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PHOTO OF THE DAY

In the Garden

Thomas Hardy

Photo by Phil Innes: Our garden with first roses and the massive climbing Hydrangea

We waited for the sun

To break its cloudy prison

(For day was not yet done,

And night still unbegun)

Leaning by the dial.

After many a trial—

We all silent there—

It burst as new-arisen,

Throwing a shade to where

Time travelled at that minute.

Little saw we in it,

But this much I know,

Of lookers on that shade,

Her towards whom it made

Soonest had to go.

PASSAGES

Sponsored by Emerson’s Furniture

Anatoly Karpov

Text selections by Vermont Views

Anatoly Karpov (born 1951) is a Russian and Soviet former world chess champion.

Even a dickhead would do a better job than Ilyumzhinov [head of FIDE, the International Chess Body]. The chaos in the chess world is caused by “leaders” who are unable to do their job properly.

This whole fuss did not only damage Fischer's image, but that of the USA as well. The way the Americans treated one of their most popular citizens did not make a positive impression worldwide.

Seville never had a rich chess tradition. Valencia is entirely different, it is enough to say that one of the city squares is named after me.

Children can take lessons in that school via the Internet and can score extra points like e.g. in Geography or History. That sounds very promising and is a fantastic basis for future steps.

People knew about 110 years of chess history. Nowadays, nobody is able to tell you the name of the world champion of 2000.

My relations with Korchnoi depend on whether he has slept well. If he had bad dreams, he speaks a lot of rubbish.

Putin needs strong moves to keep the country as one. There is some criticism that he is centralizing power, but in Russia, if you don't centralize power, you have the risk of losing the country.

Read more Anatoly Karpov >>>

Recent Passages By: Anatoly Karpov, James Baldwin, Lech Wałęsa, Henning Mankell, Anaïs Nin, Suzi Quatro, Lyall Watson, Paula Fox, Octavia Butler, Emma Orczy, Gwendolyn Brooks, Bill Murray, Johnny Weissmuller, Ronald Reagan, Paulo Coelho, Louis L’Amour, Juliette Binoche, Michael Ondaatje, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Philip Roth, Monty Don.  Read their work here

NOT QUITE THE THING

Sponsored by Delectable Mountain Cloth

Caption It!

MM Kizi

Series 24 images

SCREENplay

Ten-Minute Plays

Lawrence Klepp

The annual Ten-Minute Play Festival at the Actors Theatre Playhouse in Chesterfield, N.H., one of the most engaging summer theater offerings in the area (and in one of the most picturesque locations), has come up with a particularly good crop of mini-plays this year, seven in all.

My favorite this time was David Sussman’s Film Appreciation, in which a young woman named Trisha (Stephanie Globus-Hoenich) meets Brian (Ryan Buck) at a Fellini film. She begins to notice that his whole conversation, including seductive overtures, consists of film dialogue… “I’ll have what she’s having”… “Go ahead, make my day”... “I’m making you an offer you can’t refuse,” etc. But she falls for him anyway, until she can’t stand the unrelieved life-as-a-movie anymore and asks him to leave. Then she dates three other guys (all played by Ian Hefele). One is a musician obsessed with jazz standards who talks in song titles (“Nice work if you can get it,” etc.). She promptly drops him, and the next guy is an actor who is all Shakespeare allusions, and finally an abstracted young man who communicates only in philosophical concepts and quotes. She concludes that men, who can’t help framing everything in the language of their obsessions, are just weird. And maybe life is a movie after all, so she goes back to the film guy, who remarks, “The troubles of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,” adding, “And stop calling me Shirley!” (channeling, respectively, Casablanca and Airplane).

Damien Licata is outstanding in two other plays, John Greiner-Ferris’s Taking Up Space (where he’s paired with Cris Parker Jennings) and Tom Coash’s Kamasutra (with Carrie Kidd). <extract>

Read More SCREENplay

MEANDERINGS

Understory vines

Charles Monette

Friday, early afternoon, a sun cloudy day.  I was headed down my outdoor staircase when I heard a knock behind.  Turning ‘round to see what it was, I noticed my walking stick had fallen over and was leaning against the door.  Thinking a moment, I quickly decided that it was an omen, and that the stick wanted to come along.  That meant hiking the steeper, more arduous side of Black mountain today.  I was okay with that.  Hadn’t been up that way in a while, and I was in need of a new perspective.

The walking stick rode in the passenger’s seat, diagonally imposed.  Soon we were going for a ride up Rte. 30, passing under a sky-blue bridge, next a moving road where the West River waters flow.

