Word of the Day: Inspissate

Inspissate (transitive verb): (1) to bring to a heavier consistency; condense
Inspissate (adjective): thickened in consistency; broadly: made thick, heavy, or intense

USING INSPISSATE IN SENTENCES

The alleyway in which the man in the black overcoat walked was enveloped in an inspissated gloom.

His inspissated, furrowed brow betrayed the anger roiling in his breast.

The inspissated air in the funeral parlor was almost tangible to those who gathered there.

Poem of the Day

HYMN OF PAN
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

From the forests and highlands
         We come, we come;
From the river-girt islands,
         Where loud waves are dumb
                Listening to my sweet pipings.
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
         The bees on the bells of thyme,
The birds on the myrtle bushes,
         The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass,
Were as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
                Listening to my sweet pipings.

Liquid Peneus was flowing,
         And all dark Tempe lay
In Pelion’s shadow, outgrowing
         The light of the dying day,
                Speeded by my sweet pipings.
The Sileni, and Sylvans, and Fauns,
         And the Nymphs of the woods and the waves,
To the edge of the moist river-lawns,
         And the brink of the dewy caves,
And all that did then attend and follow,
Were silent with love, as you now, Apollo,
                With envy of my sweet pipings.

I sang of the dancing stars,
         I sang of the daedal Earth,
And of Heaven, and the giant wars,
         And Love, and Death, and Birth—
                And then I chang’d my pipings,
Singing how down the vale of Maenalus
         I pursu’d a maiden and clasp’d a reed.
Gods and men, we are all deluded thus!
         It breaks in our bosom and then we bleed.
All wept, as I think both ye now would,
If envy or age had not frozen your blood,
                At the sorrow of my sweet pipings.

Thought of the Day

Perhaps there is love without attachment. It doesn’t seem possible. Certainly the Buddha loved humanity, and yet he was free of all earthly attachments. How does one reconcile these two assertions?
Perhaps there is more than one way of experiencing another human being whom you love or are in love. Love is an especially difficult word to define because it can take a thousand forms.
I like to think of love as an emotional energy that can take as its object nearly anything—another human being, humanity as a whole, animals, nature, places, even things like pizza.
So, the texture and taste of the love we experience for another human being may depend, in part, on how we imagine that person. The human imagination is a powerful force. How do we imagine a loved one? As a soul? As a body? As a complex of thoughts, senses, and emotions? Can we simultaneously imagine a loved one as a speck of dust blown aimlessly away in the universal winds of time, and also as someone in the here and now, with whom we wish to spend our lives, and with whom each hour spent is a priceless treasure and each minute an inexpressible joy?

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30 Blog Posts in 30 Days

My goal is to write thirty blog posts in thirty days. Each post will consist of a Word of the Day, a poem from a famous poet (public domain only), and either a thought or a verse (or two) from yours truly.

First Post: October 11th, 2019
Last Post: November 9th, 2019

Wish me luck!

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Every month or so, I’ll send a newsletter via e-mail to my subscribers. More often than not, it will contain a list of my new blog posts.  You may find something in it that interests you! Or more likely, you’ll be bored to tears and curse my very existence. In either case, you should sign up. You may unsubscribe at any time!

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Word of the Day: Esurient

Esurient (adjective): voracious, greedy

USING ESURIENT IN SENTENCES

The panther regarded me with esurient eyes, despite the fact that I’m not particularly tasty.

An esurient woman of the night approached the young priest with an offer he couldn’t refuse.

“I will devour your kingdom, rape your women, and enslave your men!” said the esurient emperor to the disobedient king.

Poem of the Day

from A PORTRAIT OF A LADY
by T.S. Eliot

“For everybody said so, all our friends,
They all were sure our feelings would relate
So closely! I myself can hardly understand.
We must leave it now to fate.
You will write, at any rate.
Perhaps it is not too late.
I shall sit here, serving tea to friends.”
And I must borrow every changing shape
To find expression … dance, dance
Like a dancing bear,
Cry like a parrot, chatter like an ape.
Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance—
Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon …
Would she not have the advantage, after all?
This music is successful with a “dying fall”
Now that we talk of dying—
And should I have the right to smile?

