A pleasure meeting you, Venerable Losang Samten, at the Glencairn Museum

Got lost while finding the entrance to the Glencairn Museum.

You never really get lost, so I took these photos of  Bryn Athyn College, possibly dormitories, and then drove out, drove straight toward the Cathedral which was the entry way to the museum.

 The sacred sands, colored with dye, which Losang drizzles onto the Sand Mandala, with something that looks like a long thin ruler. It makes a singing sound. 

 He had left his drawing table, so I strolled around taking pictures, after ascertaining it was allowed.

What should I call you? Should I call you, Sir? I asked him.

No, he laffed. Call me Losang.

He has a cough. He was drinking black tea.

He was very happy to answer all my questions. I bought $33 worth of merchandise which will help Tibetan refugees.

Losang is originally from Tibet. Other Tibetan monks live at the Spring Garden house. Visit the website here.

He stood at the table greeting visitors until it was time to build the mandala.

I took a walk and visited the Marc Chagall and The Bible Display.

Click to enlarge.

If only my granddaughter Grace Catherine were here she could match up each of the pictures with the handout I got.

Losang, I asked. Are you a vegetarian?

I eat meat, he said, if people give it to me.

I told him I had tilapia and mushrooms for lunch.

What's tilapia? he asked.

It's a delicious fish, I said.

Then I told him that I'm a counselor, who helps people, and I used to visit a Buddhist monastery in Bensalem, PA.

He clapped his hands and was delighted to hear that. 

What a great personality he has!!!

Here's his touring schedule, which I asked him about.

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Oh, they'll love you there, I said. They'll all hippies.

He laffed.

Canada

California

Texas

Canada

The famous stained glass of Bryn Athyn.

Do you believe in reincarnation, I asked.

He looked at me and said nothing.

Who were you in a past life, I asked.

A cockaroch! he laffed.

The assembled crowd laffed along with him.

 You need steady hands to do your work, the hands of a surgeon, I remarked.

The Sand Mandala would be filled up on the blue mat on Sunday at 4:30 pm.

What do you do with it when you destroy it? I asked.

It's funneled up on the blue sheet and dumped into a pond.

Last time, said an official, there was a snake in the pond. Wonder who the snake will be in its next life.

People who attend the ceremony on the last day can take some of the sand home with them. 

 His comfortable clothes and shoes.

I sat down on this velvet couch and watched him, entranced.

I started mumbling, to myself, my own mantra. I told him I meditated this morning, which I did at the Willow Grove Giant Supermarket. Then I sat there and read a chapter in

 

One of my purchases was Losang doing meditations. In fact, it's on my nearby CD player right now.

 These mandalas, he said, go in the altar of a home.

He rang a gong, laughing that when you meditate and you fall asleep, this gong is rung. Remember, he lives off Spring Garden Street.

What a relief to hear I'm not the only one who invariably falls asleep when she meditates.

 A weaving of St George and the Dragon on the wall.

 Departing.

 Spring Garden.

If only that street were as beautiful as its name.

 Exodus.

The Tree of Good and Evil.

Will you taste the apple?

Switcheroo: From Comcast to Verizon - Poem: The Potbellies Storm the Jenkintown IHOP

Each claims to be faster than the other. But now that my Verizon has been installed, I can say it's definitely faster than my old Comcast, which, if you remember, used to be Home.com.

Joe from Verizon was here for a couple of hours.



My new email is Ruth Deming at Verizon.net. It's not activated yet.

BUT I don't know how to get it on my Inbox, the way I have my Comcast emails right now.

Joe the Verizon man didn't know but showed me the long-winded way to get it off Verizon.com.

At the last minute when he was ready to go, I remembered I needed another account for New Directions.

As I told our support group last nite, I had jokingly put the names "Barack and Michelle" into a CC, but they kept coming up. So when I sent out emails from New Directions people did indeed think I was in touch with the Obamas.

Hey, I'm good but I'm not that good.

Of course, the New Directions@verizon.net would be taken. Joe suggested I use the same Compass123 but I wanted something more identifiable, so I selected NewDirectionsSupport@verizon.net

Feel free to email me something!

