Celebration of the Arts and Helping Hands

The last two weekends I have shared adventures with different groups of friends. Last weekend, seven teachers and I met at the Celebration of the Arts adventure outside in front of the Doudna Fine Arts Center on EIU's campus where we shared music, fair food, and bounteous amounts of art. The most fun (besides just seeing the teachers) came with the Dachshund dash, a weird set of races with Dachshunds of various ages and sizes.

Today I helped out with a large group of church friends, cleaning gutters, washing windows, carting furniture, and picking up branches or other yard paraphernalia for several seniors in need. This was the helping hands ministry day, and after more than three hours of labor, I feel tired--but pleased, too.

Earth Day Rituals

So today is the 48th Earth Day in the U.S., where rolling back effective environmental regulations is held up as good for the environment--at least on Twitter.

Despite what seems like a hopeless situation, I wore green today, planted a tree I bought at our local Rural King farm store, and read a few chapters of my current favorite book, Lab Girl by Hope Jahren.

Here's the blurb about the book from Good Reads:

"Acclaimed scientist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more.

Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when those two things come together. It is told through Jahren’s stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science, and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work.

Yet at the core of this book is the story of a relationship Jahren forged with a brilliant, wounded man named Bill, who becomes her lab partner and best friend. Their sometimes rogue adventures in science take them from the Midwest across the United States and back again, over the Atlantic to the ever-light skies of the North Pole and to tropical Hawaii, where she and her lab currently make their home."

All in all, this Earth Day was less eventful than I'd like, but at least the Earth Wise students did attempt to inspire EIU with its Climate Change protest, and our on campus Celebration of the Arts included a shout out to science.

Poem Published in Prairie Schooner Literary Journal!

I found out one of my poems was published today, "A Trinity Plus One." The poem translates odd family memories into poetry and an exploration of bad Eldils and C.S. Lewis.

When I read the email message today, I actually cried, overcome with emotion--mostly joy but also sadness, a pensive sense of regret and nostalgia.

I'll share more once the formal letter arrives, but here's a little about Prairie Schooner, the journal that published my piece: 

Prairie Schooner is published in cooperation with the University of Nebraska Press and the Creative Writing Program of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln English Department and is endowed by the Glenna Luschei Endowed Editorship and Fund for Excellence at Prairie Schooner. Members of the faculty of the creative writing program include Jonis Agee, Grace Bauer, Joy Castro, Jennine Capo Crucet, Kwame Dawes, Ted Kooser, Amelia María de la Luz Montes, Chigozie Obioma, Timothy Schaffert, and Stacey Waite.

Prairie Schooner and its editorship are endowed in perpetuity by the Glenna Luschei Fund for Excellence at Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska Foundation. This endowment provides eleven annual Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Awards in the amount of $4,000.

Pansies

Pansies

When crushed sprouts from a thinned bed smell like cantaloupe

I plant a row of pansies

the mother-may-I line of tri-colored children

cutting through lingering snow like sunlight through a prism

after a wild pony cart ride at an amusement park

where a buck-toothed two-year old

outsmarting Puck

climbs out a painted dray with wheels groaning over rails

like an “imperial vot'ress" passing on "fancy-free”

while Cupid brushes flowers “purple with love's wound"

clearing away tears as the Roman Pliny writes

easing headaches and dizziness and what Shakespeare called “love’s idleness.”

Mostly, though, these mildly soothing pansies

help me sleep on long nights broken by train whistles

Out my window, I still see them

dancing toward mother under the moon.