Parking near the trailhead on Quarry road, I grabbed my trusty stick and a liter of spring water from Iceland.  The stick was 5’ 9 inches or so long, whittled hard maple that had a curved index finger handhold perfect to my squeeze.  There was some water-based oil paint from France splattered about the handle, just enough to make it interesting.

Setting out, the trail was narrow, overgrown grassy adjoining either side.  As the weed grass & clover brushed my legs, I queased of ticks.  Just thinking, not worrying, because I had sprayed the buzz away after leaving my car.  Leaving the open sunshine, I was swallowed by the woods.

  Read more of this article by Charles Monette >>>

AN A-MUSING LIFE

Of hippos and their snacks

Nanci Bern

All I can muster are thoughts of what the blazes is going on in the world, and how it is reverberating in our burgh of Brattleboro. It feels like the air has been overcome by a froth of conflict that covers our conversations to the point that I have seen relationships rupture. Some days the act of breathing seems like a victory.

How do you navigate wanting to respect the dynamic of community relationship and speaking your truth, when you hear what you consider hurtful and harmful points of view? How do we see through the thickness of this atmosphere?

What would Thornton Wilder say? We are in an 'Our Town'. The various written and spoken outlets of disagreement that turn to outrage rebound in a small town that so depends on its web of connections. This has impact beyond the particular issues.  

I overheard a conversation that froze me with the dismayed realization that no give and take may ever be possible. I feared that a common understanding and then joint action to work toward a solution might not to be.

A newly minted adult in the working world; one filled with good intentions and only the highest vision for the future, stood determined in an opinion that left no possibility for anything but seeing their own side. When offered facts, verified reality of the situation, that was even equally verified by this person's side of choice; it came to no avail. They said that their opinion was more important than facts because their opinions and feelings are real and that is what counts.

Read more Nanci Bern

WRITE WALK

I See You

Susan Cruickshank

“LEAVE ME ALONE!!!”  

But they didn’t. They swarmed me instead, always empty, hungry and afraid.  And they were angry too. I could see it in their eyes, their misery and frustration, their rage that I wouldn’t HELP THEM. That I wouldn’t even LOOK at them, SEE them, see that they were human beings, not insects to be swatted away.

But I only walked more quickly, dropping my head, averting my eyes, trying to move past, trying to get away. I was a North American woman traveling alone in New Delhi. Although not hungry, still feeling empty and very much afraid.

That night in my hotel room, after taking a shower and washing off the day’s grime, the panic and vitriol began to subside and I got quiet.

I knew my approach wasn’t working; it wasn’t working at all.

Besides, feeling incensed and frightened, I felt like a jerk for treating people with such disdain. My behavior had made it glaringly obvious that there was a great chasm between who I wanted to be and who I said I was, with who actually lived inside and came out when the pressure was on.

Nobody deserved to be treated with so little respect. My dreams of reaching higher consciousness made me cringe. How superficial my definition had been, how easily it had cracked when challenged.

Extract: Read More Susan Cruickshank >>>

LOVE IN ACTION

Fifty Years of Gratitude in One Beautiful Weekend

Elizabeth Hill

<extract> After our first year, we worked as essential staff in the hospital—five days a week and year-round—with a vigorous schedule that included blocks of day and evening shifts in all the various departments. By year three, night shift was added to our roster along with being in charge of whole wards with thirty or more patients. Most nights, there would be two auxiliary staff people to help with patient care, though there was only one Nursing Supervisor for the whole hospital who could be paged if there was an emergency. Most wards were routinely at full capacity, sometimes also jammed with extra patients in beds lining the hallways.

During our recent 50th reunion weekend—while stories from those long-ago student days were being shared—one classmate quietly stated:

“Every single day during those three years, I was scared!”

Her words landed on me like a soothing suave on a tired old wound. I thanked her for saying it out loud!

In the 60’s, student nurses did not practice their craft in cyberspace or on rubber dummies! We learned—sometimes by trial and error from very early days in our training—on flesh and blood human beings! We were teenage girls charged with responsibilities way beyond our years, and our actions could be life enhancing or even life threatening!

I was eighteen that first year, assigned one day to care for an elderly man who had suffered several severe strokes. He wasn’t able to talk, but I do remember the sparkle in his eyes and his smile, made crooked by the strokes. I was aware his chart had DNR on it, which meant he was not to be resuscitated if he stopped breathing.

That morning, I helped him eat a bit of breakfast and did his routine care until my lunch break. By the time I returned, he had slipped into a coma, and orders were to give him comfort care.

