MY AUNTIE - by George Naylor

 

MY  AUNTIE by  George Naylor When I was hopeless, you were there.You picked me up; you showed me care.Without the love you had for meGod only knows where I would be. To me, you were a second mom,a person I drew wisdom from.In my corner every fight,you always cared that things were right. I won't forget the things you've done.I felt like your adopted son.Ready now and feeling new,I couldn't leave not thanking you.

BEST AND WISEST MOM - by Joanna Fuchs

 

BEST  AND  WISEST  MOM by  Joanna Fuchs Mom, I wish I had words to tellHow much you mean to me.I am the person I am today,Because you let me be. Your unconditional loveMade me happy, strong, secure.Your teaching and exampleMade me confident, mature. In all the world, there is no motherBetter than my own.You're the best and wisest person, MomI have ever known.

I GIVE YOU BACK - by Joy Harjo

 

I GIVE YOU BACK by Joy Harjo I release you, my beautiful and terrible fear. I release you. You were my beloved and hated twin, but now, I don’t know you as myself. I release you with all the pain I would know at the death of my children. You are not my blood anymore. I give you back to the soldiers who burned down my home, beheaded my children, raped and sodomized my brothers and sisters. I give you back to those who stole the food from our plates when we were starving. I release you, fear, because you hold these scenes in front of me and I was born with eyes that can never close. I release you I release you I release you I release you I am not afraid to be angry. I am not afraid to rejoice. I am not afraid to be black. I am not afraid to be white. I am not afraid to be hungry. I am not afraid to be full. I am not afraid to be hated. I am not afraid to be loved. to be loved, to be loved, fear. Oh, you have choked me, but I gave you the leash. You have gutted me, but I gave you the knife. You have devoured me, but I laid myself across the fire. I take myself back, fear. You are not my shadow any longer. I won’t hold you in my hands. You can’t live in my eyes, my ears, my voice my belly, or in my heart my heart my heart my heart But come here, fear I am alive and you are so afraid of dying. Joy Harjo is the first Native American (Mvskoke Nation) United States Poet Laureate.

LATE FRAGMENT - by Raymond Carver

 

LATE  FRAGMENT by Raymond Carver And did you get what you wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

NERVES AND COMMON SENSE - by Annie Payson Call

 

ABOUT  FACES

Watch the faces as you walk along the street ! If you get the habit of noticing, your observations will grow keener. It is surprising to see how seldom we find a really quiet face. I do not mean that there should be no lines in the face. We are here in this world at school and we cannot have any real schooling unless we have real experiences. We cannot have real experiences without suffering, and suffering which comes from the discipline of life and results in character leaves lines in our faces. It is the lines made by unnecessary strain to which I refer.

Strange to say the unquiet faces come mostly from shallow feeling. Usually the deeper the feeling the less strain there is on the face. A face may look troubled, it may be full of pain, without a touch of that strain which comes from shallow worry or excitement.

The strained expression takes character out of the face, it weakens it, and certainly it detracts greatly from whatever natural beauty there may have been to begin with. The expression which comes from pain or any suffering well borne gives character to the face and adds to its real beauty as well as its strength.

To remove the strained expression we must remove the strain behind; therefore the hardest work we have to do is below the surface. The surface work is comparatively easy.

I know a woman whose face is quiet and placid. The lines are really beautiful, but they are always the same. This woman used to watch herself in the glass until she had her face as quiet and free from lines as she could get it, she used even to arrange the corners of her mouth with her fingers until they had just the right droop.

Then she observed carefully how her face felt with that placid expression and studied to keep it always with that feeling, until by and by her features were fixed and now the placid face is always there, for she has established in her brain an automatic vigilance over it that will not allow the muscles once to get "out of drawing."

What kind of an old woman this acquaintance of mine will make I do not know. I am curious to see her, but now she certainly is a most remarkable hypocrite. The strain in behind the mask of a face which she has made for herself must be something frightful. And indeed I believe it is, for she is ill most of the time and what could keep one in nervous illness more entirely than this deep interior strain which is necessary to such external appearance of placidity.

There comes to my mind at once a very comical illustration of something quite akin to this although at first thought it seems almost the reverse. A woman who constantly talked of the preeminency of mind over matter, and the impossibility of being moved by external circumstances to any one who believed as she did, this woman I saw very angry.

