Fencing Bear at Prayer

I have been meaning to write this post for over two weeks now.  It would have been better if I had been able to write it back on the day , but of course if I had been able to think clearly then, by definition I wouldn't have choked, so there you go.  Has it been long enough now for me to think rather than simply be overwhelmed by my emotions?  I can still see my opponent's face so clearly when we took off our masks and were signing the bout sheet after she had won.  She knew what she had done to me, and I knew what she knew she had done.  I still don't know how I am going to live that feeling down. So let's start by making a list.  Why?!!!    Why, why, why, why, why???--when I knew what kind of fencer she was, when I had in fact warmed up with her on that very day and so had some more recent information about how she was fencing, when I had just seen her beat someone whom I knew to be a stronger fencer than she (or, at least, than she had been...

Where there's life, there's hope.  But is there hope in death? A friend and colleague of mine died this past week of a cancer that was diagnosed less than six months ago, just after Thanksgiving.  Last autumn, she and a colleague took a group of students on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.  This spring, she is dead, leaving behind her father, her brother, her husband, and their two sons.  She was 53. There is no logic in her death.  She was, in so many ways, the best of us, the most generous, the most giving, the most supportive, the calmest, always ready with a thoughtful word.  Thinking of her, what I remember best is her warmth, the gentleness of her voice, and her smile.  Although I saw her only infrequently after graduate school, she always gave the impression of having been thinking about me.     She had an almost magical ability to make one feel loved and respected and treasured. And now she is dead.  I can ...

Which is the true measure of my strength: that I cry when I choke (and did I choke on Sunday !), or that I get back on the strip even after humiliating myself in front of all of my friends and try again? Growing up, it was regularly borne upon me that crying was the worst of failings, the greatest of sins, the true marker of my character.  "Why do you get so upset?  It's only [fill in the blank]."  "Don't upset Rachel, she can't take it." My siblings knew that I could always be counted upon to burst into tears of rage and frustration if they pushed me hard enough, at which the adults would sit round shaking their heads and saying, "Why can't she learn to control her temper?" and trying desperately to distance themselves from the storm. It was humiliating.  Every time it happened, after the storm passed, I simply wanted to die, run away, get as far away from the things that had made me so panicky.  In my humiliation, all I could see was ...

Right, so, that was painful.  And, yes, it still hurts, although it seems to be passing. But am I actually going to quit? Yes and no. Yes, I need to quit, but, no, I probably won't. I'm not sure that this is entirely a good thing. Where am I going with this thought? I am still very, very tired from this past weekend.  I feel like a storm has blown through and there are still branches down in the street.  I am happy to have had the desire to blog again, at least briefly.  Will that last?  I don't know, but I realize that I actually hope so. I don't like quitting.  And yet, it is an odd form of weakness not to be able to quit doing something that hurts so very much.  Why don't I just run away? I meant this post to be a little more philosophical, not just ramblings, but not having blogged in so long, maybe this is what I need to do.  Just sit down at the page and....  And what? What is the difference between quitting and failure? ...

Something died in me this weekend.  It was the spring Veterans' NAC.  All the usual suspects, plus a few new faces.  I fenced brilliantly in both my pools: 4-1 on Friday in Veteran Women 40-49 foil, 5-1 yesterday in Veteran Women Combined foil.  On Friday I placed 4th out of the pools overall; on Sunday I tied for 6th.  And then I blew it.  TWICE.  I lost my first DE on Friday 8-10, thus losing my place in the medal round (top 8).  And I lost my second DE yesterday, again 8-10, again losing my place in the medal round--the first time ever in Vet Combined that I even had a place to lose after the pools.  And that basically broke my heart. One of my friends was watching the Veteran Women Foil Team finals with me on Saturday, and he said something about fencing being a fickle sport.  Fickle is exactly the word--and its god is Loki.  No matter what kind of offerings you bring to the god, he will cheat and trick and lie to you.  N...

Response to Matthew J. Milliner, “The Sexuality of Christ in Byzantine Art and in Hypermodern Oblivion” Everybody loves a scandal. Traveling to Istanbul in 1717 the Englishwoman Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was shocked to see images of the Virgin Mary executed with no effort at naturalism. “The Greeks,” she wrote home, “have the most monstrous taste in their pictures, which for more finery are always drawn upon a gold ground. You may imagine what a good air this has, but they have no notion either of shade or proportion.” En route through the Holy Roman Empire, she had been equally shocked to see pictures of the Trinity. Writing from Regensburg, she told her friend Anne Thistlethwayte, “I was very much scandalized at a large silver image of the Trinity where the Father is represented under the figure of a decrepit old man with a beard down to his knees, and a triple crown on his head, holding in his arms the Son fixed on the Cross, and the Holy Ghost in the shape of a dove hovering over...

Five years and four or so months ago, I started this blog with a prayer.  " O God, hasten to my aid !"  I had never written a blog, and I had no idea what I was going to say.  I only knew that I wanted to write and to say something about the process of writing.  I knew also that I wanted to think about prayer and hoped that I might find others who also wanted to think about prayer.  I had an inkling at the time that I would be writing about fencing, thus the title of the blog, but I needed a persona other than my professional or private self through which to explore whatever it was that I was going to be exploring, thus my Fencing Bear mask. For the first few months, I kept my proper name out of my posts, although almost immediately I realized that I wanted other people to know that I was keeping a blog, even when things started to get, shall we say, a little embarrassing, especially those posts that I wrote that summer at Nationals.  By the middle of the...

