JWalking: The Blog

  "Still through the cloven skies they come With peaceful wings unfurled And still their heavenly music floats O'er all the weary world Above its sad and lowly plains They bend on hovering wing And ever o'er its Babel sounds The blessed angels sing." Christmas Eve never fails to bring out the wisdom captured in a carol. Seems my go-to song for years has been my favorite musically, too: It Came Upon The Midnight Clear . I've re-read Edmund Sears' lyrics every season with something new grabbing my mind. This year, I wonder just how long the world has been 'weary'? O, Holy Night speaks of the same ("The weary world rejoices.") Why are those Merry Gentlemen commanded to "rest" and not "dismay"? Some might think we've experienced the ultimate in weariness with this continuing state of pandemic, which has brought new meaning to the "sad and lowly plains." The range of sadness runs anywhere from literal death to t...

" Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone...." In the Bleak Midwinter , Christina Rossetti Started writing this on a warm afternoon for February -- the day before another powerfully icy, iron-hardening nature-spraying arrived in Central Virginia. Aside from choosing to postpone a couple of appointments and having some appointments postponed on me, the weather is what I expect from a February -- maybe not in Central Virginia, but of other Winters in my life. When our area was hit last week with a similar storm, I gave myself 30 minutes of alone time to just stare out the back window and take in the whiteness, the stillness. We had had more snow with that system. It wasn't the same as Rossetti's "snow on snow on snow," but I was captivated with the glimmering highlights on the tree branches and appreciated her idyllic capture of a similar scene. But, this week, I came back to "Earth stood hard." Earth usually doesn't stand. It is in constant...

I am certainly late to the formal announcement of my word for 2021. But, it's not that I haven't had one, or don't continue to think about it. I even used a form of it already in a text, and found myself grinning with affirmation.     Prospect (v; n) Oddly, I had thought of the verb form first. Maybe it was subconsciously taking root after bingeing on movies over the holidays. (One day, I'll get back to a time of weekend movie marathons. 2020 was not enough of an excuse to catch up on cinema.) There Will Be Blood opened with the scene of a single gentleman prospector, deep in his hand-hewn vertical shaft of rock and earth, picking his way to a few shavings of gold. The scene played long, beyond my comfort level, in that the way it was shot amplified the riskiness. Do I plan to prospect for gold? No. At least, not in the traditional, metallic sense. The word is not just exploring, but probing. Not just surveying, but looking deep with the intent to see the makeup of som...