Wednesday Oct 30
In the 1980s UofD’s library had a framing service that did fine work. You could bring some piece you wanted framed,discuss the type and color of matting and frame, and pay a pretty reasonable price for a fine piece of wall-beauty. Perfect wedding gift because you could choose a text that felt right for the couple choosing the daring bravery of deep intimacy marked with a hope for their future. The framing service fell victim to a tightened budget one year. Made sense, running a framing shop was pretty far from a university’s core business of research and teaching and service. I still miss it though.
Blessings for the day
john sj
Today’s poem: Hand’s down, my favorite poems for wedding gifts came from Tagore’s Gitanjali . Here’s No. 63
Thou hast made me known to friends whom I knew not.
Thou hast given me seats in homes not my own.
Thou hast brought the distant near and made a brother of the stranger.
I am uneasy at heart when I have to leave my accustomed shelter;
I forget that there abides the old in the new,
and that there also thou abidest.
Through birth and death, in this world or in others,
wherever thou leadest me it is thou, the same,
the one companion of my endless life
who ever linkest my heart with bonds of joy to the unfamiliar.
When one knows thee, then alien there is none,
then no door is shut.
Oh, grant me my prayer
that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one
in the play of the many.
Tagore Gitanjali #63
Tagore died in the city of his birth, Calcutta, in 1941. He vastly influenced poetry, sacred and secular, not only in India but around the world. He is the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. If you buy Gitanjali, a book of 100 short sacred poems, prepare yourself to only read one poem at a time so you can sit with it. Here is # 1. These poems have no titles, only numbers.