On Candlemas, I took my Christmas tree down all by myself and dragged it to the driveway. I started to cut it up with a hand saw, but that was slow going, and I decided to ask my neighbor to have at it with his power tools, so I can put it in my yard waste bin.
As I hauled the tree along the front walk, I noticed that the first anemone is blooming, and in the back garden a bee was drinking from the manzanita flowers.
I’m posting this in honor of St. Brigid of Ireland, whose feast day is February 1. I think she would have liked this poem, and would know it to be about her love for Christ.
A BIRTHDAY
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a water’d shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me a dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair* and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
-Christina Rossetti
*vair: A fur, probably squirrel, much used in medieval times to line and trim robes.
We commemorate St. Anthony the Great this month.
There are three satanic traps that steal joy and peace:
regret for the past,
fear of the future,
ingratitude for the present.
+ Saint Anthony the Great
“People have always found ways to carve out moments of privacy in public space; this is part of what makes public space tolerable for everyone. Civil attention’s twin is civil inattention, ‘whereby one treats the other as if he has been seen but is not an object of undue curiosity,’ as Goffman described. We nod at the stranger stepping into the elevator and then return to staring at the ceiling or look up briefly from reading when other commuters get on the bus.
“Civil inattention is still a kind of acknowledgment, qualitatively different from being ‘looked at as through air.’ When we focus our attention on the glowing screens of our smartphones rather than on the people around us, never granting them even brief acknowledgment, we are not practicing civil inattention but civil disengagement. This is becoming the norm in public space.”
— Christine Rosen, The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World
Gladsome Lights 