She was sitting with her face drawn in a hundred cross lines and all askew with her anger. She had been spouting and sputtering what she called her righteous indignation for some minutes, when after a brief pause and with the angry expression still on her face she exclaimed: "Well, I don't care, it's all peace within."

I doubt if my masked lady would ever have declared to herself or to any one else that "it was all peace within." The angry woman was - without doubt - the deeper hypocrite, but the masked woman had become rigid in her hypocrisy. I do not know which was the weaker of the two, probably the one who was deceiving herself.

But to return to those drawn, strained lines we see on the people about us. They do not come from hard work or deep thought. They come from unnecessary contractions about the work. If we use our wills consistently and steadily to drop such contractions, the result is a more quiet and restful way of living, and so quieter and more attractive faces.

This unquietness comes especially in the eyes. It is a rare thing to see a really quiet eye; and very pleasant and beautiful it is when we do see it. And the more we see and observe the unquiet eyes and the unquiet faces the better worth while it seems to work to have ours more quiet, but not to put on a mask, or be in any other way a hypocrite.

The exercise described in a previous chapter will help to bring a quiet face. We must drop our heads with a sense of letting every strain go out of our faces, and then let our heads carry our bodies down as far as possible, dropping strain all the time, and while rising slowly we must take the same care to drop all strain.

In taking the long breath, we must inhale without effort, and exhale so easily that it seems as if the breath went out of itself, like the balloons that children blow up and then watch them shrink as the air leaves them.

Five minutes a day is very little time to spend to get a quiet face, but just that five minutes, if followed consistently will make us so much more sensitive to the unquiet that we will sooner or later turn away from it as by a natural instinct.

ABOUT  VOICES

I Knew an old German, a wonderful teacher of the speaking voice who said "the ancients believed that the soul of the man is here" - pointing to the pit of his stomach. "I do not know," and he shrugged his shoulders with expressive interest, "it may be and it may not be, but I know the soul of the voice is here, and you Americans, you squeeze the life out of the word in your throat and it is born dead."

That old artist spoke the truth, we Americans, most of us - do squeeze the life out of our words and they are born dead. We squeeze the life out by the strain which runs all through us and reflects itself especially in our voices. Our throats are tense and closed; our stomachs are tense and strained; with many of us the word is dead before it is born.

Watch people talking in a very noisy place; hear how they scream at the top of their lungs to get above the noise. Think of the amount of nervous force they use in their efforts to be heard.

Now really when we are in the midst of a great noise and want to be heard, what we have to do is to pitch our voices on a different key from the noise about us. We can be heard as well, and better, if we pitch our voices on a lower key than if we pitch them on a higher key; and to pitch your voice on a low key requires very much less effort than to strain to a high one.

I can imagine talking with some one for half an hour in a noisy factory, for instance, and being more rested at the end of the half hour than at the beginning. Because to pitch your voice low you must drop some superfluous tension and dropping superfluous tension is always restful.

I beg any or all of my readers to try this experiment the next time they have to talk with a friend in a noisy street. At first the habit of screaming above the noise of the wheels is strong on us and it seems impossible that we should be heard if we speak below it. It is difficult to pitch our voices low and keep them there. But if we persist until we have formed a new habit, the change is delightful.

There is one other difficulty in the way; whoever is listening to us may be in the habit of hearing a voice at high tension and so find it difficult at first to adjust his ear to the lower voice and will in consequence insist that the lower tone cannot be heard as easily.

It seems curious that our ears can be so much engaged in expecting screaming that they cannot without a positive effort of the mind readjust in order to listen to a lower tone. But it is so. And, therefore, we must remember that to be thoroughly successful in speaking intelligently below the noise we must beg our listeners to change the habit of their ears as we ourselves must change the pitch of our voices.

The result both to speaker and listener is worth the effort ten times over.

As we habitually lower the pitch of our voices our words cease gradually to be "born dead." With a low-pitched voice everything pertaining to the voice is more open and flexible and can react more immediately to whatever may be in our minds to express.

Moreover, the voice itself may react back again upon our dispositions. If a woman gets excited in an argument, especially if she loses her temper, her voice will be raised higher and higher until it reaches almost a shriek. And to hear two women "argue" sometimes it may be truly said that we are listening to a "caterwauling." That is the only word that will describe it.

