A Showering of April
A showering of April social media posts for the convenience and amusement of visitors to my humble blog.
April 4, 2020
Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
. . . .
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
-Geoffrey Chaucer, from the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales
Middle English is not to everyone’s taste, but the impulse to go on pilgrimage when “the yonge sonne / Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,” that is, in early April, is inescapable. We want to be out – whether lingering on the doorsill or riding to Canterbury doesn’t much matter. It’s the softening earth and insistent light and the plant growth scenting the air that matters. They direct us to go wherever we’re not. At least for now.
An April pilgrimage to the remains of a dead saint frames the characters’ tales. April may beckon, but the pilgrims know that their journey ends in something sacred and awful. Perhaps that is why they tell themselves stories to get there.
All imagination is an act of prayer.
The Enemy Glory trilogy is available from Amazon.
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April 6, 2020
Holy. Holy. Holy.
Home is a holy place. The folks in my last post “longen [ ] to go on pilgrimages,” and so they ride from London to Canterbury. It can’t be helped. It’s primal. Sweet Aprille pricks them on.
But the best travels are inward. Books are home. Coffee is home. Sweet virgin goddess Hestia – I mean, of course, the hearth – is home; and never more home than on a dark day. New England has dark days between April and October, but not enough, and not reliably. The aesthetic will mostly bury its head for the next six months, like a mythic river running to secret places. Or maybe like the introverted friend it is.
The Enemy Glory trilogy, which was written with much coffee on dark days, is available from Amazon.
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April 9, 2020
“And dances with the daffodils.” In Wordsworth’s poem, a “never-ending line” of the damn things flash upon his “bliss of solitude” and then . . . helplessly and joyfully . . . his heart dances with them in a kind of mystic entanglement. Cool. It’s Romanticism. Mystic entanglements are bound to happen.
So moon? Stars? Eternity is everywhere. There is no center. There’s only center. We drink and eat and work and play in eternity every day, every hour. Eternity swims in the wind. It lives in your neighbor’s trash heap. It rumbles through great works of art, and marks the thoughtless beating of your ancient heart. From a certain perspective, all journeys are illusions. They don’t go anywhere because they never really start or end. Like poems.
We carry stardust in our bodies. We arose from the same earth that violently birthed the moon. We are the universe experiencing a mystic entanglement with itself.
Apparently it does that sometimes.
The Enemy Glory trilogy, which is a minefield of mystic entanglements, is available from Amazon.
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April 21, 2020
It’s National Library Week.
Inscribed over the door of the library at Thebes, built around 1250 BCE by Ramses II, were the words “Psyches Iatreion” (“Healing Place of the Soul”). All libraries should bear this inscription. I count them among holy places.
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April 23, 2020
Just another reason to love libraries. Because where would we be without order?
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April 26, 2020
To cap off National Library Week. The Enemy Glory trilogy is available at the Worcester Public Library (main branch) for your free reading pleasure.
It is also available from Amazon.
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You are reading a post from Matter Notes, Karen Michalson’s blog on creativity as spirituality and the war on the humanities. Her most recent novel, The Maenad’s God, is available on Amazon.
Subscribe to her mailing list (bottom of page) and receive a free copy of Enemy Glory (Book One), the first book of her Enemy Glory trilogy.