For closeups from others, please go HERE
The Jocotepec, Jalisco, church is beautifully constructed of irregularly-shaped stone with smaller stones laid into the grout. The base of each of the huge palm trees in the courtyard is surrounded by a huge metal or clay pot handcrafted by local artisans. Although I live in the municipality of Jocotepec, my village is actually the smaller pueblo of San Juan Cosala.
http://ceenphotography.com/2015/04/07/cees-fun-foto-challenge-churches-or-any-religious-building-2/
The Prompt: If I Had a Hammer–If you could learn a trade — say carpentry, electrical work, roofing, landscaping, plumbing, flooring, drywall — you name it — what skill(s) would you love to have in your back pocket?
I live in Mexico, where labor is cheap and where everyone needs work, so although there are many of these skills that I already have (given that I used to make lamps and had a husband who thought we should do all our repairs ourselves and never hire a handyman); I am all too happy to call a repairman for almost every job. The exception is rewiring lamps and actually, I’ve also fixed the ice maker–twice! As for the rest, I’m contributing to the Mexican economy. I hire!!
If you’d like to read my poem for today, please go here: https://grieflessons.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/new-world-miracle-napowrimo-2015-day-9/
For other people’s posts on “If I Had a Hammer” go here: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/hammer/
Today’s prompt is to write a visual poem. This is one I tried to publish earlier this year when WordPress was not accepting pingbacks, so perhaps not many have seen it, and certainly not in this form, as when I published it, it was all evened out into regular stanzas by the blog formatting. It occurred to me to save it in jpeg and treat the pages as photographs and that seems to have worked.
San Miguel’s church in the Plaza Principal is noted for the change of color in different light. It had a cleaning about 14 years ago and I need to try to find some of my old pictures to show the difference..
http://ceenphotography.com/2015/04/07/cees-fun-foto-challenge-churches-or-any-religious-building-2/
The Prompt: Write a palinode–a poem in which the poet retracts a statement made in an earlier poem. if you don’t have an actual poetically-expressed statement you want to retract, maybe you could write a poem in which you explain your reasons for changing your mind about something.
Of Stable Mind
There’s nothing I said yesterday that I’d like to retract.
Such wishy-washy thought systems leave me cold, in fact.
Those things that I believed in last week, last month, last year
are pretty much the standards that I still hold dear.
I’m not veering toward the right. I don’t like war games much.
Haven’t changed my taste for chocolate or changed to Greek from Dutch.
I still like Indie movies, the Avett Brothers and
prefer the beach to mountains as I like my walks in sand.
Though change is epidemic with apps changing every day,
when it comes to my beliefs, I think that I’m just going to stay
right here in the middle of the leftward slanting crowd–
where thinking for yourself is both encouraged and allowed.
No knee jerk either way, please, and respect for everyone
so long as they aren’t given to persuasion with a gun.
So I’ll post no apologia for anything I’m thinking.
I’ll row home in the boat I came in even if it’s sinking!
The Prompt: Ripped from the Headlines–Click over to whatever website you visit most frequently to get news. Find the third headline on the page. Make sure that headline is in your post.
The News is too Much with Us
After an hour and a half of perusing the news, I am both confused and depressed and have found absolutely nothing I want to write about. In her blog, my friend Martha looked at the news, found froth and looked for substance. I found depressing substance and went in search of froth, veering off from the German airbus crash to a survey of Mitzi Gaynor’s life. What is wrong with me that I can no longer stand to face the truth of the world even from a distance? I will soon be reduced to watching old romance movies, no doubt, but I can’t help but know from talking to friends and acquaintances that I’m not the only person seeking escape and perhaps nature is taking a hand as well. Perhaps there is a reason why Alzheimer’s has become an epidemic.
May I excuse myself for limiting my world view as much as possible to enable me to still have faith in this world? If I look out my window, I see beauty; and this afternoon, I’ll celebrate the marriage of a friend/employee by taking her family of 8 for dinner at our favorite Argentinian restaurant. Perhaps part of the world as we wish it to be can be preserved by the simple living out of our own lives. For me, this seems only possible if I cut myself off as much as possible from the larger world as they choose to present it in the media.