But if one of these women is sensitive enough to know she is beginning to strain in her argument and will lower her voice and persist in keeping it lowered the effect upon herself and the other woman will put the "caterwauling" out of the question.

"Caterwauling" is an ugly word. It describes an ugly sound. If you have ever found yourself in the past aiding and abetting such an ugly sound in argument with another say to yourself "caterwauling," "caterwauling," "I have been 'caterwauling' with Jane Smith, or Maria Jones," or whoever it may be, and that will bring out in such clear relief the ugliness of the word and the sound that you will turn earnestly toward a more quiet way of speaking.

The next time you start on the strain of an argument and your voice begins to go up, up, up - something will whisper in your ear "caterwauling" and you will at once, in self-defense, lower your voice or stop speaking altogether.

It is good to call ugly things by their ugliest names. It helps us to see them in their true light and makes us more earnest in our efforts to get away from them altogether.

I was once a guest at a large reception and the noise of talking seemed to be a roar, when suddenly an elderly man got up on a chair and called "silence," and having obtained silence he said, "it has been suggested that every one in this room should speak in a lower tone of voice."

The response was immediate. Every one went on talking with the same interest only in a lower tone of voice with a result that was both delightful and soothing.

I say every one, there were perhaps half a dozen whom I observed who looked and I have no doubt said "how impudent." So it was "impudent" if you chose to take it so, but most of the people did not choose to take it so and so brought a more quiet atmosphere and a happy change of tone.

Theophile Gautier said that the voice was nearer the soul than any other expressive part of us. It is certainly a very striking indicator of the state of the soul. If we accustom ourselves to listen to the voices of those about us we detect more and more clearly various qualities of the man or the woman in the voice, and if we grow sensitive to the strain in our own voices and drop it at once when it is perceived, we feel a proportionate gain.

I knew of a blind doctor who habitually told character by the tone of the voice, and men and women often went to him to have their characters described as one would go to a palmist.

Once a woman spoke to him earnestly for that purpose and he replied, "Madam, your voice has been so much cultivated that there is nothing of you in it - I cannot tell your real character at all." The only way to cultivate a voice is to open it to its best possibilities, not to teach its owner to pose or to imitate a beautiful tone until it has acquired the beautiful tone habit. Such tones are always artificial and the unreality in them can be easily detected by a quick ear.

Most great singers are arrant hypocrites. There is nothing of themselves in their tone. The trouble is to have a really beautiful voice one must have a really beautiful soul behind it.

If you drop the tension of your voice in an argument for the sake of getting a clearer mind and meeting your opponent without resistance, your voice helps your mind and your mind helps your voice.

They act and react upon one another with mutual benefit. If you lower your voice in general for the sake of being more quiet, and so more agreeable and useful to those about you, then again the mental or moral effort and the physical effort help one another.

It adds greatly to a woman's attraction and to her use to have a low, quiet voice and if any reader is persisting in the effort to get five minutes absolute quiet in every day let her finish the exercise by saying something in a quiet, restful tone of voice.

It will make her more sensitive to her unrestful tones outside, and so help her to improve them.

ABOUT  FRIGHTS

Here are two true stories and a remarkable contrast. A nerve specialist was called to see a young girl who had had nervous prostration for two years. The physician was told before seeing the patient that the illness had started through fright occasioned by the patient's waking and discovering a burglar in her room.

Almost the moment the doctor entered the sick room, he was accosted with: "Doctor, do you know what made me ill ? It was frightful." Then followed a minute description of her sudden awakening and seeing the man at her bureau drawers.

This story had been lived over and over by the young girl and her friends for two years, until the strain in her brain caused by the repetition of the impression of fright was so intense that no skill nor tact seemed able to remove it. She simply would not let it go, and she never got really well.

Now, see the contrast. Another young woman had a similar burglar experience, and for several nights after she woke with a start at the same hour. For the first two or three nights she lay and shivered until she shivered herself to sleep.

Then she noticed how tightened up she was in every muscle when she woke, and she bethought herself that she would put her mind on relaxing her muscles and getting rid of the tension in her nerves. She did this persistently, so that when she woke with the burglar fright it was at once a reminder to relax.

