2013.03.17 Stormy Weather?

It’s amusing to watch the weather people this winter here in New England.  They usually don’t get much air time, but with all these storms they are front and center in our living rooms.  Weather newscasters shout the latest disaster and its terrific drama almost ecstatically. They dance close to roiling waters, mikes in hand, while nearly being soaked by a blast of sea, or blown over by a fresh strong gust of snow-wind. 

The weather is Cecil B. DeMille calibre.

But I’m tired of everything, from the latest economic news to D.C. political plots, being cast as a disaster, a catastrophe, a crisis. The “weather”of this culture is like the weather outside, so hyper it could blow us away.

Does everything have to be an opera in rehearsal? It’s hard to slow down, hard not to snap at people I love, hard to concentrate on what really matters when everything seems to demand attention—hard to love.

I even suffered the base theological temptation of wondering if God, through the weather, was getting even with us for being scornful and forgetting Divinity. We, as well as God, can get lost in the swift currents of a world in a panicky race. Many religious folks worry —silently or aloud—that God destroys as well as creates. But Godde has nothing to do with the weather. Nature’s will is as free as ours. And Love does not destroy.

Still, I’m tired of adrenaline rushes. My soul is ready for some peace. If it snows or blows or implodes I want to hear the news in a clear, calm way that gives the facts, advisories, and predictions.

There is a difference between an apocalypticist (the end is near and it isn't pretty, so get afraid now) and an eschatologist (we don't know how, or if, the world will end, so we live each day in hope).

Then a gift came my way.  It is a storm photo, but it’s not stormy. The bird mid-flight looks more like the Spirit to me than the “almighty” weather. She is free, lithe, peaceful, and true, in all weathers. Not dramatic, but so powerful—sort of like the white smoke over the Vatican, symbol of hope-in-flight.  We'll see.   Thank you.

2012.11.11 Aria on a Tricycle

Now that we have a new/old President and congressional reps old and new, we begin again.    And we also need a respite from everything serious, or that’s my unhumble opinion. Here is something fun.

 This is Jane. This is Jane singing a Verdi aria from her mezzo profundo  soul. This is Jane laughing at trike-ology. 

  



















Jane lives in Cambridge.  She is a mezzosoprano opera singer and voice teacher married to an astrophysicist.  How did that happen?  Who knows but they are a dynamic pair—one looks at the stars and the other sings to the stars.

Jane does have a car but prefers public transport or.....her TRICYCLE. How did that happen?  Jane knows how to have fun, how to play.  When she rides through a high school yard young people cheer and wave: GREAT BIKE! 

Yes, its a trike. Takes me back to the olden days and my first shiny red trike. I lived in the city but could ride it in Central Park at the playground where my mother used to haul us in carriages and by hands every day for an outing.  That’s what city kids did. 

As we got older we played on our own, throwing pinkie balls against walls of buildings, hop-scotching anywhere available, and playing hie and seek in the apartment building basement where the storage lockers and the laundry were.  The basement was the most fun because it had  many nooks and crannies and places to hide and invent scary myths about what sort of “bums,” our word of the day in the 40s,  hung out there.  And every storage locker looked like a jail cell. 

Jane can be spotted on Mass Avenue and on many side street toodling along helmeted and fully equipped with her smiley face flag to alert cars and bikers and pedestrians to her presence.  And she never tips over.