An Appalachian Country Rag--Distilled Spirits

A Country Rag Distilled Spirits

"The Mote in Descartes' Eye"

Life's a journey, not a destination.

Graphic: Pilgrim, quilted mixed-media wallhanging, Margaret Gregg, Mill 'N Creek Studio, Limestone, TN
"It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God." -- Mary Daly

Beast


If I can't give you beauty,
I can give you truth:
that is that I'm old.
I don't like it, 
it just is.

Rampages of time --
losses, stress, pain,
and laughter too --
write on facial lines.
In wrinkled folds
my eyes reveal
what they didn't understand
and hung beneath my arms
all I hadn't strength to lift.
Distances unrun
waffle round my thighs.
In weariness for what I've tried
blue veins rise and harden.

I've earned all this,
a voice of years
for vision over sight
to harvest from life
what's blessed and real.

Season
Fall in Appalachia is the fall of color, of cover from mountaintop to deepest hollow, the tease of winter cold. It comes toward us gradually. Time to get out warmer clothes. The hills are burning red, glowing orange. Golden seductions defer our fear of ice, freezing. We will walk on these crushed paths, cushion our souls for retreat. Winter's repose comes slowly -- blazing, dimming, dying at our feet. What requiem, what poem will properly engrave the dead lament of summer singing, sinking to earth?

Brother Star


I can't imagine a world without music,
I knew it before I was born,
knew words so the rhythm of poetry
became the rhyme of meaning
straining to meet mute chords.
I knew the duet of my grandmother
and her operatic song.
You cannot kill this;
it is culture marching on.

-- Jeannette Harris

Graphic: War on Venus

"Why should we all use our creative power...? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money." -- Brenda Ueland

Midi: Sunshine of Your Love, Cream

NOTE: Rene Descartes (1596-1650), French physicist, philosopher and mathematician, is famous for a logic summarized as "I think, therefore I am." For twenty years, he lived seclusively in Holland and penned many books, including Essais Philosophiques. He believed in the ultimately dualistic nature of all substance, i.e. mind or matter; held a mechanistic, versus causative, view of physical processes; originated the science of analytical geometry and contributed to the theory of equations.