Search (Find just what you want to read)

Posted on June 2, 2011 by literarylee

You can search for blog posts to read by grouping them in several different ways.  A basic Search box, at the top of the right-hand column, allows you to find whatever word or content you’re looking for from within the entire blog.  Archives, at the bottom of the right-hand column, allows you to find everything I wrote in a particular month.  For example, you’d like to focus on articles about early spring, something I haven’t created a category for, you might find a large grouping posted during the month of March.

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The Ideas (Adding Words to Life)

Posted on June 1, 2011 by literarylee

See the tab just under the header called, “The Ideas: Adding Words to Life“?  It leads to a page full of links to suggestions I’m collecting for how to live a little more literarily.  One of the two missions of this blog is to write ideas for including fine, deliberate words, original or not, in a person’s life.  I’m aiming this at people whose day jobs don’t include handling fine words and things literary, such as writers, editors, English teachers (though I hope they read these, too, and share their own ideas).   I’m writing this for chemists, civil servants, engineers, housewives, retired people and the still-employed, mailmen (and mail women), bus drivers, lawyers, doctors, the unemployed, and well, you name it.  Hopefully just about anybody will find some ideas for how to add deliberate, nice words to their daily living.

I have divided the ideas into six categories: Write, Memorize Poems, Host a Literary Event, Play with Words, Read, and Devotion.  Click on the tab to find links for each of these categories.  Each link, in turn, leads to many suggestions for how to live a little more literarily.  Many of these are simple actions, easy to incorporate.  Others take more time.  All of them, in one way or another, will give someone who is not a literary professional ways to live in a literary way, adding a bit of depth and fun to living.

How to Use This Blog

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Welcome to the Union Center

Posted on May 31, 2011 by literarylee

Life in and around the Union Center goes at its own pace, listens to its own music, lives by its own rules.  A jarring combination of open and shut, welcoming and forbidding, not everyone is comfortable even visiting, not to mention moving in.  A certain type is drawn here.  When newcomers arrive by design or by fortuitous accident, everyone, residents and guest alike, knows right away if it’s going to work or not.

The heart of Union Center is a zany, colorful, hustle-bustle kind of place where, to be perfectly honest, you never know what’s going to hit next.  That’s the attraction for some, but what scares others off.  This is no place for subterfuge or politicking.  Unfeigned living and loving, giving and taking are the orders of the day.  Continue reading →

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What I’m Writing – (Projects and Collections)

Posted on May 31, 2011 by literarylee

Directly below the header (the picture across the top of the page) are several tabs with basic information.  One tab, “What I’m Writing,” contains brief descriptions of the various projects I’m working on.  Most of what I am writing so far are portions of books or articles I hope to publish someday.  For example, you can see I’m working on a collection of essays and articles called, “Garden: A Love Story,” which will be a year-long journal of my gardening life, not so much a how-to but rather how does this make me feel, the joys and sorrows of gardening.  Another one is a weird little work of fiction I’m trying called “The Life and Times of Union Center,” which will be a story about a community of plants.  Don’t worry: I write about more than plants!  Click the tab and browse what all I’m working on.  Let me know what you think.

How to Use This Blog

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The Rider Chronicles 1 – Excrutiating Waiting

Posted on May 30, 2011 by literarylee

Nine months of waiting finally over,  Rider, our grandson, was born early Friday morning after more than two long days of labor.  On Wednesday afternoon, we dashed from Alexandria to a cousin’s place in New Jersey, close to Manhattan where the baby would be born, staging ourselves for the final dash to the prize: meeting our first grandson, seeing our son a father and his beautiful bride, a mother.  She had been in labor for 12 hours when we started the drive, so it seemed a reasonable time to get going when we did.

Then we waited.  Wednesday night we waited.  Our son sent occasional text messages like: “Closer contractions.  Still at home but there’s improvement,” (meaning progress) and: “Still at home.  Trying to relax while at the same time get it going.  I’ll keep you posted.”  He kept us posted but we were always eager to hear more and so, so anxious for it all to be safely and happily concluded.  We went to bed that night breathing prayers for momma and baby and the papa who was supporting them.  Continue reading →

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The Gettysburg Address

Posted on May 30, 2011 by literarylee

Abraham Lincoln

Four score and seven years ago
our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation,
conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition
that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war,
testing whether that nation, or any nation,
so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
We are met on a great battle-field of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field,
as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives
that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate,
we can not consecrate,
we can not hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here, have consecrated it,
far above our poor power to add or detract.
The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here,
but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather,
to be dedicated here to the unfinished work
which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us
to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—
that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—
that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—
and that government of the people,
by the people,
and for the people,
shall not perish from the earth.

