I expect her to show for another round.  I repaired the hole in the wood trim, thankfully no larger than a golf ball—  the likely result of the animal’s first session of work.  I expected it to return.  The night after our first encounter,  it was a no show.  Maybe I got the best of the animal, and thus the retreat.  More likely a calculated decision was made to find a home for it’s young elsewhere, a place that involved less effort, less expenditure of energy.  We underestimate the intelligence of wild animals.

I’d like to post some poems from James Kavanaugh.  I recently rediscovered his poetry from a book of poems which I have owned for many years.  He began his adolescence and adulthood by following a religious vocation.  He became a Catholic priest.  I can relate because I was raised in a protestant evangelical fundamentalist family.  That was my “normal.”  What Kavanaugh and I have in common are the lessons of guilt, shame, of self loathing that are inscribed by this type of heritage.  In fairness, I do not think that it is necessary to be religious in order to pass these judgments upon ones self.  Christianity does not help however.

In these lines of poetry, you will sense Kavanaugh’s fulsome humanity, his bias for compassion for oneself.

I understand that a birthday celebration is scheduled for this weekend for myself and for another family member.  I will be 70 years old come April 1st.  I guess that is quite a milestone.  How the years have passed.  I still ask the question, where am I going, why am I here……?  Times passage apparently does not answer those questions.

Also, here are several photos taken within a Starbucks that just opened in Wheeling.  I stopped by to visit a friend who was transferred there.  Starbucks is a standout for their attention to aesthetics, and to good design.

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 “To love is not to possess,
To own or imprison,
Nor to lose one’s self in another.
Love is to join and separate,
To walk alone and together,
To find a laughing freedom
That lonely isolation does not permit.
It is finally to be able
To be who we really are
No longer clinging in childish dependency
Nor docilely living separate lives in silence,
It is to be perfectly one’s self
And perfectly joined in permanent commitment
To another–and to one’s inner self.
Love only endures when it moves like waves,
Receding and returning gently or passionately,
Or moving lovingly like the tide
In the moon’s own predictable harmony,
Because finally, despite a child’s scars
Or an adult’s deepest wounds,
They are openly free to be
Who they really are–and always secretly were,
In the very core of their being
Where true and lasting love can alone abide.”

― James Kavanaugh, Poetry of James Kavanagh

 “Little world, full of little people
shouting for recognition, screaming for love,
Rolling world, teeming with millions,
carousel of the hungry,
Is there food enough? Wheat and corn will not do.
The fat are the hungriest of all, the skinny the most silent.”

― James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves

“Now he haunts me seldom: some fierce umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have learned to love them
And to know that they are the wounds that make love real.
His face illudes me; his voice, with its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when he held my hand.
I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again–I whose boyhood was turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too–and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving from our own reality.”

― James Kavanaugh, There Are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves