Scrupulology: 12/1/11

12/28/11

Ever-reliable Facebook recommended the website applebrides.com, an offer I of course could not refuse. Among the honorable mentions of the featured article, "The Best Wedding Dresses of 2011" (how could I not), were two wedding picture books. Combined, they are my dream wedding.

Which will be classy and adorable, I might add.

What Else Would I Be Doing With My Free Time?

I submit that there are few tasks more rewarding or worthwhile for the forward-thinking young woman on Christmas Break than perusing the Internet for future wedding ideas. Refer to my post about wedding dresses for my response to those who would disagree.

Ever-reliable Facebook recommended the website applebrides.com, an offer I of course could not refuse. Among the honorable mentions of the featured article, "The Best Wedding Dresses of 2011" (how could I not), were two wedding picturebooks. Combined, they are my dream wedding.

I'll be back to applebrides soon, won't you?

12/14/11

Apparently Finals are Good for Something

I came across this quote from Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” one of the abandoned assignments on my Victorian Era Literature syllabus. I’m glad I found it…even if it was in my last hour of cramming!

Beauty has a many meanings as man has moods. Beauty is the symbol of symbols. Beauty reveals everything, because it expresses nothing. When it shows us itself, it shows us the whole fiery-colored world.

12/10/11

Scruple the Second

THE ARMCHAIR

It was a squash yellow: the velvety corduroy print was the sinewy entrails of ripe pumpkin. The arms were low and thinly padded. If they were plush and comely once, years of 1st graders’ sidling bottoms, or ramming knees, or pounding fists had aptly deflated them. The seat cushion sagged from so many stories told from behind your ear in Mrs. Barbezat’s jean-skirted lap. She added “r”s to her words: “washed” was “warshed” to her. The first graders were willing to overlook it: so long as she played the last page of A Very Quiet Cricket more than once. The armchair concealed a “spinney” bottom behind a mustard duster. The intrepid youth received “yellow lights” on their conduct cards for testing the limits of inertia upon the armchair.

I look back into the closed doors of my memory. Walk down the pale lemon hallway of St. Joseph’s Catholic School. Open the wood-stain door with the glass inlay. And in the dark, muffled, cloudy quiet of a school on Sunday, rests the yellow armchair.

12/6/11

Gabriel's Hymn (a funny little postcard's song) (12/4/11)

I prophesy

From the dusty wilderness of

The corkboard square she pinned me to:

Next to and off the map-

Which tracks,

In white string and orange tacks

The route,

A yellow star paperclip

Settling above

Each port

Announcing his arrival.

I: the harbinger from

Cape Town.

It was like Advent,

Sitting in her tiny campus mailbox,

Waiting for the seraphic chorus

Of keys’ teeth chattering into keyhole.

I could’ve glowed

In her smooth hands,

Nail-bitten more than usual

For reasons obvious and unknown.

How blessed to be a herald of the

Good News!,

Gabriel’s hymn:

“Everything is beautiful here:

You’d fit right in.”

12/4/11

MiTunes 8

The Mumph. I contest that those who dislike Mumford & Sons are 1) musically illiterate or 2) certifiably insane. What’s not to like about Mumford & Sons? I have something: The lyrics. Those are to absolutely love.

I can’t wait for their sophomore album to come debut. They previewed this song, “Below My Feet” (craftily concealed in the just-for-kicks picture HYPERLINK…so Blog savvy, guys), and many others at their performance at the Fillmore in Denver, CO this past summer. Enjoy!

Countdown!

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"Hence, the importance of PATIENCE. . . Which becomes the basic constituent of Christianity, more even than humility: the power to wait, to PERSPERVERE, to hold out, to ENDURE to the end, not to transcend one's own limitations, not to force issues by playing the hero or the titan, but to practice the virtue that lies BEYOND heroism, the meekness of the Lamb which is led." -Fr. von Balthasar
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"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." - Margaret Williamson
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“You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know." - Rene Daumal
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"But what is my God? I put my question to the earth. It answered, ‘I am not God,’ and all things on earth declared the same. I asked the sea and the chasms of the deep and the living things that creep in them, but they answered, ‘We are not your God. Seek what is above us.’ I spoke to the winds that blow, and the whole air and all that lives in it replied, ‘Anaximenes is wrong. I am not God.’ I asked the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars, but they told me, ‘Neither are we the God who you seek.’ I spoke to all the things that are about me and that can be admitted by the door of the senses, and I said, ‘Since you are not my God, tell me about him. Tell me something of my God.’ Clear and loud they answered, ‘God is he who made us.’ I asked these questions simply by gazing at these things, and their beauty was all the answer that they gave." - St. Augustine, Confessions
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And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open. - Seamus Heaney
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"Would you be the wind to blow me HOME?
Would you be a DREAM,
On the WINGS of a poem?
And if WE were walking through a CROWD;
Well, you know I'd be PROUD:

If you CALL my NAME out loud.
Do you suppose that I would come RUNNING?
Do you suppose I'd come at all?
I suppose I would...
You KNOW I would." -Dispatch
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"Thus says the LORD:
Just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down
And do not return there
till they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
Giving seed to the one who sows
and bread to the one who eats,
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it." - Isaiah 55:10-11
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The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings. - Gerard Manley Hopkins
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Scrupulology