I sat next to him and held his hand for several hours as his breathing slowed and became irregular. Then, gasps began. I knew from our classroom studies these gasps meant he would soon take his final breath.

Fear overtook me. Though still holding his hand, I had to turn away. I felt as if I was invading a sacred space, a moment that was too private for me to watch.

Extract Read More Elizabeth Hill >>>

VERMONT DIARY

Don’t free Tibet, yet

Editorial

Reports from the Himalayas on Tibetans are varied, but rarely edifying..  George Schaller recognized by many as the world's preeminent field biologist, in reports from the fringes of Tibetan tribes outside the orb of the Chinese, offered that the women could be smelled from 30 feet away because of the rancid yak butter in their hair; their children frost and wind burned with constant runny noses and filthy from head to foot, and the men anodyne shepards, these groups having escaped the attention away from the influence of the organized state to a ‘natural’ one.

Then there is Peter Caddy, co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation in Northern Scotland, describing Tibet as a ‘death –culture.’

What then to make of the ‘Free Tibet’ bumper sticker?

Research indicates that on the eve of the Chinese invasion of the country in  1949/1950 life expectancy averaged 33 years. If you were a woman this would be lower since there was no western medicine to ameliorate birthing difficulties, and the reader may imagine average age at which children are orphaned. Best would be about 17 years, but likely averaged 8.

This year the average life-span of Tibetans has exactly doubled to 66 years.

Read More Vermont Diary >>>

MONKEY’S CLOAK

to Mother Teresa

András Adorján — ’92. máj. 15.

Thank You  God Who Lives Inside Us

Thank God, thank you Kubát János

And all of living and dead idols

Thanks for Gandhi, Barcza, Liszt

All the muses’ inspiring kiss

Thank You for my troubles, misery

Thank You for the pushes towards humility

Forgive me for being just a man, silly

You’ve created me this way, (can’t) You see?

Thanks for crushing my vanity, pride

In return I got a humble heart

Let me be worthy just once more or say twice

Let me be sincere, confident, nice

Let me radiate your shining inner light

When our Father Sun is out of sight

Let me be your instrument, please

Play your melody through sinful me

Let others receive your call by me too

Let me join your Army of Peace, would You?

Put down the sword of the anger, we’re blue

Do not punish us, yourself Our Father of truth(You true)

Yes, you heard it well, we’re really you

Who created who how could we knew?

There’s no telling, there’s no proof

Who is us (and) who are you

[editorial note: the writer is a chess grandmaster and candidate world champion, resident in Budapest, Hungary]

SELECTED LETTERS

Compassion is volunteering to feed the hungry

Jane Southworth

...And why is it that we need to search for compassionate acts? The point, of course, is that our world on the whole, as it is now, is far from compassionate, and woefully needs to become more so.

Yet – even so – often below the surface, and sometimes even organized and on an ongoing basis, some things are happening. Compassionate people do exist everywhere, and are performing compassionate acts. We just don’t see enough of them.

Take, for a good example, the "Loaves and Fishes" meal program, sponsored and housed by the Centre Congregational Church. Loaves and Fishes serves lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. every Tuesday and Friday in the Church basement. Together with similarly compassionate groups in town, persons in need can now get a free meal every day of the week. Of course these things don’t just happen. As it take a village to raise children, it takes a legion of volunteers to provide these meals for hungry people.

At about 7 a.m. on Fridays (the day I know best), the kitchen in Centre Church’s basement is warm with heat from stoves and hard work. Phil, Josie and Ruth (our organizer and captain) are cooking. William is doing dishes. Diane is setting the eight tables. 

[Editorial note:  Both John and Ryan are usually members of the 7am crew, or actually 6:30-ish, Phil] This is an extract from Jane Southworth’s letter. Photo Credit: Phil Innes, From left Jo, Ruth] read on >>>

ARCHETYPAL HIPPIE SPEAKS

Perfect

Jeri Rose

It kind of pisses me off when people say of themselves, "I am not perfect" because everyone is perfect. They are the only one like them and that perfection is the only perfection because God made it all. Yes, we can mess up what is in alignment for us to be and fail the perfection that is ours to obtain working through the situation of our lives, but we are still perfect because it is our choice and it is uniquely ours; not one of us can be other than who we are. We are perfectly true to ourselves even when we are wrong and go against the initiating love and intelligence that we are bestowed as our gift of being human. So just quit saying you are not perfect because the concept of some perfection that we all miss is not created...there is no template of human that we all must be like as though we are capable of being one thing alike to some idea. We are perfect in difference in uniqueness and in individuality.

Read more Jeri Rose >>>

IN BETWEEN

Searching For All the Moments We Put on Hold

Julia Ferrari

Regarding that need to search for those lost moments in my life, I feel almost as if, in finding them I could re-live those moments of vitality and immediacy from the past. I could imagine finding them one by one, and re-living them. That ordinary sunny day at lunch, when the cat stretched in the warm southern exposure, that conversation during a long car ride filled with imaginative ideas about future books. I liked having someone to share my day-to-day existence, giving and sharing purpose. So what is my purpose now? I’m not sure anymore, except to maintain, to stay afloat, to keep my head above water until I see the Island in the distance. Glimpses, glimpses …

Read more Julia Ferrari

OPEN MIND

So what is Donald Trump

Offie Wortham

Your meeting with President Trump

Try to imagine that you are at a very high-class social gathering with your companion and you get into a conversation with Donald Trump. He will most likely be uninterested in events in either of your lives. He will tell you about his recent accomplishments, and plans for future adventures. If you are a male, he might lean over and whisper in your ear about how he would “like to grab the pussy” of that beautiful woman across the room. He might also brag about some of his many extra-marital affairs and how one of his mistresses, Marla Maples, was “The best sex I ever had.” If you are not shocked enough to excuse yourself from his presence, he will continue the one-sided conversation for perhaps another half hour.

He might talk about the success of his reality TV program, The Apprentice. Reviews now say that the ‘reality’ in Trump’s reality TV wasn’t real. “In every episode he acted out dramas of control over submissive contestants seeking his favor, wilting at his denial of it and fawning at his approval. Under Trump, winning was the road to serfdom. The subtext was pathos, not only on the part of the supplicants but also in the boss’s trademark phrase, ‘You’re fired.’ No matter how many people Trump rejected, he couldn’t force his own acceptance.”

According to the highly respected psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, and hundreds of other mental health professionals, “President Trump exhibits malignant narcissism, a sociopathy, paranoia, a delusional detachment from reality, and more. He has delusional levels of grandiosity, impulsivity, and the compulsions of mental impairment. He has a detachment from reality”, and of “a hypomanic temperament” (restless, impatient, easily bored, supremely confident, impulsive, and risk-taking with a minuscule attention span). He is also an extreme present hedonist who lives in the moment “without much thought of any consequences of his actions or of the future” and says “whatever it will take to pump up his ego and to assuage his inherent low self-esteem, without any thought for past reality.” It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to notice that our president is mentally compromised, with his furious tirades, conspiracy fantasies, and aversion to facts and attraction to violence.

<extract>    Read More Offie Wortham >>>

WRITE ON !

In Light of Pee

Nicola Metcalf

As a Quaker, we talk a lot about seeking “the light”, usually from within.  That can be within oneself or another person. When I went to India, my noticed my perception of light changing.  What I became aware of (in addition to dark poverty, dirt and garbage) was the light without.  When landing in Dubai en route to Chennai (not India but getting close) the lights sparkled with more brilliance than other airports I have visited.  I sat in the Matrimandir Temple in Auroville with its single beam of sunlight penetrating the space as a reminder to concentrate.   Warm inviting sunshine embraced me while swimming in the Bay of Bengal.  I delighted in the eye catching colors of saried women riding scooters sidesaddle.   We ogled necklaces layered thick in glittering gold in an upscale jewelry store.  The indian love of bright reflective things was in the atmosphere all around me.  One day stands out in this experience in particular.

It had been a long day of sightseeing in Tiravunamalai, southern India.  We had risen at 4:30 am to circumambulate 8 miles around the base of Aranuchala Mountain, visiting 8 small temples along the way.

Read More Nicola Metcalf >>>

OLD LADY BLOG

Horoscope and Water Wars

Toni Ortner

From a forthcoming title: Daybook II

At the start of the dry season we assumed it would end. We heard thunder, but rain did not come. We became so desperate we did rain dances and chanted, but nothing worked. We knelt in the dirt and prayed to gods to let the water run again. Then we blamed the government, but it made no difference. What had we done? How had we sinned so that water would not run?

Our bellies became bloated and our throats parched. We had wrinkled skin then convulsions No flowers in the vase became a joke when there were no more nuts or vegetables, or grains or fruit Dead goats, cattle, and sheep lay piled in heaps. The earth split into fissures. Streams trickled over rocks then stopped. Water tanks gurgled then spit sand. We did not understand.

THE FIRST GLASS

TODAY'S WEATHER

Vincent Panella

She was sitting in front of the TV, remote in hand, water, books, and pills on the side table. She lowered the sound when he came in and sat, his back hurting from the day's work.

