Soul Meets Blog

I've been singing this in the barn every day as I shovel horseshit.

About the only time I feel good anymore is when I’m in church, when I’m in love, or when I’m outside in nature. I was in love once; I didn’t question life. My faith was unbroken, unswerving.

Is it possible to fall back in love with life once you’ve fallen out? I hope so.

I just had to post this. It makes a perfect mad lib. Substitute whichever words you like. :) "Hey ______, I've got a ______ that's so _______ your ________ will think it's havin' a party."

I can't believe what they used to get away with in advertising.

Today's song is for my friend Zac in Bolivia. It's from the musical Anything Goes.

It's early June. I saw one of the most gorgeous things I've ever beheld today: a field of Lady Slipper Orchids (Cypripedium.)

Listed as endangered for most of my life, these wild orchids grow under pine trees and HATE being disturbed. If you pick the flower, the whole plant dies. This, combined with habitat destruction, is responsible for the flower’s scarcity.

You can't transplant them, but you CAN buy hybrids. (The wild ones are still the most beautiful to me. My soul catches its breath to behold a beautiful thing that cannot be touched; perhaps such things are beautiful because I can never touch them or own them or change, only accept them.)

Within the past two years, dozens of Lady Slippers have sprouted up and down my street! I think I've discovered something to fall in love with again.

Today's song is based on a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, one of my favorite poets.

None of us can truly know another's being. Not if that person puts up a glittering wall to keep us out. Outward power, grace, and style sometimes disguise a suffering that seems boundless to the person trapped inside the light. "But beauty was behind a pane of glass..." says Septimus in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway.

I've been the impoverished factory worker. I've glittered as Richard Cory. I've fallen as far as Septimus. I've weighed my pockets with river stones like Virginia. I've seen beauty and felt it to be outside myself: something I can see but never be part of. I've looked my own death in the eye, feared it, and struggled to find a reason to go on.

Have you?

Today's song is for old flames that just refuse to burn out. It's off Sheryl Crow's Globe Sessions.

1. Being homosexual is unnatural. Americans always reject unnatural things such as eyeglasses, polyester, and air conditioning.
2. Same-sex marriage will encourage people to be homosexual, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall. [This only applies to me.]
3. Same-sex marriage will change the foundation of society; we could never adapt to new social norms. Just like we haven't adapted to cars, the service-sector economy, or longer life spans.
4. Hetersexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn't changed at all; women are still property, blacks still can't marry whites, and divorce is still illegal.
5. Heterosexual marriage will be less meaningful if same-sex marriage were allowed; the sanctity of Britney Spears' 55-hour just-for-fun marriage would be destroyed.
6. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Same-sex couples, infertile couples, and old people shouldn't be allowed to marry because our orphanages aren't full yet, and the world needs more children.
7. Obviously homosexual parents will raise homosexual children, since heterosexual parents only raise heterosexual children.
8. Same-sex marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That's why we have only one religion in America.
9. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That's why we as a society expressly forbid widows, widowers, and other single parents to raise children.
10. Legalizing same-sex marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
11. Since homosexuals are all promiscuous, if they get married, married heterosexuals might be tempted to commit adultery.

I cannot die today, no
I can’t afford to crawl
on my belly like a sidewinder
or a sick animal.
Or dry up and fall away
like a bud in a drought.

No, I won’t die today;
I am cactus flowers after rain,
a fuchsia climax among thorns.
I am a nomad, a dromedary crossing
love’s desert, following yesterday
and tomorrow’s stars.

I’ve drunk enough tears on tap
to regret it the next morning,
enough to fill a sixth ocean, enough
to plant my own oasis
where I’ll grow dates
on palm trees.

Copyright 2006, S. Donovan Mullaney

So, Death Cab isn't a secret anymore. They've gone major label. And that's sad in a way, but good for them. They deserve it, and so far it hasn't hurt them lyrically or musically. Their latest CD, Plans, has a lot of love/death entwined imagery on it. When death is written of so lovingly, it doesn't seem as scary.

My friends have much better taste in music than I do. (Or perhaps it's just that I'm out of synch with the world.) For all notes Indie I have the tall, talented, and brilliant Joyful. For folk, classical, gospel, and blues, I have Keith. And for the funkiest groovy beats, there's Prophet.

Once again, Prophet has introduced me to "the next groovetastic wow music moment [he and I] share": Gnarls Barkley (read St. Elsewhere review on Allmusic.com.)

Prophet's last introduction was DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist (out-of-print, but thank god for online downloads) and the previous one was Delton 3030. All highly recommended. I knew there was a reason he was my business partner besides being cute. (Ladies, step up and recognize the fine specimen that is Prophet. Light-loafered gentlemen, he's one of those annoyingly sexually secure straight guys who's cultured NOT confused.)

Read on for lyrics to "Crazy" from St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley. It's on replay here on the lake.

Today is my stepfather's, my late grandmother's, and her late twin sister's birthday.

My grandmother passed July 10, 2001. Five years of absence have not lessened her memory. Alice Ruby Shobbrook Mullaney loved Jane Austen, Romantic poetry, and roses. This evening at my grandparents' grave, it seems fitting to read the following poem by William Wordsworth, composed two-hundred-three years--nearly to the day--before her death. I will also bring two roses from her rose garden, which I have spent the last year rehabilitating.

Today's song is "Useless Desires" from Patty Griffin's record Impossible Dream. Love this disc; it's some of her best work. The spare purity of her lyrics has remained consistent throughout her five albums: I've heard many women called "the female Bruce Springsteen." If anyone does it, it's Patty. The characters in her songwriting seem to come from the same source as the Boss': hard-working American men and women who are often materially impoverished but seem to live with a transcending spirituality which isn't rationalization or escapism but is based in beauty leftover from everyday sorrow.

This song is for the little llama I didn't get to watch grow up.

The promised rain hasn't come yet, so my mother and I begin to put the horses out for the day. We fill their water buckets, hay nets, and walk the first three to their paddocks when my mother looks over at the llama pen.

There's something small, dark, and fuzzy on the ground. "What is that?" she asks suspiciously, then "Oh, my God."

A bulbous head wobbles on a skinny neck. Liquid brown eyes--still slightly daze--open and regard us trustingly. We have a new resident here on the farm. All three of our llamas are female, so this is a surprise. With a name like Divine, perhaps it's immaculate conception, but more likely she was pregnant when we got her in January.

Unfortunately, our wonderful surprise turned to tragedy. Shortly after moving the cria into the barn, it became obvious something was wrong. She couldn't stand or nurse and was getting weaker.

The vet arrived and found that she'd either been born with a shattered knee, or it broke shortly after birth. With that kind of break, she said she couldn't help the poor thing. So, sadly, before our 'divine surprise' turned four hours old, we had to put her to sleep.

We now have two graves in our llama pen. The first grave holds the remains of Chief Sunday's Squaw--the aged, sickly llama my mom adopted out of kindness. (That's where the poem that appears in my book, Follow The Wolf Moon, comes from.)

The second holds something beautiful, young, and fleeting that we hardly had time to love. We didn't know she was coming, we couldn't make her live, but we'll miss this little cria just the same.