxieties have been so well fed over the years that they can live a good while off their existing body fat.  So the “this will not be easy” is, well, classic understatement.

The Third of June

Granted, one seemingly needs to be of a certain age to remember and/or care, (and of a certain age where the remembering part becomes more and more of a challenge) but those of us who do know that the 3rd of June is a remarkable day in the history of music.  This is the day memorialized by Bobbie Gentry as “the day Billy Joe McCallister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge.”  This 1967 classic is certainly indelibly written into the American Songbook.  So on this day, give it a listen.  Two choices, feel free to sing along:


The iconic original by Bobby Gentry that drips of the late 60s.

If anyone comes close to the original, it is Patty Smyth on this version, great background music by Tom Scott & The L.A. Express

Here’s a bit of trivia.  Note that in this storytelling, and this is great storytelling, no one at the dinner table, the narrator’s whole family, has a name, just mamma, brother, papa…, yet every other person in the song does have a name.  


This song also presents a textbook example of a MacGuffin, an object, device, or event that is necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, but insignificant, unimportant, or irrelevant in itself — that is, in this instance, the question: Just what did they throw off the Tallahatchie bridge? — that is a pure MacGuffin.