Revolution of Tenderness

“A state of inner readiness and waiting. I’m open to all annunciations.” ~ Anna Kamieńska [Annunciation, by Giotto]

• During the Nazi occupation of Poland, Anna Kamieńska (1920–1986) taught at various underground schools in and around Lublin, where she spent her formative years. After graduating from college, she studied Classical Philology at the University of Łódź and went on to marry the poet Jan Śpiewak in 1948. The two collaborated on translations of Russian poetry and drama until Śpiewak’s sudden death from cancer in 1967. More: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/poem-week-thanking/ 

“Those who live small, mate small, die small. It’s the reductionist approach to life: if you keep it small, you’ll keep it under control. If you don’t make any noise, the bogeyman won’t find you. But it’s all an illusion, because they die too, those people who roll up their spirits into tiny little balls so as to be safe. Safe?! From what? Life is always on the edge of death; narrow streets lead to the same place as wide avenues, and a little candle burns itself out just like a flaming torch does. I choose my own way to burn.”   

—Sophie Scholl

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”  – Émile Zola  [Painter at Work, Paul Cézanne] 

• Émile Zola (1840-1902), French activist, critic, and author of many works influential in the naturalism literary school including his series of twenty novels written between 1871 and 1893 that follow the Rougon Macquart family starting with The Fortune of the Rougons (1871). More: http://www.online-literature.com/emile-zola/ 

“True artists above all are ready to acknowledge their limits.” — Pope St. John Paul II  [Tadeusz Gorecki, Humility] 

• Pope John Paul II ... proclaimed the Year of Redemption, the Marian Year and the Year of the Eucharist as well as the Great Jubilee Year of 2000, in order to provide the People of God with particularly intense spiritual experiences. He also attracted young people by beginning the celebration of World Youth Day. More: http://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/biografia/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_20190722_biografia.html 

"The concept which assumes that everything in the Church is irrevocably set for all times appears to me to be a false one. It would be naive to disregard that the Church has a history; the Church is a human institution and like all things human, was destined to change and evolve…" – St. Edith Stein  [Church in the Wild, by Jammie Holmes] 

• Edith Stein (1891–1942) was a realist phenomenologist associated with the Göttingen school and later a Christian metaphysician. She was a Jew who converted to Catholicism in 1922 and was ordained a Carmelite nun in 1933. She died in Auschwitz in 1942. More: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/stein/  

“We cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of one who gives and kindles joy in the heart of one who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other, not even those whom you catch committing an evil deed. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a morass of filth that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Keep away from the spilling of speech. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgement. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult, outrage, and will shield your glowing hearts against the evil that creeps around.” – Seraphim of Sarov  [Christ and the Disciples, Georges Rouault] 

• Now only the birds and the wild beasts visited him, and he dwelt with them as Adam did in Paradise. They came at midnight and waited for him to complete his Rule of prayer. Then he would feed bears, lynxes, foxes, rabbits, and even wolves with bread from his hand. Saint Seraphim also had a bear which would obey him and run errands for him. More: https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2021/01/02/100008-repose-of-venerable-seraphim-wonderworker-of-sarov 

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.” ~ Ernest Hemingway [Untitled - Shah Bibi Tarakhail with Davyd Whaley] 

• During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer’s disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman’s journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat. More: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1954/hemingway/biographical/ 

“We always find that those who walked closest to Christ were those who had to bear the greatest trials.”  ~St. Teresa of Avila  [Two Heads of Men, Vincent Van Gogh] 

• Teresa lived in an age of exploration as well as political, social, and religious upheaval. It was the 16th century, a time of turmoil and reform. She was born before the Protestant Reformation and died almost 20 years after the closing of the Council of Trent. More: https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-of-the-day/saint-teresa-of-avila 

"I understand those who prefer a more rigorous pastoral care which leaves no room for confusion. But I sincerely believe that Jesus wants a Church attentive to the goodness which the Holy Spirit sows in the midst of human weakness, a Mother who, while clearly expressing her objective teaching, always does what good she can, even if in the process, her shoes get soiled by the mud of the street.' Jesus 'expects us to stop looking for those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune, and instead to enter into the reality of other people’s lives and to know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated.'" - Pope Francis  [”Tu es Petrus,” Biblia Sacra by Salvador Dali] 