I don't think I'll be able to get up.

You poor thing.

Bent over a sink for the last few hours.

It's so good you came.

I'm a little late.

That doesn't matter. As long as you're here.

Turn that sound off. I can't stand him. Read More>>>

SCREENplay

The Darkest Hour

Lawrence Klepp

...replacing Neville Chamberlain. R.A. Butler, a Tory politician in the Foreign Office, called him “a half-breed American whose main support was inefficient but talkative people of a similar type.” It was whispered that he was vulgar, he was a drunkard, he was unreliable.

It is hard to realize now how much Churchill, the enduring emblem of indomitable British fortitude and tradition, was distrusted and disdained at the time by most of the British establishment.

100 YEARS AGO

January 1918

Vermont Views

January – 1918 flu pandemic: "Spanish 'flu" (influenza) first observed in Haskell County, Kansas.

GUEST ARTCLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #15

Some sentences from Cuba

Mac Gander

It is dawn in La Habana and I am listening to Bob Marley’s “Rebel Music” as my wife Shanta sleeps in the next room and I mark the end of our third week here. One week to go. Travel is exhausting. There is no moment in which one does not wish to be awake.

I am thinking of the opening trope in Denis Johnson’s “Fiskadoro,” where he invokes Marley as one of the three great gods still left in the Florida Keys after a nuclear holocaust, a book that ends with a war-ship returning to those shores after a 90-year quarantine, from Cuba, a grey ship that is taller than the sky.

GUEST ARTICLE

LETTERS FROM CUBA #12

What lies beneath: Our stories our ghosts

Shanta Lee Gander

Who came first?  Europa or Europe?  With some research, I could get an answer, but the story of a girl who keeps dreaming about two continents fighting over her and who meets her fate and immortality with a God turned beautiful bull is an old one

SPECIAL FEATURE

A Dance with Hermes

Ken Masters

‘Into this hallowed room (I remember a gratifying visiting Professor of Logic, who, whilst debunking “Eastern Philosophy”, and cutting short his fourteen pages of definitions of “consciousness”, waved his arms in the air, inviting in the energy to energise the very expression of his de-bunking – which intangibility I can not possibly recognise, classify, or exonerate) came one Lindsay Clarke, propagating one irritatingly intangible “(A Dance With) Hermes”, full of vital “presence”, whom I hoped I had seen off aeons ago.

URBAN NATURALIST

“...spanning 6 1/2 to 7 feet”

Lloyd Graf

Chipmunks, needing a position suited for chastising the lumpen bipeds who invade their territories by walking the Sanctuary trail have dug a burrow right by the trail-head entry post

Perfect

Jeri Rose

It kind of pisses me off when people say of themselves, "I am not perfect" because everyone is perfect. They are the only one like them and that perfection is the only perfection because God made it all. Yes, we can mess up what is in alignment for us to be and fail the perfection that is ours to obtain working through the situation of our lives, but we are still perfect because it is our choice and it is uniquely ours; not one of us can be other than who we are. We are perfectly true to ourselves even when we are wrong and go against the initiating love and intelligence that we are bestowed as our gift of being human. So just quit saying you are not perfect because the concept of some perfection that we all miss is not created...there is no template of human that we all must be like as though we are capable of being one thing alike to some idea. We are perfect in difference in uniqueness and in individuality.

Read more Jeri Rose >>>

NOW, HERE, THIS!

Tornado Watch— 15 May

Vermont Views

3:00 PM and two views of an active tornado watch. Top image is of lightning  strikes of a storm headed this way, and bottom or right is current concentrations. From Brattleboro at 3:10 thunder heard south.

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Maclean and Shanta Lee Gander : 15 Letters from Cuba

RECENT ARTICLES

Passages Anatoly Karpov

Lawrence Klepp Ten-Minute Plays SCREENplay

Charles Monette Understory vines Meanderings

Nanci Bern Of hippos and their snacks An A-musing life

Susan Cruikshank I See You Write Walk

Elizabeth Hill Fifty Years of Gratitude in One Beautiful Weekend Love In Action

Vermont Diary Don’t free Tibet, yet

András Adorján to Mother Teresa Monkeys Cloak

Jane Southworth Compassion is volunteering to feed the hungry Selected Letters

Jeri Rose Perfect Archetypal Hippie Speaks

Offie Wortham So what is Donald Trump Open Mind

Nicola Metcalf In Light of Pee Write On!

Vincent Panella The First Glass

Mac & Shanta Lee Gander 15 Letters from Cuba