O Frabjous Day! Callooh! Callay! Photos from the Party Celebrating Our Wedding

Guests Enjoying Themselves

You asked for more photos of our marriage events. Well, some of you asked for them. For those who aren't entirely weary of them, here are some we received last week from the photographer (Marcus Rachard) who took pictures at our party on 21 June in celebration of our wedding on 12 May. I've selected a set of black and white and sepia-toned ones I like. There are color photos, too. 

Gratitude: A Story from Our Recent Trip

Gratitude is the highest form of acceptance. Like patience, it is one of the catalytic agents, one of the alchemist's secrets, for turning dross to gold, hell to heaven, death to life (Stephen Levine, A Year to Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last [NY: Bell Tower, 1997).

Purity and Danger: On the Racist Subtext of Current U.S. Debates about Latino Immigrant Children and the Ebola Virus

Some days lately as I read the news, I wonder, "Did Mary Douglas have some kind of crystal ball that allowed her to see fifty years into the future when she wrote her book Purity and Danger in the early 1960s?" So much happening today seems almost as if it is lifted from the footnotes of that classic essay — as if it is being scripted to prove the validity of Douglas's analysis.

Signposts on a Spiritual Journey: "It Is Such an Irony. The Holy Land Has Such a Long History of Being Drenched in Blood"

Photograph: Petri Storlöpare, www.slowlife.se

When we return from our trip of the last week, a postcard from our friends John and Andre is waiting for us. They're visiting the Holy Land.

Droppings from the Catholic Birdcage: "The Bodies Become Fully United at, Well, to Be Blunt, Ejaculation in the Vagina"

At the Little Catholic Bubble blog site, Bethany writes,

The bodies become fully united at, well, to be blunt, ejaculation in the vagina, thus fulfilling the necessary requirements to allow the potential of reproduction to take place.

We Go, We Return, We Fall Down, We Get Up: On Life Journeys As Spiritual Journeys (2)

The view from Bobonong, she mused: was that how the world looked to Mma Makutsi? It seemed an odd thing to say, and yet all of us had a view from somewhere, a view of the world from the perspective of who we were, of what had happened to us, of how we thought about things (Alexander McCall Smith, The Minor Adjustment Beauty Salon [NY: Random House, 2013], p. 40).

We Go, We Return, We Fall Down, We Get Up: On Life Journeys As Spiritual Journeys

You were almost right, coolmom: though we didn't go to Minneapolis on our trip last week, it was definitely a Midwestern trek, from Fayetteville, Arkansas, to Kansas City and Independence, Missouri, and on to Dyersville, Iowa. And here's Waldo proof (in part): yours truly standing in front of a window at Crystal Bridges Museum last Wednesday, before we headed on to Kansas City. I have smiled and smiled as I read your "Where's Waldo?" proposal and hrh's stone tablets comment, and all the other precious and much-appreciated responses to my last posting. (I did encounter the stone tablets on this trip, hrh. But I suspect they conked me on the head as I walked up the mountain, and so I have no memory of having seen them.)