While driving this morning, before the rain began, which it did late, around 2, I knew I was gonna write a poem about our late night trip to IHOP.

THE POTBELLIES STORM THE

JENKINTOWN IHOP

All across the nation

the International House

of Pancakes opens its

loving blue arms

a shelter from

the dark chilly

night

so brightly lit

we blink our eyes

as Brittanie leads

us to our seats

The endless pot

of coffee is brought

out and I fill myself

with the soothing

hot liquid I desire each

time I pass a

Dunkin or a Starbucks

Does the coffee have any

flavor? Not really but

it sure looks good in the

white IHOP mug

My potbelly could hold

a two-month-old baby

were my nubility not a

thing of the past

My friends

Harriet - Karen - Christopher

Brett - Ron and Elissa have

smaller bellies than mine and

order up!

Suddenly we are transported

to the African desert where

Mount Kilimanjaro soars

in the distance. Inside our

flapping tents, Brittanie and

a young Ernest Hemingway

with mustache and piercing

black eyes all women dream of

march in with our order 

Blueberry pancakes with a

side dish of sweetened blueberries

French toast with banana and

strawberries,

“A favorite of mine,” says Papa

and Brittanie nods

For Karen, both pancakes,

eggs and hash browns

Christopher goes for the

piles of whipped cream

“My second wife Pauline

ate too much whipped cream,”

said Papa, “but by then I had

fallen for Martha”

The only potbelly who did not

drown herself in pancakes

was Harriet, not Tubman,

of the slave revolt,

but Harriet, president of

our Flat Tummy Club

Elissa has a cat to come home to

Brett a dad

Christopher a madhouse

Harriet a Steve

Papa a shotgun

Karen a man

Abrams a bike

Deming a red couch

Where she dreams of an eternity

sipping hot coffee

and eating reams and reams

of whipped cream on

chocolate chip pancakes

up to the sky.

Lynn Levin's Sonnet Class - Linda Barrett's Playground Swing Sonnet

Say hello to the women in Lynn Levin's Sonnet Class at the Huntingdon Valley Library.

Last row - Eileen O'Toole - Judy Miller - Linda Barrett, who actually wrote a sonnet
First row - Paula Spritzberg - Janis Dawson - Lynn Levin - Ruth Deming

This is the second of three classes.

Such wonderful sonnets we read including Aquainted with the Night by Robert Frost. You can hear it on this YouTube video. 


I'd never been aware of the black poet Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000). Her remarkable poem The Progress told of the treatment African-Americans received after fighting in World War II.

The Progress

And still we wear our uniforms, follow
The cracked cry of the bugles, comb and brush
Our pride and prejudice, doctor the sallow
Initial ardor, wish to keep it fresh.
Still we applaud the president's voice and face.
Still we remark on patriotism, sing
Salute the flag, thrill heavily, rejoice
For death of men, who, too, saluted, sang.
But inward grows a soberness, an awe
A fear, a deepening hollow through the cold.
For even if we come out standing up
How shall we smile, congratulate: and how
Settle in chairs? Listen, listen. The step
Of iron feet again. And again wild.

The above word "but" is called a "volta" - a different point of view.

Listen to Gwendolyn Brooks reading her most famous poem "We Cool" on YouTube here.



Was not familiar with Dick Allen, born in 1939. His poem Lost Love is very moving. It was originally published in the 1987 New Yorker.

He's got his own website. Read it here.

We also read a sonnet by John Berryman (1914-1972) whose first lines read

I've found out why, that day, the suicide
From the Empire State falling on someone's car
Troubled you so: and why we quarreled. War
Illness, an accident.

     Berryman looks like he's in deep despair. He jumped to his death from a bridge.

On a lighter note, Linda Barrett just emailed me her sonnet.

PlayGround Swing Sonnet

@2015 Linda Barrett

Swing with me into the skies
Take flight with your legs and arms
Reach back and forth, flying high
Into bright heaven’s blue charms
Push back and forth light as a feather
Grasp harder at the swing’s rusty chains
Shriek aloud from a seat of leather
While denying Physic’s logical claims
Design your own flying machine
Made from chains, arms and feet
Cast off from the grass so green
Your playground joy made complete
Within the park, fly hard on your swing,
Relishing the joy without wings!

