Finding poetry

I’ve been wanting to expand the blog into other media beside the printed word for some time, and I managed that a bit in the past with a post about a song that became a book, a cool video about language, and a short film. Today I am compelled to post about The King is Dead, the new album by The Decemberists. I simply can’t stop listening to it.

One slight hiccup is that the opening of “Calamity Song” is so reminiscent of REM’s “Seven Chinese Brothers”, that I actually thought my iTunes was accidentally on shuffle. To add to the confusion, Peter Buck even plays on the track, though the song is all Colin Meloy’s, and once I got over the sense of deja vu I realized it’s a great piece with some amazing lyrics, such as:

Hettie Green
Queen of supply-side bonhomie bone-drab
(Know what I mean?)

Well, no, I have no idea, but I’d like to hug Meloy for using the word “bonhomie” in a song.

This is my favorite:

The thrushes bleating battle with the wrens
Disrupts my reverie again

It took me a while to figure out why I liked that phrase so much from the song “June Hymn”. Was it that it has a gorgeous melody behind it? That it has a little alliteration? It feels almost like a tongue twister? I thought and listened and listened and thought some more. And then I figured it out. It was so obvious, I couldn’t believe it took me a week and a half for this word to even cross my mind. It’s poetry.

Doing for others.

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is:
What are you doing for others?
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Each of us will have a different answer to this question and a different sense of what is enough. For me, I’m going to take this opportunity to rethink my charitable contributions. Do the organizations I support really align with my values and passions? Could I make a greater impact by giving more to fewer charities? Today I will take a look back at the gifts I made in 2010 and, for the first time ever, make a charitable giving plan for 2011 so that I can be sure what I’m doing for others is a question I can feel proud to answer.

Best laid plans

We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. ~ E.M. Forster

Particularly poignant as a new year begins, but easier said than done.

Blahgging

In the latter part of 2010 “A Happy Accident” went from being a blog to a blahg. It was so blah, it was basically dead. But the blog is back, baby. Again. So to kick of the new year and the new blog, I give you…  more blogs. Here are three online happy accidents you should check out:

Footsee – Fetish or fashion? You decide.

Philly Joe Remarkable Looks On In Disbelief - Contrary to its title, it’s not entirely about Philadelphia, nor will it in instill in you an overwhelming sense of disbelief, but it is a nice collection of random things.

Catalog Living – Unbelievably clever and wickedly funny.

So you had a bad day.

“…the world has a way of slipping through your fingers.”
~ George Bernard Shaw, Heartbreak House

Or, sometimes, it’s not so much the whole world as it is your own personal little world at a given moment. Take the work day, for example. Today, my work world slipped through my fingers, plummeted to the floor, and shattered into a million razor sharp pieces which were so wide spread it seemed impossible not to step on them.

That is a gross exaggeration, of course. It was just a bad day. A really bad day. But so what? We’ve all had them. We get through them. We come back and try again. Sometimes we fail again, sometimes we fail better, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, and sometimes we even succeed. How tolerable this cycle is depends so much on the work at hand. What one does for eight or more hours a day — time that we wish could be spent in so many other ways — makes all the difference in a world that has a way of slipping through your fingers. Even loving your job doesn’t guarantee a sturdy grip, but it sure does make it easier to get out of bed on Monday.