Yesterday, Mark Aldrich wrote about schadenfreude, that strange but I fear too true tendency of human nature to take pleasure from the pain of others. How else can we explain our fascination with every detail of a major disaster? On one hand, we need to be informed, but if we look realistically at our own responses to the gory details, we will admit there is a certain thrill of horror mixed with relief that this happened to someone else and not to us.
In pandering to that side of ourselves, we fall in line with the the role that slasher movies, competitive and vicious reality television and internet games play in bringing our violent sides out at an ever-increasing and alarming rate. We are desensitized to the point that the reality of rape, pillage, war, tsunami, airline crashes, murder and the victimization of entire societies becomes little more than another thrill. We are so accustomed to horror in our entertainment that real horror becomes a type of entertainment as well.
This is why I disconnected my TV dish years ago and why the daily news no longer serves as my home page. My home page (ironic that a typo caused this to read “hope page” until I caught it and changed it) is now my blog and my email—things that I can control to the point where the first thing that greets my eyes every morning is not the news. Am I an ostrich, burying my head in the sand, or simply someone taking control of her own life? In the long run, I guess it just boils down to semantics, but the nice thing about a life and a blog is that if we are lucky, we have control over it, and so long as both of these facts remain true, I’m going to exercise my right, leave the news trapped in a part of the World Wide Net where I have chosen to entwine it and get my news filtered down to what inevitably seeps through to the part of the net I frequent. Controlled. Put in perspective behind the details of my own life and the life of my friends—where it would naturally be without the glut of information devices that instead of informing us about the world seem to have become our world.
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/ripped-from-the-headlines-2/
The copper vases were all hand raised in Santa Clara del Cobra, near Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. I couldn’t find my pictures of artisans at work, unfortunately, but perhaps some day they will magically appear. The woman is a Tarahumara woman from Copper Canyon, where I didn’t see any copper for sale, but the women make incredible pine needle baskets. The murals are from the ceiling of a church at the bottom of the Canyon. Seems like Copper Canyon pictures qualified. I could have taken the Pepsi bottle out of the picture, but it is more authentic with it. Pepsi actually made it to Mexico (at least my part of Mexico) before Coca Cola did. I have a story about that. Perhaps one day… The bracelets are from Santa Clara del Cobra and Africa.
For more Copper photos, go here:
http://jennifernicholewells.com/2015/04/07/one-word-photo-challenge-copper-2/
Dropped Bill
It falls so easily from open purse or pocket,
unnoticed as you walk away;
and yet to the one who finds it,
such a gift.
A mere surprise, perhaps, baksheesh,
or a next meal they otherwise may have gone without.
Such a small joy for whomever finds it,
whether they pass it on or spend it soon.
Well worth letting a fiver drop by accident,
now and then, like a beneficent God
waiting to see what will happen.
Dropped Bill II
What passes more quickly or more often from hand to hand,
or has more life in it: oil from the fish and chips it purchased,
dirt from the field, lost signs of love?
Everything in life is pressed into the bills we pay
for most of what sustains us.
Yet we call it filthy lucre
as though these signs of life are bad.
Perhaps Shakespeare coined the term, regarding Shylock’s usury.
We’ll look it up after—both you and me.
But even if I’m right, now that I’ve written this verse and you have read it,
Bill Shakespeare may no longer have complete dominion
over our connotation of the term.
Dropped Bill III
King James version of The Bible (Titus 1:10-11), For there are many unruly and vain talkers and deceivers . . . Whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole houses, teaching things which they ought not, for filthy lucre’s sake.
Who knew there was a book in the Bible called Titus?
Not me, though I won the prize, week after week,
for learning the most verses in Sunday School.
True, I’ve forgotten much of what I once knew;
but I was a child who loved money,
hoarding my quarter allowance
in a large blue piggy bank,
and so I doubt an allusion to filthy lucre
would have passed me by,
even without Google to look up the word.
Surely some motivated teacher would have defined the word.
Then I would have known that the term “filthy lucre” was Biblical,
and let Shylock off the hook ever after–
applying it, ironically, to those like politicians
who, for the sake of filthy lucre,
do not pass bills.
The Prompt: Write about money! It could be about not having enough, having too much (a nice kind of problem to have), the smell, or feel, or sensory aspects of money. It could also just be a poem about how we decide what has value or worth.
To find out more about NaPoWriMo, go here: http://www.napowrimo.net/
https://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_prompt/supercalifragilisticexpialidocious/
