I haven't blogged in a month or so - life has been very busy - but I've been thinking a lot about this ConversantLife blog and what to do with it. I like to have a topic or purpose in my blogging, and I've been a bit aimless and scattered lately. But then I had an idea.

One thing I've experienced through growing up in the church has been an overwhelming negativity toward "our culture", a serious belief that our culture is the least moral, most degenerate, most reprehensible that has ever existed on the face of Planet Earth. This was often taken as proof that Christians ought to basically save as many people as they can and then hole up in a shelter and wait for Jesus to come back.

Over the last few years, it's struck me how arrogant it really is for us to believe that we live in the worst time ever. Yes, the twentieth century was bloody and awful - nobody will dispute that fact, and that a lot of it is due to increased globalization, along with the rise of the kind of evolutionary theories that discount the existence of God. But at the same time, reading history reminds me that men and women of every era have experienced the same issues as we have - abortion, selfishness, sexual promiscuity, worship of deities other than the God of the universe - and others we now can barely conceive of, such as murder for sport. Some of these bad things have even been done in the name of religion. It seems like humans are uniformly evil throughout history.

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Election Year
By Donald Revell

A jet of mere phantom
Is a brook, as the land around
Turns rocky and hollow.
Those airplane sounds
Are the drowning of bicyclists.
Leaping, a bridesmaid leaps.
You asked for my autobiography.
Imagine the greeny clicking sound
Of hummingbirds in a dry wood,
And there you’d have it. Other birds
Pour over the walls now.
I'd never suspected: every day,
Although the nation is done for,
I find new flowers.

Mark Doty is one of today's more prolific poets, and he teaches at the University of Houston. I like to think of him crouched in a corner at the gym, scribbling in a notebook, writing this poem.

At the Gym

This salt-stain spot
marks the place where men
lay down their heads,
back to the bench,

and hoist nothing
that need be lifted
but some burden they've chosen
this time: more reps,

more weight, the upward shove
of it leaving, collectively,
this sign of where we've been:
shroud-stain, negative

flashed onto the vinyl
where we push something
unyielding skyward,

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This article has some great thoughts on the passing of Paul Newman and the generation of socially-conscious businesses he inspired.

Charles Simic is a Yugoslavian emigrant to the United States. He is prolific and decorated, but one of his major accomplishments was winning the Pulitzer in 1990 for his book of poetry, Prose Poems. He teaches at the University of New Hampshire.

In the Library

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered
The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.
Now the sun is shining

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As the sky falls on Wall Street, are you confused about what happened? Not sure how this complicated chain events was started? Here's a few, interesting, and (dare I say?) entertaining resources that will help you become informed about what in the world is going on.

Written long before the crisis even began, Michael Lewis' book Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street is by far the most interesting explanation of how mortgage-backed securities were created on Wall Street in the 1980s. I read this book several years ago and it scared me - apparently, not without basis. (Lewis has a new book coming out in December, called Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.)

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If you don't know of Edna St. Vincent Millay, then you should - one of the New York literati during her lifetime. I used to live a block away from several places where she lived in New York's beautiful West Village. Autumn is gorgeous here, and it's no wonder that she wrote this poem.

God's World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;

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Today's poet is Billy Collins (again). Collins was on the cover of Poets and Writers' September/October issue. He also will be at the IAM conference here in New York in February.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

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Today, poetry from the celebrated American poet Denise Levertov. You can find out more about her and read more poems (including this one) on Poets.org.

This poem stirs my soul. It's an excerpt from a larger work.

Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus [excerpt]

ii Gloria

Praise the wet snow
falling early.
Praise the shadow
my neighor's chimney casts on the tile roof
even this gray October day that should, they say,
have been golden.
Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.
Praise
god or the gods, the unknown,

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I love my husband, and I like to make sure he has good food to eat. I also like to save money, but I want good-quality food and appreciate a relaxed grocery shopping experience, so I shop at places like Whole Foods (since we've moved out of the neighborhood with the wonderful food co-op). I like to bring my lunch to work each day, to avoid eating nutrient-deficient and/or expensive lunches out all the time. I also have very little discretionary time.

Recently, I sat back and took a good, hard look at the way I manage our food, and realized that I needed to start planning meals and grocery lists each week. But the idea of carrying around yet another notebook was daunting. 

So what does a twenty-first century girl do? I pulled on my thinking cap and decided to put a few digital resources to work: the internet, and my iPhone. Here's how:

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