Thought of the Day

Many people are uncomfortable with ambiguity. It must be one of the reasons people embrace dogmatic religious formulas and so-called truths. Why are some people so convinced that there is a heaven, or life after death, or that Jesus rose from the dead?
I remember once sitting at a café. A small group of young women had gathered at the table next to mine, and I listened in on their conversation. Apparently, they formed some sort of Bible study group. One of the woman had said that heaven must have paved roads, because the inhabitants—dead souls, I suppose—wouldn’t otherwise be able to get around.
This, of course, is an extreme example.
What is certain is that none of knows what happens when we die. It can only be experienced … and those that have done so are unable to tell the living about it.
It may be that truth—or the approximation of truth—often hides in ambiguity and paradox. Takes two or more seemingly antithetical ideas or theories, and the limit of human comprehension is somewhere in between, where opposing realities clash and are reconciled.

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30 Blog Posts in 30 Days

My goal is to write thirty blog posts in thirty days. Each post will consist of a Word of the Day, a poem from a famous poet (public domain only), and either a thought or a verse (or two) from yours truly.

First Post: October 11th, 2019
Last Post: November 9th, 2019

Wish me luck!

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Every month or so, I’ll send a newsletter via e-mail to my subscribers. More often than not, it will contain a list of my new blog posts.  You may find something in it that interests you! Or more likely, you’ll be bored to tears and curse my very existence. In either case, you should sign up. You may unsubscribe at any time!

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Word of the Day: Lambent

Lambent (adjective): (1) playing lightly on or over a surface;  gliding over; wavering, flickering (2) softly bright or radiant (3) light and brilliant

USING LAMBENT IN SENTENCES

The young man gazed absently on the lambent river, as his canoe gently glided with the current in the early hours of the morning.

Their bodies lay exhausted, lambent and musky, as the city in the night swelled all around them.

They looked into each other’s lambent eyes, filled with love and longing.

Poem of the Day

LEVIATHAN
by Pablo Neruda

Ark of forbearance and anger, derelict
Night of the brute, antarctic outlander.
Nearing or passing me — an ice-field
Displacing the darkness — one day
I shall enter your walls, I shall rear
On the sunken marine of your winter, your armory.

Southward, there crackled a holocaust, black
With your planet’s expulsion, the domains
Of your silence that moved in the algae
And jostled the lump of the ages.

Then, form was, alone, was magnitude
Sealed by a world’s agitation, wherein glided
Your leathern pre-eminence, mistrusting
The gifts of its nature: tenderness, power.

Ark of our passion, inflaming
A hummock of dark, as with torches.
When your blind blood was quickened
An epoch of ocean still slept in its gardens.
And in an immensity the disfiguring moon
Divided its track with a magnet of phosphor.
Life sputtered,
The mother-medusa, blue in the flame,
A tempest of multiple wombs.
And increase grew whole in its purity
Like the pompano’s pulse in the sea.

Among waters, your congress
Of mastheads and spars was disposed

Thought of the Day

How the Id compels us! What atrocities and mass destruction is caused by the repressed aggressions of powerful men! Neruda’s poem is about the slaughter of whales.
I remember once stopping traffic to move a turtle out of the middle of the road. The woman driving the car behind me looked at me malevolently, as if to say, “You’re going to save a turtle? And whilst doing so, waste minutes of my precious time?”
I wonder, at times, how a human can become so callous … and so fixated on her own wildly inflated ego.
And I also wonder why it is in this culture that a man cannot empathize with animals–small and helpless animals–without feeling emasculated. Why is so necessary for a man to be hard-hearted?
I don’t like this aspect of our mid-western culture.

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30 Blog Posts in 30 Days

My goal is to write thirty blog posts in thirty days. Each post will consist of a Word of the Day, a poem from a famous poet (public domain only), and either a thought or a verse (or two) from yours truly.

First Post: October 11th, 2019
Last Post: November 9th, 2019

Wish me luck!

---

Every month or so, I’ll send a newsletter via e-mail to my subscribers. More often than not, it will contain a list of my new blog posts.  You may find something in it that interests you! Or more likely, you’ll be bored to tears and curse my very existence. In either case, you should sign up. You may unsubscribe at any time!

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Word of the Day: Otiose

Otiose (adjective): (1) being at leisure or ease (idle, unemployed); (2) without profit (sterile, futile); (3) lacking use or effect (4) of a deity:  remote and aloof; not concerned with the details of the world

USING OTIOSE IN SENTENCES

Changing my cat’s behavior so that he won’t bite my ankles is an otiose endeavor.

My otiose days lounging on the front porch without a job have been surprisingly relaxing, despite the fact that I have no money.

The otiose Babylonian god, Marduk, cared very little what happened in the ancient world.

Poem of the Day

SELF-UNCONSCIOUS
by Thomas Hardy

       Along the way
        He walked that day,
    Watching shapes that reveries limn,
        And seldom he
        Had eyes to see
    The moment that encompassed him.