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Share / Save (Like an article? Send it to someone)

Posted on May 30, 2011 by literarylee

At the end of every post you see a bar that says Share/Save followed by little symbols.  This feature allows the reader to share this blog with other people or make it easy to find again later.  Hover the cursor over the bar to see three options: share/save, email, bookmark.

  • Click the email option to send a link to whoever you think might be interested in the article.
  • You can also publish a link to The Life Literary using Facebook, Twitter, or one of many other file sharing sites so that online friends can see what you’re reading and read it too.  Click the share/save option and select the one you want.
  • If you read something you like and want to be able to find it easily again, click the bookmark option to create a link in Favorites that will take you straight to the post.

How to Use The Life Literary

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Literary and Devotional

Posted on May 29, 2011 by literarylee

Orthodox churches this past Sunday commemorated the account of Jesus’ conversation with the Samaritan woman he talked to at Jacob’s Well.  The account is in John 4:5-42.  One of the hymns the Orthodox sang on that day is filled with vivid images, metaphors that illustrate the significance of that meeting.

Jesus met the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s well
He wraps the earth in clouds, yet He asks for water from her
O wonder!  He who rides the cherubim speaks with an adulterous woman
He Who suspended the earth on the waters asks for a drink
He Who causes the lakes and springs to overflow is weary with thirst
Truly, He desires to set the woman free from the enemy’s snares
He drowns her sins in the Waters of Life
For He alone is the compassionate lover of man.

The imagery compares the Christian belief that Jesus was divine with the very human, and in that social context, surprising, thing he was doing at that moment.  A man would not have directly addressed a woman he didn’t know, in public, in that culture (and given the different social groups they belonged to), even less asked for a drink of water.  Placed side by side in the words of the hymn, these words illustrate the concept that God speaks to people.  The hymn uses literary devices to show that God is near and not far, present, not removed.  Also, the One Who created lakes and springs was thirsty and needed a drink, speaking to the full humanity and simultaneous divinity of Jesus.  The water metaphor continues but shifts.  At the end of the hymn, the drink receiver becomes the life-giving water (of baptism) giver.

Beautiful words and images are all around.  You can appreciate and be enriched by the literary in many different contexts and many different activities, such as devotion.

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The Fences of Washington

Posted on May 28, 2011 by literarylee

It started with a picture, a simple photograph.  A few days before the Cherry Blossom Festival on a windy Wednesday evening, we were among the very few people walking along the Tidal Basin, enjoying the just-emerging blossoms.  Behind a fence along that path, we saw the still-under-construction Martin Luther King jr. Memorial, attractive even though unfinished.  I took a picture of the memorial’s centerpiece, a huge statue of King himself.  Though I don’t have a fancy camera, I wanted to see if I could focus on the face, yet include a part of the fence surrounding the site.  I was taken aback by the unexpected meaning the picture took on, taken from behind a fence.

Since then, I have been alert to other fences and the subjects behind them, and am surprised at the meanings the combinations of the two convey.  To be sure, these photos are all a little contrived.  The fences in these shots are only there to protect and control access to construction sites, a worthy goal.  The buildings, or memorial, behind them are just being worked on.  These photos only juxtapose enclosure and enclosed in ways that suggest interesting, intriguing messages.

Still not free?

I continue to toy with possible captions for this photo, such as, “Still has a dream,” or “Still dreaming the fences (barriers? walls?) will be torn down.”   How about “Fenced, yet”?  The scaffolding adds another layer of enclosure, adding to the sense of captivity, being held back.  Continue reading →

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Photos (Hover the cursor over the picture to see the second caption)

Posted on May 28, 2011 by literarylee

Photos on this blog all include a title and a caption.  The caption is plainly visible beneath the picture.  To see the title, which I often write to be  a second caption, hover the cursor over the photo itself.  I try to make the second caption a joke, a word play, a rhyme or perhaps a bit of irony to more fully describe or support the picture in the title.  Don’t miss it.

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