After a little she got the impression that she woke in order to relax and it was only a very little while before she succeeded so well that she did not wake until it was time to get up in the morning.

The burglar impression not only left her entirely, but left her with the habit of dropping all contractions before she went to sleep, and her nerves are stronger and more normal in consequence.

The two girls had each a very sensitive, nervous temperament, and the contrast in their behavior was simply a matter of intelligence.

This same nerve specialist received a patient once who was positively blatant in her complaint of a nervous shock. "Doctor, I have had a horrible nervous shock. It was horrible. I do not see how I can ever get over it."

Then she told it and brought the horrors out in weird, over-vivid colors. It was horrible, but she was increasing the horrors by the way in which she dwelt on it.

Finally, when she paused long enough to give the doctor an opportunity to speak, he said, very quietly: "Madam, will you kindly say to me, as gently as you can, 'I have had a severe nervous shock." She looked at him without a gleam of understanding and repeated the words quietly: "I have had a severe nervous shock."

In spite of herself she felt the contrast in her own brain. The habitual blatancy was slightly checked. The doctor then tried to impress upon her the fact that she was constantly increasing the strain of the shock by the way she spoke of it and the way she thought of it, and that she was really keeping herself ill.

Gradually, as she learned to relax the nervous tension caused by the shock, a true intelligence about it all dawned upon her; the over-vivid colors faded, and she got well. She was surprised herself at the rapidity with which she got well, but she seemed to understand the process and to be moderately grateful for it.

If she had had a more sensitive temperament she would have appreciated it all the more keenly; but if she had had a more sensitive temperament she would not have been blatant about her shock.

Annie Payson Call (1853–1940) was a Waltham author. 

She wrote several books and published articles in "Ladies' Home Journal".

Many articles are reprinted in her book "Nerves and Common Sense".

The common theme of her work is mental health. 

COMING HOME - by Ellen P. Allerton

 

COMING  HOME by  Ellen P. Allerton     Home to my mother's door. Push back the lock,     She will not open it - no use to knock.     A weight is on my breast; oh ! never yet     Daughter at mother's door such welcome met!     No kiss upon my lips; no word, no sound,     No loving arms reach out to clasp me round,     I cross the threshold to a solemn room,     Peopled with shadows, silent as the tomb.     The heavy air is chill - no fire, no light;     Only pale sunshine, streaming thin and white     Through the bare panes upon the naked floor.     I shrink and shiver - do not shut the door !     Tread lightly on the creaking boards, speak low;     Start not the hollow echoes; well I know     They sleep in every corner. Do not call,     Lest they should answer loudly, one and all.     Her voice is still. 'Twas here I heard it last -      Here by the door. The tears fell thick and fast     From both our eyes; today the drops run o'er     From only mine; and she - she weeps no more.     This was her bed-room; it was here, you say,     She laid in silence all that summer day,     With roses (how she loved them!) at her head,     Wreathed on the wall and strewn upon her bed.     Now she lies yonder, and a sombre pall     The dead leaves weave above her as they fall;     The rains that beat, the autumn Winds that blow,     Are making ready heavy shrouds of snow.     Whatever covers her, she still sleeps well;     But oh! these silent rooms! I can not tell     Why their cold emptiness should move me so;     I can not bear it longer - let us go.

MOTHER EARTH - by Aufie Zophy

 

MOTHER   EARTH by  Aufie   Zophy To our dear mother earth,who gave to all of us birth:your fever we want to cure.Will we succeed? Not so sure! Some of our sisters and brothersseem not to care for any others.Apparently blinded by money and wealth,they seem not worried about your health. When pushed on the topic of your fever,they will make any kind of endeavourto deny it and claim nothing is wrong;a lack of emotion, their greed much too strong. I still hope, our dear mother earth,holding all treasures of incredible worth,that we will find people in numbers enoughto treat your disease with utmost caring love. Let us work all together to find a solution,stop all the waste and unnecessary pollution,reduce carbon emission, preserve our trees,keep clean our earth, our oceans and seas. Now is the time to move and act.The disease of our mother is a certain factNo man with a bit of intellect, a bit of a braincan be allowed to ignore your fever again.