        Bright yellowhammers
        Made mirthful clamours,
    And billed long straws with a bustling air,
        And bearing their load
        Flew up the road
    That he followed, alone, without interest there.

        From bank to ground
        And over and round
    They sidled along the adjoining hedge;
        Sometimes to the gutter
        Their yellow flutter
    Would dip from the nearest slatestone ledge.

        The smooth sea-line
        With a metal shine,
    And flashes of white, and a sail thereon,
        He would also descry
        With a half-wrapt eye
    Between the projects he mused upon.

        Yes, round him were these
        Earth’s artistries,
    But specious plans that came to his call
        Did most engage
        His pilgrimage,
    While himself he did not see at all.

        Dead now as sherds
        Are the yellow birds,
    And all that mattered has passed away;
        Yet God, the Elf,
        Now shows him that self
    As he was, and should have been shown, that day.

        O it would have been good
        Could he then have stood
    At a focussed distance, and conned the whole,
        But now such vision
        Is mere derision,
    Nor soothes his body nor saves his soul.

        Not much, some may
        Incline to say,
    To see therein, had it all been seen.
        Nay! he is aware
        A thing was there
    That loomed with an immortal mien.

Thought of the Day

Our attention can either be projected outward, toward the world, or inward, toward our own psyche–toward our inner world–our thoughts, emotions, memories, and imagination. This poem reminds me of people who take walks with earbuds in their ears, likely listening to podcasts, or the day’s news, or something similar, so enrapt in whatever it is to which they listen, that they do not engage in the world flowing around them and in which they move.
I don’t suggest we shouldn’t engage our time fully. It is amazing that we can listen and learn about nearly anything that interests us through modern technology, while we walk, drive, wash our clothes, etc. But we should also learn to listen to the world, and to let it flow through us … that is another kind of learning–a learning for the soul.
If I walk upon a well-worn path, with the intention of quieting my mind, and watching the world, I see things in it I haven’t seen before, even though I may have walked the same path a hundred times before.
It may be worthwhile to consider Hardy’s poem. Perhaps, we will look back with regret one day that we didn’t spend more time discovering the world’s beauty teeming all around us, if we would have just stilled ourselves for a time to watch and listen.

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30 Blog Posts in 30 Days

My goal is to write thirty blog posts in thirty days. Each post will consist of a Word of the Day, a poem from a famous poet (public domain only), and either a thought or a verse (or two) from yours truly.

First Post: October 11th, 2019
Last Post: November 9th, 2019

Wish me luck!

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Every month or so, I’ll send a newsletter via e-mail to my subscribers. More often than not, it will contain a list of my new blog posts.  You may find something in it that interests you! Or more likely, you’ll be bored to tears and curse my very existence. In either case, you should sign up. You may unsubscribe at any time!

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Word of the Day: Hokum

Hokum (noun): (1) pretentious nonsense; (2) a device found to elicit a display of mirth or sentimental emotion from an audience and therefore deliberately used to impel persons to a desired action.

Fun Fact: hokum is likely a combination of the words hocus-pocus and bunkum.

USING HOKUM IN SENTENCES

The pot-bellied politician jiggled as he spouted nonsensical hokum to the disapproving committee.

Beatrice was a rich, old lady who knew next to nothing, but loved filling the ears of anyone who listened to her with the most absurd hokum.

Jeremy listened to his wife’s irritating hokum with feigned attention.

Poem of the Day

A PSALM OF LIFE
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
   “Life is but an empty dream!”
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
   And the grave is not its goal;
“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”
   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
   Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
   Finds us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
   And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,
   In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
   Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,–act in the living Present!
   Heart within, and God o’erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
   Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
   With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
   Learn to labor and to wait.

Thought of the Day

If you wish to be present in each moment, and not live in the shadow of the past or in the glow of the future’s rising sun, remember that life is fleeting and our years all too short. One should always be mindful of one’s own mortality, not because one should wallow in morbidity, but to remain vigilant and aware that each and every moment of one’s life is extraordinarily precious.

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30 Blog Posts in 30 Days

My goal is to write thirty blog posts in thirty days. Each post will consist of a Word of the Day, a poem from a famous poet (public domain only), and either a thought or a verse (or two) from yours truly.

First Post: October 11th, 2019
Last Post: November 9th, 2019

Wish me luck!

---

Every month or so, I’ll send a newsletter via e-mail to my subscribers. More often than not, it will contain a list of my new blog posts.  You may find something in it that interests you! Or more likely, you’ll be bored to tears and curse my very existence. In either case, you should sign up. You may unsubscribe at any time!

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