It gets dark so early these days. / And we needed to get home, / after the creek / and the climbing the hill / and . . . (Poetry by Katie Murchison Ross)
Afternoon walk, mid-November
Author: encomia
Observing Día de los Muertos, San Miguel de Allende, México
Quietly I walked through the streets full of people, full of people honoring and celebrating in different ways their loved ones who passed away. . . . (Photography by David Cea)
And the Leaves of the Tree will be for the Healing of the Nations
The first thing you should know: / The tree has leaves. / Leaves whose lives depart, by definition. / Evergreens have needles; palms, fronds. / But leaves fulfill their nomenclatural destiny: / Fade, wither, fall. . . . (Poetry by Jeannie Rose Barksdale)
Great Spirit Prayer
Oh, Great Spirit, / Whose voice I hear in the winds . . . (Lakota Prayer translated by Chief Yellow Lark)
Satyagraha: Gandhi’s Civil Disobedience and Nonviolent Resistance
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said, “the line separating good and evil passes . . . right through every human heart.” Humanity has always struggled internally, in the space between our better angels and our darker thoughts. As division and hate blight our body politic, the compelling moral power of Gandhi’s satyagraha remains a vibrant and ever-relevant resource. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others in the Civil Rights Movement were deeply inspired by . . . (An essay by Jonathan English)
Fall, leaves, fall
Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away; / Lengthen night and shorten day . . . (A poem by Emily Brontë)
Autumn
A touch of cold in the Autumn night-- / I walked abroad, / And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge . . . (A poem by T.E. Hulme)
Pilgrim Land
Memory sometimes eludes us, smirks, plays tricks. Now, as I write and peer back into the golden haze of early childhood memories . . . (A photo essay by Jonathan English)
An Odyssey: Toward Beauty, Virtue and Redemption
Said to be an admirable children's story but not more, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader contains depths calling for reflection. Yet some have missed these depths. Indeed, one weakness of the film is its compressed, edited storytelling, leaving little time for reflection or anticipation. Largely episodic in nature, the movie should point to the arc . . . (A flash review by Jonathan English)
from Ode to the Dictionary, Pablo Neruda
As Encomia embarks, a small vessel on the vast seas of published literature, it seems only natural to call to mind the popular odes of Pablo Neruda, particularly his “Ode to the Dictionary”. It’s a beautiful, wild, celebratory ode. Like many of Neruda’s odes, it’s generous in gratitude, appreciating even ordinary, everyday things. But it’s… Continue reading from Ode to the Dictionary, Pablo Neruda