GIF - ANIMATION - HAPPY BIRTHDAY

 

IF YOU'RE GOING TO LOVE ME - by Anonymous

 

IF  YOU'RE  GOING  TO  LOVE  ME by Anonymous If you're ever going to love me love me now, while I can knowAll the sweet and tender feelings which from real affection flow.Love me now, while I am living; do not wait till I am goneAnd then chisel it in marble — warm love words on ice-cold stone.If you've dear, sweet thoughts about me, why not whisper them to me?Don't you know 'twould make me happy and as glad as glad could be?If you wait till I am sleeping, ne'er to waken here again,There'll be walls of earth between us and I couldn't hear you then.If you knew someone was thirsting for a drop of water sweetWould you be so slow to bring it? Would you step with laggard feet?There are tender hearts all round us who are thirsting for our love;Why withhold from them what nature makes them crave all else above?I won't need your kind caresses when the grass grows o'er my face;I won't crave your love or kisses in my last low resting place.So, then, if you love me any, if it's but a little bit,Let me know it now while living; I can own and treasure it.

CLAUDE MELLAN - ( 1598 – 1688) French engraver.

Incredible! This 17th century engraving depicting Jesus Christ wearing a crown of thorns is called "Sudarium of Saint Veronica", engraving by Claude Mellan in 1649. An ordinary drawing, close up, turns out to be an image created using a single line that is twisted in a spiral. All the details of the face and transitions of light and shadow are created using thickenings of this line. For the artist's contemporaries, his method of engraving remained a mystery, and no one was able to repeat it.

Self-portrait, engraving by Claude Mellan (1635)

Claude Mellan ( 1598 – 1688) was a French draughtsman, engraver, and painter.

Mellan was born in Abbeville, the son of a customs official.

His first known print (Préaud no. 288 ), made for a thesis in theology at the Collège des Mathurins, shows that he was in Paris by 1619. His first teachers have not been identified, but his early engravings are thought to show the influence of Léonard Gaultier.

In 1624 Mellan went to Rome, where he studied engraving for a brief time with Francesco Villamena, who died that year. He then studied under Simon Vouet, who had been in Rome since 1614. Vouet encouraged Mellan to draw, considering it essential for both engraving and painting. Mellan engraved some of Vouet's works and also began drawing small portraits from life. Many of his portrait drawings were never engraved. He developed a style that was simple and natural, that would be characteristic throughout his later career. Many of his engravings in Rome were reproductive works, including, for example, designs by Pietro da Cortona and Gianlorenzo Bernini. The few after his own designs include Saint Francis de Paul  and the Penitent Magdalene . The plates Mellan engraved in Rome were mostly executed in a conventional manner.

In 1637, after a period of time in Aix-en-Provence with Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, he returned to Paris, where he adopted an idiosyncratic technique, in which, instead of creating shade by cross-hatching, he used a system of parallel lines, regulating tone by varying their breadth and closeness.

Particularly notable is his engraving The Face of Christ , also called the Sudarium of Saint Veronica (see Veil of Veronica), created from a single spiralling line that starts at the tip of Jesus's nose. (as I said few lines above).

During this later period in Paris, Mellan mostly engraved his own work. He was much sought after as a portrait artist, drawing from life and engraving the portraits. Among his subjects were members of the royal family of Bourbon. His drawings "reveal more variety of style and execution than he showed in the engravings." Two examples, for which both a drawing  and an engraving exist, are portraits of Marie-Louise de Gonzague-Nevers and Henri de Savoie, Duc de Nemours.

He also created large religious works with geometric layouts and poses. According to Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, writing in The Dictionary of Art, Mellan's use of the single line gives "an abstract effect" and, "as an engraver he proved sensitive to the classical ideal developed by Nicolas Poussin, Jacques Stella and others in Paris in the middle of the 17th century." Among Mellan's reproductive engravings are two frontispieces for religious works after designs by Poussin  and Stella .

Anatole de Montaiglon catalogued 400 engravings by Mellan, and about 100 drawings are known. The latter are mostly in the Stockholm Nationalmuseum (via the collection of Carl Gustav Tessin) and the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg (via the Cobenzl collection). Several of Mellan's lost paintings are known from his engravings of them, including Samson and Delilah  and Saint John the Baptist in the Desert.  A few other paintings were attributed to him, beginning in the 1970s, but these have not been generally accepted.

Moon