celtic_writer

root_element

Early last Saturday morning, the trusty blue Bug motored me 45 miles north to Silver Spring, Maryland, where I instructed 14 writers and editors on a scripting language called XML. I have worked with this group before, and their collective smarts and willingness to learn makes sacrificing a Saturday worthwhile.

I have taught this subject for some time now -- from beginners through advanced -- but for some reason on Saturday, I finally heard myself say, "Every XML document must have a root element, and all the content it holds must be nested correctly within it, or it will fail."

I have said that sentence hundreds of times to hundreds of people, and only now, finally, heard it.

Life lesson here.

I don't want to get too technical, as that causes most people's eyeballs to start rolling around to the backs of their heads, but you see, XML is a language that allows us to structure information any way we like.

If you were to type XML manually, it would look like this:

It only holds information, and when I look at it, I think it is a beautiful structure because it is so plain. All the prettiness and noise of formatting fonts and colors and margins and type-sizes are stored in external files. You don't have to link to them if you don't want to. XML is like going to Baskin-Robbins and ordering a good old vanilla cone, 'cause you've always liked that plain cold taste, and it's your choice to avoid the fancy flavors.

And it got me to wondering: if our lives could be viewed as XML, what structure and content would they hold in order to have meaning?

Is it this?

The best part about XML is you can create, in this case, a life document of your very own. But that scares folks, methinks, 'cause it's safer to stay right where you are, with external styles formatting how you look and how you live and what you think you know.

How 'bout this?

Holy Curiosity

The Grail tale has always been an unruly plot. The story of the quest to find the whereabouts of the cup used at the Last Supper, the vessel held by Joseph of Arimathea to catch the blood of Christ's suffering while it was spiked to the cross. This mystery has been churned into poems about chivalrous trips, massive theological squabbles, and most recently, popularized in gawdawful fiction.

Heard an interesting theory about the Grail last week, delivered to these ears by a Midwestern bodhisattva. That every human experiences a glimpse of the Grail some time in youth...be it a love interest, a sunset, some magnificent fish on a line, the winning championship goal scored, some song sung in perfect pitch...and spends the rest of his or her life trying to find it again, yet always falling short of reenactment. And that's why there is so much yearning for more, so many divorces, such extreme feelings of emotional and material failure by humans today. That, if we take the time to think back, we can discover the few gestalt moments that are the gifts that explain where we really belong.

Einstein cautioned us never to lose our "holy curiosity," so I've been thinking about the Grail the last few days, and about some moments in this life when perhaps I experienced it.

I discovered the Grail again last summer, as I drove mile after mile in that little blue cup of a car.

It is called silence.

Photo:
Storm Rainbow, photographed on Rt. 20, heading east from Yellowstone National Park to Cody, Wyoming, August 2005

Seven Swans

Last Friday it was 20 degrees when the Labs and I sauntered down the frozen dirt road to the river. I was thinking of a friend of mine, a fellow stunned by the disappearance of his wife, a woman who abandoned him when he was ill and vulnerable. He is recovering now, making a new life for himself on his own, and that is good. Down that road, just after sunrise, the dogs and I discovered seven trumpeter swans, parked in the grey swaying water.

They are Celtic, these birds. Their majestic cries heard overhead each November mean snow is possible until they migrate back again, when their whistles and wing flaps communicate the message that spring will once more come 'round.

There are many stories about swans. One is the Chinook legend of the Seven White Swans. When you see seven together, it means goodness is in store for you. The kind of luck that brings you a sweetheart, someone who is true to you; not two-faced, but genuine.

As the Chinooks tell it, a young girl named Be-be was born crippled, yet was loved deeply by her mother, so she was given the chance to learn to walk, even though she dragged one foot behind the other. She was not perfect, but her face was beautiful, and her soul was kind, and she loved to laugh. One of the braves, a strong handsome hunter, confident in his aim, asked her to come with him. "I am not pretty, and I cannot dance like the others," she said. "I will move for us both," he told her. "And you will always be young, with that beautiful face and that rare soul and that love of laughter."  She believed him, and became his mate. Over the years they had six children, all healthy and strong.

One day a woman, tall and pretty, came to visit the tribe. She attracted the attention of the men, including the hunter, because she was a fine dancer. The hunter went off with the dancer, leaving Be-be alone to raise their children. Other men came to Be-be, telling her that the hunter would never return, insisting she should marry one of them.  She refused all, concentrating her grief on the important task of raising her children right.

Years went by. Everyone else grew old in mind and body, yet Be-be's face and spirit stayed youthful. Far away, the hunter grew older, his aim not so sure, the dancer still by his side, a woman aged with stooped shoulders, as she never had a spirit worth knowing, and she could no longer dance. One day the hunter -- who had never forgotten Be-be -- returned to see her beautiful face and hear her laugh. Bent and old as he was, he bowed to her. She reached out her hand to him.

But the gods spoke from the sky. "The untrue can never permanently mate with the true," they said. "We shall honor Be-be and her children in such a way that their youth, beauty and laughter shall forever taunt your unloyal heart. They will never be old, and the crippled Be-Be will become glorified in natural grace. They will remind you of what you have abandoned."

And the gods turned Be-be and her children into seven swans, each representing one trait - beauty, grace, laughter, youth, fidelity, love and truth - to remind the hunter of the seven glorious things he had forfeited.

Original photo by Greg Gerjets, Rice, Minnesota
Found on The Trumpeter Swan Society's Web Site
Dry Brush Filtered in Photoshop

White Gloves

No wonder I am a lapsed Catholic with life-long questionable fashion sense.

Here's the evidence -- poorly photographed, unfortunately.  This is why my standard uniform these days consists of black jeans and blouse. Relieved to have given my Irish Catholic mother's sense of church fashion the old slip, as they say. Forced to don a hat like that, how could one not wear such an expression?

I do believe this photo was snapped on a Sunday of my childhood when I, once again, attempted to fight the good fight. In church I had had enough with the gloves already, so I waited for just the right moment during Mass to ball 'em up and chuck 'em under the pew a coupla rows up from where the Holy Gillens were worshipping. But Mother Gillen was too smart for me. She spied the discarded ball 'o gloves as she marched...saintly with her GLOVED hands folded...up the main aisle to communion. I heard about that for weeks.

I shared this photo with friend Quinn McDonald, fellow teacher, coach and extraordinary artist. She wrote, "Not only is the hat perfect, placed squarely on your head, but those GLOVES! I hadda wear them too, and I never noticed they made our hands look HUGE! Minnie Mouse hands! I hated those because they got dirty so easily. My mom insisted I wear them when we went out--riding the bus to town, or on the playground. Oy, oy, oy. They never stayed white when I was on the swings. And as we got older, we wore stretch mesh ones--like fishnet stockings for your hands. Did you have those too?"

Oh yeah.

She also wrote, "...this photo is fabulously defiant. Perhaps an early vision on ennui and distrust of the imperfect world that surrounds the future goddess/priest."

You betcha.

And it still makes this Celt laugh. As James Thurber wrote in The New Yorker: "The proof of humor is the ability to put one's self on awkward public record."