Angela,
this is a very powerful statement. You are separating your beliefs from
history, in fact, separating God from history, and saying instead, God has no
involvement in human evolution, evolvement of ideas, or history. I find this
a very fecund affirmation.
Sincerely,'
Jane
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Nov 22 20:32:14 1998
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 22:32:06 EST
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: Compassion to the animals!
Hi there! To augment this, I was told by my vet that the average life span of
an indoor cat was 15 years, and of an outdoor cat 18 months. I still let my
cats out the back door for brief spells, but only when I'm home, and I call
them back in periodically--not that they obey. (I also live off of busy
streets, with an empty yard (nursery school) behind me). But I have learned
that if they go out only periodically, they don't enlarge their "territory" as
much, and tend to stick closer to home. I learned this the heartbreaking way
of having a cat (who had been born of a feral mother) who came and went and
eventually went forever, I think to her death by car. Of course, I'm talking
neutered females; can't say this applies universally.
Jane
>From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sun Nov 22 20:40:25 1998
From: "Joe E. Dees" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 21:40:44 -0600
Subject: Re: new participant/reply Ecofem lit
Reply-to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
In-reply-to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date sent: Sun, 22 Nov 1998 19:55:37 EST
Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: STUDIES IN WOMEN AND ENVIRONMENT <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: new participant/reply Ecofem lit
> Hi Joe,
>
> I love your poem!
>
> Jane
>
Thanks, here's another for you (and ecolady, too).
Lenses (a love song for Salman Rushdie)
We are wanderers all
In the quicksilver dunes of our days
Seeking amidst the sandstorms
The sight of a sheltered course.
So we sift our pasts to craft our futures
And grind lenses to focus our lives.
Most are less than original
But each has its own eccentricities
Fitted for one eye, one terrain;
No lens is universal, and no path.
Most of us hide our quirks of vision
>From others and even from ourselves
Lest some fatal slip should betray us
And hew to some hard line or other
Packed by souls of similar stripe
Who confuse the safety of nimbers
With the security of a way well chosen
And who, fearing the very existence
Of walkers of other ways, viewing them
As challenges to the wisdom of their own decisions
Seek to reassure themselves by herding
Those they MUST consider misled
Back to the "proper route", or failing that
Seek to end their journeys.
But some crazed few of us
Too honest for our own damned good
Craft our lenses from every gritty grain
Of the wide beach of experience
Heating them in the kiln of knowledge and
Fusing them carefully in insight's crucible
Until they crystallize clean and true
And then we wave them radiantly
Before the wondering world.
These folks are followed or killed, or both.
Poets and messiahs are the glaziers
Of living visions, and well wrought lenses
May powerfully concentrate the common gaze
Promising pathfinding clarity.
But - remember this:
Art is metaphor, and metaphors are chameleons.
They are colored by our journeys
As surely as they shape them.
Empty and aimless are those who lack lenses
If such pathless ones exist
But stumbling blind are those who, when given the lenses of others
Wear them as if they were windowpanes
And polish them not with their lives.
