Chronicles of Life in Small Stone, Arkansas: For the Fun of It (Because Sometimes We Need to Laugh)

So this happened today: 

An Autumn Poem for You: "Ambered in My Time"

And, as a gift to you readers this morning, and a reminder that my life is not summed up by that dismal letter I've been sharing with you all from 1993 — they can break my body but not my soul — a poem about autumn for you.

Poem for the Day: Seamus Heaney, "Anything Can Happen"

And since the spirit needs to be fed, when we (I really mean, when I) spend too much time wrestling with pigs (who, as George Bernard Shaw famously observed, enjoy being in the mud), a poem for you all today: this is the poem that the Academy of American Poets circulated this morning in its poem-for-today email--Seamus Heaney, "Anything Can Happen":

A Summertime Poem: Figs for Birds

What message

Do the gifties gie us

More Anti-Gospel Meeting Gospel: Michael Bayly Responds to Archbishop Cordileone about Marriage Equality

Animals, Souls: Reminders

I know.

Nothing is more boring than pictures of other folks' pets.  Well, except for pictures of other folks' vacations and other folks' families.  (And except that I often do enjoy the pictures friends send me of their pets.)

Alice Walker on Chickens, Spiders, and the Human Species as a Test

From Alice Walker, The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses & Babe: A Memoir (NY: New Press, 2011):

What to Call bin Laden's Death?: Michael Sean Winters vs. Michael Moore

Bless his heart, Michael Sean just can't seem to help himself, when opportunities arise to take a punchy jab at "the left."  I can well imagine it's a hard job, but somebody has to do it, and this obviously keeps Michael Sean on his toes, as he mediates between right and left for the beltway establishment.  And as he assures that his own Catholic church and other American religious groups remain duly conservative in the officially mandated areas (e.g., "respect for life" and for the sanctity of marriage), while exploring left-leaning values about other issues like health care and justice for working people.