<Are you on vacation too?>
No, gypsy, I am not on vacation. I WAS on a very long vacation until a few weeks ago, when I realized that Jim Barrett and Michael Cummings were really straining under the burden of supporting me and my lazy little family with their precious tax dollars. So I decided I'd better get busy and make a little money for a change. At the same time I realized that all of my investments needed a very serious review, so I have been concentrating on them. What a painful experience that is!
Where did you go on your Club Med vacation? Did you have fun in Vancouver? I have very fond memories of that place, which is so free-spirited and beautiful and green.
The Feelings thread often seems a lot like Ask God, when we discuss religion. I guess it is one of the more serious threads at SI. On the other hand, it can be a lot more real than Ask God, which I personally find refreshing.
I found a really pretty Irish poem today, Gypsy, that I hope you like as well as I did. I like it because it recalls the pagan nature of life, which in Ireland really only has a veneer of a few centuries of Catholicism over it, for the common people at least, a veneer which is rapidly curling up and blowing away as the sexual predilections and child abuse suit settlements are draining the church of much of its money, and many in the congregation, as well. I was discussing this issue with an Irish college student I met the other day who said it's mostly the old women who still go to church. Anyway, the poem is free and colorful, I think:
To Ireland in the Coming Times
Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of that company,
Who sang to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I less of them,
Because the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan,
Trails all about the written page;
For in all the world's first blossoming age
The light fall of her flying feet
Made Ireland's heart begin to beat;
And still the starry candles flare
To help light her foot here and there;
And still the thoughts of Ireland brood
Upon her holy quietude.
Nor may I less be counted one
With Davis, Mangan, Ferguson,
Because to him, who ponders well,
My rhymes more than their rhyming tell
Of the dim wisdoms old and deep,
That God gives unto man in sleep.
For the elemental beings go
About my table to and fro.
In flood and fire and clay and wind,
They huddle from man's pondering mind;
Yet he who threads in austere ways
May surely meet their austere gaze.
Man ever journeys on with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon,
A Druid land, a Druid tune!
While still I may, I write for you
The love I lived, the dream I knew.
From our birthday, until we die,
Is but the winking of an eye;
And we, our singing and our love,
The mariners of thoughts above,
And all the wizard things that go
About my table to and fro,
Are passing on to where may be,
In truth's consuming ecstasy,
No place for love and dream and all;
For God goes by with white foot-fall.
I cast my heart into my rhymes,
That you, in the dim coming times,
May know how my heart went with them
After the red-rose-bordered hem.
- W.B. Yeats
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