• The first Pope of the Americas Jorge Mario Bergoglio hails from Argentina. The 76-year-old Jesuit Archbishop of Buenos Aires is a prominent figure throughout the continent, yet remains a simple pastor who is deeply loved by his diocese, throughout which he has travelled extensively on the underground and by bus during the 15 years of his episcopal ministry. More: http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/biography/documents/papa-francesco-biografia-bergoglio.html 

"Humanity i love you because you are perpetually putting the secret of life in your pants and forgetting it's there and sitting down on it" – E.E. Cummings  [Mauve Intersection, Mark Rothko]

• As one of the most innovative poets of his time, Cummings experimented with poetic form and language to create a distinct personal style. A typical Cummings poem is spare and precise, employing a few key words eccentrically placed on the page. Some of these words were invented by Cummings, often by combining two common words into a new synthesis. More: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/e-e-cummings 

"I do not agree with a big way of doing things. What matters is the individual. If we wait till we get numbers, then we will be lost in the numbers and we will never be able to show that love and respect for the person." – St. Mother Teresa  [Personage, Karel Appel]

• On October 7, 1950, Mother Teresa received permission from the Holy See to start her own order, “The Missionaries of Charity”, whose primary task was to love and care for those persons nobody was prepared to look after. In 1965 the Society became an International Religious Family by a decree of Pope Paul VI. More: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/peace/1979/teresa/biographical/ 

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes.” — Vladimir Nabokov  [Moonlit Night, Isaac Levitan] 

• Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartments in the United States, seem impermanent, places of exile. Their rooms include one used for visits by their son Dmitri, and another, the chambre de debarras, where various items are deposited—Turkish and Japanese editions of Lolita, other books, sporting equipment, an American flag. More: https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4310/the-art-of-fiction-no-40-vladimir-nabokov 

“The only true and effective ‘operator’s manual for spaceship earth’ is not a book that any human will ever write; it is hundreds of thousands of local cultures.” ~ Wendell Berry [Landscape of Havana, 1969 - René Portocarrero] 

• Poet, novelist, and environmentalist Wendell Berry lives in Port Royal, Kentucky near his birthplace, where he has maintained a farm for over 40 years. Mistrustful of technology, he holds deep reverence for the land and is a staunch defender of agrarian values. He is the author of over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His poetry celebrates the holiness of life and everyday miracles often taken for granted. More: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendell-berry 

“If water derives lucidity from stillness, how much more the faculties of the mind! The mind of the sage, being in repose, becomes the mirror of the universe, the speculum of all creation.” ~ Chuang Tzu [Water Lilies, 1917 - 1919 - Claude Monet] 

• Zhuangzi (Chuang-tzu 莊子 “Master Zhuang” late 4th century BC) is the pivotal figure in Classical Philosophical Daoism. The Zhuangzi is a compilation of his and others’ writings at the pinnacle of the philosophically subtle Classical period in China (5th–3rd century BC). The period was marked by humanist and naturalist reflections on normativity shaped by the metaphor of a dào—a social or a natural path. More: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/ 

“When we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something… but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, that is when we join the fashionable mad men.” – Joan Didion  [Mammon, George Frederick Watts] 

• Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Joan Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done. More: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/what-we-get-wrong-about-joan-didion/amp 

Lost in the forest    by Pablo Neruda Lost in the forest, I broke off a dark twig and lifted its whisper to my thirsty lips: maybe it was the voice of the rain crying, a cracked bell, or a torn heart. Something from far off it seemed deep and secret to me, hidden by the earth, a shout muffled by huge autumns, by the moist half-open darkness of the leaves. Wakening from the dreaming forest there, the hazel-sprig sang under my tongue, its drifting fragrance climbed up through my conscious mind as if suddenly the roots I had left behind cried out to me, the land I had lost with my childhood-- and I stopped, wounded by the wandering scent. 

[Hazel Bush, by Victor Borisov-Musatov] 

• from Neruda’s Nobel Acceptance Speech: “From all this, my friends, there arises an insight which the poet must learn through other people. There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are...” More: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1971/neruda/lecture/