Well, that didn't take long.  Here I have been biding my time, looking forward to the day when I could start blogging again, planning all sorts of re-entry posts about who I am now, how I have changed over the course of the year, what it feels like to have almost a complete draft of my book done, and BANG!  Here I am writing about being attacked by the devil again .  How apropos. It happened to Sister Mary of Ágreda , and she is a much, much more gifted writer than I will ever be.  (Mainly because she understood the true nature of her gifts--they came from God, as she well knew; I still have the presumption to imagine that what I write somehow depends on me.)  As she tells it in the introduction to the second part of her masterpiece, The Mystical City of God (Mystica Ciudad de Dios, first published in 1670 ) : 1.  When I was ready to present before the throne of God the insignificant results of my labors in writing the first part of the most holy lif...

THE VIRGIN MARY AND THE ART OF PRAYER The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought Invitatory: How to Read this Book, The Virgin Clothed with the Sun [5,000 words] Chapter 1 The Hours of the Virgin [20,000 words] A Little History of the Office Symbolism and Structure of the Hours Chapter 2   Ave Maria [22,000 words] Saluting Mary Naming Mary Chapter 3   Antiphon and Psalm [60,000 words] Mary in the Temple The LORD and the Lady of the Temple Miriam, the Mother of Jesus the Son of God Most High Mary, the Theotokos, the Living Temple of God Mary in the Psalms The Night Office or Matins First nocturn, on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday Second nocturn, on Tuesday and Friday Third nocturn, on Wednesday and Saturday The Seven Hours of the Day Lauds, sung at sunrise Prime, sung at the first hour of the day Terce, Sext, and None, sung at the third, sixth, and ninth hours Vespers, sung at sunset Compline, sun...

I'm still here, just lying low for the moment.  Work on the book is proceeding apace , but I am finding it harder and harder to write about anything else.  This is a good thing, I think.  As the Preacher says, "for everything there is a season,"* and this is the season for me to finish the draft of my book.  I don't want to say much more just now, lest I scare away the Muse.  Let's just say it's going well...better than I ever dreamed possible.** *Ecclesiastes 3:1.  **Meanwhile, the Dragon Baby is snoring, probably dreaming about that squirrel she caught yesterday.*** ***Yes, that makes twice she has counted coup on the rodentia of the trees.  We're both having quite a year!

 Heh.  Not bad for a couch potato , eh? Posted with Blogsy

Seeding is based on results from the past three national events: Summer Nationals 2012, December NAC 2012 and March NAC 2013. It's been a good year! But I've also spent the past seven months sitting on my couch, writing. And I've had the flu for the past month. Last night I woke up coughing again, and my energy is really low. It is going to be a tough day today. Posted with Blogsy

"Adults can hamper progress with their own perfectionism: whereas children throw themselves into tasks, adults often agonise over the mechanics of the movements, trying to conceptualise exactly what is required.  This could be one of our biggest downfalls.  'Adults think much more about what they are doing,' says Gabriele Wulf at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 'Children just copy what they see.' "Wulf's work over the past decade shows that you should focus on the outcome of your actions rather than the intricacies of the movements.   She applies this finding in her own life: as a keen golfer, she has found it is better to think about the swing of the club, for instance, rather than the position of her hands.  'I'm always trying to find where best to focus my attention,' she says.  Similarly, if you are learning to sing, then you should concentrate on the tone of the voice, rather than on the larynx or the placement of the tongue.  Study...

Everything hurts.  My back hurts, particularly a point over my right shoulder blade.  My hands hurt, particularly my right hand if I try to clench it.  My feet hurt, particularly the top of my left foot, where the tendons are.  All of my joints are stiff, particularly my right wrist and ankle.  All this after getting a massage on Tuesday and spending the week doing something other than sitting on my couch with my laptop on my lap, writing. Talk about Sitzfleisch .  I looked it up on Wiktionary : "The ability to endure or carry on with an activity," from the German for "the ability to sit still."  I have another definition: "The way your body feels after you have been sitting still for five months working on your book manuscript." It creeps up on you.  Back in the winter, when it was so cold that it took a full five minutes to get the layers on before taking the dog out for her midday romp, I just thought I felt stiff because I had so many cl...

After three-and-a-half years' constant practice, the Dragon Baby caught her first squirrel this week.  There we were, almost home from our lunchtime walk, and one minute she was next to me on the sidewalk, while the next she was emerging from the other side of a tree with a young squirrel in her mouth.  It all happened so fast, I wasn't quite sure what to think, never mind do, so I stood there, entranced, as the squirrel squeaked and the Dragon Baby tried to shake it just as she has her toys so many times.  But squirrels, unlike stuffed hedgehogs, have teeth and claws and muscles with which they can fight and move.  Just as quickly as she had caught the squirrel, suddenly it was away back up the tree, barking and looking down at us as the Dragon Baby, undaunted, settled back down on the sidewalk so as to keep an eye on her prey. And I thought it was bad when she ate the baby mouse !  When she caught the squirrel, my first thought was that she was surely goi...