Brava, Linda Barrett who deserves that fine title Poetess.

Well, I will arise and go now, as William Butler Yeats wrote from Innisfree, a lake in Northern Island. The Times has an article about this idyllic place. 

Short story "Pandemonium" is published - Irv Yalom - Poem: The Titanic

Just got off my stationery bike. Rode for 20 minutes while reading



They're much-disguised stories of the patients he sees in his San Francisco office.

Here's Yalom today, born in 1931, he's 83 years old. On his website, look to the Left and see him age.



I graduated in 1992, at the age of 45, from Hahnemann University's group psychotherapy, receiving my MGPGP degree.

Master, Group Process and Group Psychotherapy.

The chairmen of our department - Mike Vaccaro, MD, and Fabian Ulitsky, M.Ed., brought Irv Yalom out to Hahnemann to speak.

I was sitting with a fellow therapist - I got a job in 6 weeks at Bristol-Bensalem Human Services - named Bill and Yalom walked alone in the room.

He spoke to no one.

He sat on a bench and tied his shoe.

"Go talk to him," said Bill.

"Why?" I said.

Scott made us pizza for lunch. Apparently I didn't inject enuf insulin since my sugar was 202, hence my biking for 20 minutes.

I almost gave up reading Creatures of a Day, as the first few stories didn't interest me. However, things picked up toward the end of the book.

Dig these chapter titles:

Get Your Own Damn Fatal Illness: Homage to Ellie
You Must Give Up the Hope of a Better Past

Yalom begins the book with this unforgettable quote I've already forgotten:

All of us are creatures of a day; the rememberer and the remembered alike. All is ephemeral - both memory and the object of memory. The time is at hand when you will have forgotten everything; and the time is at hand when all will have forgotten you. Always reflect that soon you will be no one and nowhere.

In the chapter I'm reading - Get Your Own Fatal Illness - Ellie, who's dying of ovarian cancer at 63,  tells Yalom that she's jealous of people who are alive and living their lives.

Suddenly I thought, What if I get ovarian cancer? There's no reason not to?

Then my thoughts went to those two or three terrible years when my sciatica was so painful - nothing worked - that I would rather be dead.

How I envied the people walking down my street - walking their dogs, moms pushing their strollers - all the while thinking, You have no idea how lucky you are.

Thank God - and I do thank him or her - I got my operation in 2011 from Guy Lee, praise be his name.

   Guy Lee is also in a rock band and a member of Doctors Without Borders.

At our Writers' Group at the Willow Grove Giant, I had presented my story "Pandemonium." I got all kinds of advise, including, "Leave out all that stuff about the sinking of the Titanic."

A writer can hear feedback but does not have to accept it.

I'd check out the movie "A Night to Remember" which inspired my writing of the short story.

Published by The Literary Yard, who also published my true story "Lethal Weapons," the editor wrote

Hi, Ruth -

You've penned a beautiful story with impressive narrative. 

Here goes the link:

Regards, 

Onkar [Sharma]

Below is a poem I wrote years ago about The Titanic.


TITANIC

In the dark theatre where
I sat wedged between a man
and his wife, both invisible
but felt, and a teenage boy and girl
scooping popcorn from a bag,

I became pained by boredom
and worried by things
to come.
I fled to the lobby to search my soul.
Would it be cowardly to
pay my money and leave without anything?
In desperation I examined each
glass-enclosed case
filled to flowing with candy
and merry, bright-
colored drinks.

I opened my mouth
to speak to the girl
but no words would come out.
Empty-handed I returned to my seat.

There were fourteen theatres
crouched side by side
I re-entered the dark tomb from
whence I came.
Crawled over the woman's legs,
then the man's, feeling first
her lightness,
then the boniness of the man,
even as he retreated
from my touch.

I wondered
when taking my seat,
alone, unprotected by
a husband or even an acquaintance,
if it might be possible
when the waters
began rushing in and the
people were swept from the
places they clung to,

if I might, ever so gently,
lay my hand on the arm of
the man next to me,
a gentle touch, invisible almost,
to comfort me when the
icy waters swept us under.