Collaboration in Time and Space
Posted on | January 4, 2012 | 2 Comments
Two events involving my son Eric coalesce to begin our new year. The first involves his trans-Atlantic collaboration with my god-daughter Anja Decke to put on a multi-lingual version of his ecology musical for children, “Animal Party.” Anja’s father, Gerd Decke, is a long-time friend of fifty years who opened the door for me to the German church world and collaborated with me on translations of some of my
writings as well as working with me on many research projects over the years. Now Anja, who, like Eric, writes and produces theater for children in German-English learning situations, has collaborated with Eric to introduce his work to audiences in Berlin. You can find an extensive pictorial story about it at her website, www.kidstheatre.de under “Aktuelles.” Don’t let the German intimidate you. Just follow the links to the Sonnenblumen-Grundschule for colorful pictures. Her German text picks up the spirit of Eric’s original “Animal Party” in a lively manner and conveys it to a wider world. To see this second generation of trans-Atlantic cooperation is indeed heartening. Congratulations to Eric and Anja!
At the same time, Eric has been helping me construct some new furniture for his reconstituted household in Asheville. So here we have an intergenerational collaboration with a very practical outcome. The bed employs several pieces of walnut laid in together between the cherry pieces to make a headboard reflecting the mountains around us.
So the year starts off with two forms of collaboration representing space and time. Now there’s something a philosopher can blog about! Meanwhile, savor the thing itself (Ding an sich).
Gone
Posted on | December 19, 2011 | 1 Comment
It seems that most of us know someone who is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease or some form of dementia that robs them of their mental capacities even as their bodies continue on. Sometimes the disease alters their personality. Other times it simply brings out features that may have been buried while they bustled about with their life. But it is always heartbreakingly hard for the caregivers, for those who love the one who is slipping away behind curtains of forgetfulness. As I reflected on this life path, a few words emerged that I thought I would share with you to capture my own feelings about this difficult life passage.
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Tower whistling at its corners in the wind,
flower waving in a symphony of celebration,
stallion lunging heavy breathing ready for the jump,
tree whispering with patient supplication,
boat slopping over choppy waters, clapping under sail,
seashell crooning reminiscence of the deep,
All gone.
Now nothing
but the wind,
the same familiar wind,
wild,
warm,
enveloping,
blowing over empty ocean,
empty land.
Man still here
mind gone.
Beginning Again
Posted on | December 6, 2011 | 2 Comments
In the past year my wife Sylvia has pulled back from her big
artistic projects and gone back to the piano, which took a back seat to her other pursuits in music and the arts for many decades. We recently found a picture of her at age seventeen standing next to her family’s piano in a dress she had made. Moreover, the picture contained the same book (John Thompson’s “Modern Course for the Piano”) that she has returned to now under the guidance of a teacher in our community. All of this led to a poem that might resonate for all of you who have taken up something that meant much in younger years and that can once again feed you in a new way. As they say in the fancy restaurants, “enjoy.”
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Her fingertips caress the keys
exploring half-remembered chords,
hands travel over black and white
reflections of her hair,
eyes pry harmonies from clustered dots
within red covers of a lesson book.
On the shelf a picture of a girl,
calm resolution in her face,
upright piano ready for her touch,
red music book set smartly on its rack,
watching as herself
begins again.
Thanksgiving
Posted on | November 28, 2011 | 4 Comments
Thanksgiving Day has always been my favorite holiday, with its simple focus on a gathering of family, friends, and sometimes strangers for a feast to celebrate God’s abundance. Like the good deed that goes not unpunished it is now engulfed in violent gridiron sports, an obscene scramble for merchandise gnawing at its shrinking stage. As we feed the economic machine, the holiday concludes with an immense explosion of fossil fuels to whisk us back to ordinary (Christmas shopping!) time. Instead of schooling us in gratitude it leads us into greed and competition. It leaves me looking forward once again to Pentecost, my last best hope for holidays.
The poignancy of Thanksgiving’s beleaguered state renews my realization that we are servants of our gods. And gods require sacrifice. That is what a god is. “The Economy,” whose fine-tuned appetite requires sacrificing families to its priests on Wall Street, academe, and government. “The [football, basketball, you name it] Team,” feeding on the aspirations of the young and the lost hopes of the old. And then, of course, “America” in all its guises — military, cultural, racial, even ecological.
We cannot live without our gods, unless we are true atheists who will make no sacrifice at all, not even for another human being. So sometimes we construct a pantheon, trying to balance them with one another, a government of checks and balances. Other times we make a ladder leading up, we hope, to heaven. We live upon a pyramid of sacrifice where we must decide at every moment when the lower gods must yield to higher calls to sacrifice.
This leaves me wondering this morning after what it means to follow a light and life that was the end to sacrifice, an end to lower and higher gods. What is it to truly love the Creator of us all? While America doesn’t want to let us pause to wonder at this question, perhaps we might sneak in a moment in the coming often hectic weeks. Take it as an assignment in waiting, in Advent. An overture to the turning to the light that is solstice, that is Hannukah, that is Christmas.
Meanwhile, I share a poem about our planet’s plight.
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Earth gasping
overheated from the race
against our human grasping
reeling from its broken pace
Melts ice to slow the fever
cool the fire on the land
Inhales the noxious vapors
catching cancer in her lungs
Swallows refuse of her captors
the bile rising to her tongue
Sends lilies up in tribute
rainbows as a pledge
the cockroach as a warning
the raven as a hedge.
« go back — keep looking »William J. Everett
In my teaching career I authored eight books and numerous articles in social ethics and religion. After over thirty years of academic work — in Germany, India, and South Africa as well as in the United States — I wanted to turn my hand to a poetically written novel to probe the issues of ecological and human reconciliation.
When I am not writing, I create furniture for worship settings. For more about my work, go to www.WisdomsTable.net, where you will also find galleries of artwork by my wife Sylvia, whose ancestors were the original inspiration for Red Clay, Blood River. READ MORE...
Red Clay Blood River
Red Clay, Blood River is a story told by Earth about two brothers from Germany and an enslaved South African woman whose lives bind together America’s “Trail of Tears” and South Africa’s simultaneous “Great Trek” of 1838.