God is Born

The history of the cosmos
is the history of the struggle of becoming.
When the dim flux of unformed life
struggled, convulsed back and forth upon itself,
and broke at last into light and dark
came into existence as light,
came into existence as cold shadow
then every atom of the cosmos trembled with delight.
Behold, God is born!
He is bright light!
He is pitch dark and cold!

And in the great struggle of intangible chaos
when, at a certain point, a drop of water
began to drip downwards
and a breath of vapour began to wreathe up
Lo again the shudder of bliss through all the atoms!
Oh, God is born!
Behold, He is born wet!
Look, He hath movement upward! He spirals!

And so, in the great aeons of accomplishment and debacle
from time to time the wild crying of every electron:
Lo! God is born!

When sapphires cooled out of molten chaos:
See, God is born! He is blue, he is deep blue,
he is forever blue!
When gold lay shining threading the cooled-off rock:
God is born! God is born! bright yellow and ductile
He is born.

When the little eggy amoeba emerged out of foam and nowhere
then all the electrons held their breath:
Ach! Ach! Now indeed God is born! He twinkles within.
When from a world of mosses and of ferns
at last the narcissus lifted a tuft of five-point stars
and dangled them in the atmosphere,
then every molecule of creation jumped and clapped its hands:
God is born! God is born perfumed and dangling and with a little cup!

Throughout the aeons, as the lizard swirls his tail finer than water,
as the peacock turns to the sun, and could not be more splendid,
as the leopard smites the small calf with a spangled paw, perfect.
the universe trembles: God is born! God is here!

And when at last man stood on two legs and wondered,
then there was a hush of suspense at the core of every electron:
Behold, now very God is born!
God Himself is born!

And so we see,
God is notuntil he is born.

And also we see
there is no end to the birth of God.

-D. H. Lawrence

Ernst Haeckel: a brief and selective abstract

here he is on Christmas, 1860

and why he named a jellyfish after his first wife:
"Mitrocoma Annae belong to the most charming of all the Medusae… Its tentacles hung like blonde hair ornaments of a princess…" his sea squirts &c.

other plates, including hummingbirds, bats, spiders, frogs, flatworms, reptiles, liverworts, gazelles and insectivorous plants are in his Kunstformen der Natur.

hasta nunca güey

“...Two days before Salvador Allende was gunned down, Pablo Neruda, dying of cancer, woke at Isla Negra, to find the walls of the room where he lay covered in clinging starfish.”
-Ray Gonzales
The Walls

sooner or later it all gets disappeared, even the rotary club

ward book exchange

last night, after the Ephraim City holiday light parade, they had the ward Christmas party. and after the Christmas party, on the way out of the building, there was a surprise ward Christmas party book exchange! dusty boxes were laid out over all the tables in the primary room. full with funeral potatoes and whipped cream jello, we browsed, heads down, necks tilting right and left.
it’s a rare joy to hear a baffled deacon, hoping maybe for something on 4-wheelers, sound out “The Maaaaarxsss - ist Reader?”

Aside from Saturday’s Warrior and the regulars, other titles included:
Jane Fonda’s Workout Book (hardcover)
The Way Things Ought to Be – Rush Limbaugh
Blood and Money – Thomas Thompson
Limnology
The Lion of Wall Street: The Two Lives of Jack Dreyfus
I Wish I Could Give my Son a Wild Raccoon- Eliot Wigginton
and a Thomas Pynchon novel


I picked up:
A Natural History of Termites
Collected Poems - Marianne Moore
Defending and Legally Establishing the Good News w/ notes inside cover
All About Dinosaurs - illustrated by Thomas W. Voter
and an old journal/ledger of sorts, the first several pages an inventory of knives, swords & tomahawks?

Kelly found:
The Magic Moscow – Daniel Pinkwater
A Gift So Rare book of sentimental religious poems dedicated "in rainbow love" to someone's chaplain
along with the crown jewel of the whole spread
A Treasury of American Folklore - B.A. Botkin (tremendous!)

…and they all agreed, it was the best ward Christmas party book exchange ever
~the end~