Tangents

This afternoon's main project is getting ready for this evening's Heartbreak Happy Hour at the Stone Fox -- I'm one of the performers.

The years I've spent drafting sermons (and numerous other speeches for church) mean that I now have a pretty good sense of how many words = ten minutes of material. Which I found myself grateful for this past week, what with trying to bounce back from the flu while going back to work and staying on schedule on a commission and so on. It was nice to know that ten minutes of material isn't actually that many words and that I could knock it out in a day if I couldn't carve out the time any earlier. (But what actually happened was that I started writing it in my head two minutes after receiving the invitation, and sketched it various lines and points in my Workflowy during the rest of the week before slicing and knotting it all together the past two days.)

Coincidentally, two of the hymns in this morning's church service were ones I selected for a service I led a decade or so ago. One was "When Shall We Learn," which is Carl Flentge Schalk's setting of a poem by Auden:

When shall we learn, what should be clear as day,
we cannot choose what we are free to love?
We are created with and from the world
to suffer with and by it day by day.

For through our lively traffic all the day,
in my own person I am forced to know
how much must be forgotten out of love,
how much must be forgiven, even love.

Or else we make a scarecrow of the day,
loose ends and jumble of our common world;
or else our changing flesh can never know
there must be sorrow if there can be love.

The other is "Creative Love, Our Thanks We Give," a William DeWitt Hyde poem adapted by Beth Ide, and set to "Truth from Above" with harmony by Vaughan Williams:

Creative love, our thanks we give
that this, our world is incomplete . . .

Since what we choose is what we are,
and what we love we yet shall be,
the goal may ever shine afar--
the will to reach it makes us free.

Also at church: an adorable mop of a service dog, who snuggled into its owner's shoulder for a while during the sermon:



After church, I ran an errand and picked up Chinese carryout. There was an invisible fortune cookie in the bag...



... and this advice in one of the corporeal cookies:

Business is a lot like playing tennis; if you don't serve well, you lose.

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From the speculative writing/publishing realm:

Sue Burke and several other very experienced translators want to bring castles in Spain to you -- specifically Castles in Spain, a bilingual anthology they're raising funds for via Indiegogo.

If you're a Science Fiction Poetry Association member, you have one week left to nominate your favorite 2014 poems for Rhysling Awards. I have both long and short poems eligible this year [downloadable at http://sfpoetry.com/ra/eligible/PegDuthie2014.rtf] . . .

How to Live on Other Planets is available for pre-order. The list of contributors is fierce, y'all.

This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/97575.html.

At the start of the service, the choir sang Ysaye Barnwell's arrangement of Kahlil Gibran's "On Children":



Your children are not your children
They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself
They come through you but they are not from you
And though they are with you they belong not to you

You can give them your love but not your thoughts
For they have their own thoughts
You may house their bodies but not their souls
For the souls dwell in a place of tomorrow
Which you cannot visit
Not even in your dreams

You can strive to be like them
But you cannot make them just like you

Rev. Gail preached about family and community, and how individuals possess both the desire to belong and the desire for freedom -- the challenge being as a family member (by blood or by choice) to nurture the people we love in such a way that they also feel free to be themselves.

Midway through the sermon, she stated that the largest category of households in the United States consists of people who live alone, which was true of our congregation -- and that the majority of that group at FUUN live alone by choice. She quoted a member of the congregation who had said to her, "I'm looking for someone to date -- but there's NO WAY I'm looking for someone to marry!" This was greeted with a wave of laughter -- and a heartfelt "Amen!" bellowed from the middle of the sanctuary, which triggered a second wave of laughter.

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Maybe ten years ago, a group at church performed another Sweet Honey in the Rock piece, "No Mirrors in My Nana's House." This animated version of it (Chris Raschka illustrations) is a joy:



This entry was originally posted at http://zirconium.dreamwidth.org/50548.html.