Showing posts with label Robert Frost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Frost. Show all posts

Saturday, September 22, 2018

‘Equal Night is tonight’

     
Elm Forest in Autumn by Edvard Munch, oil on canvas, 1919-20.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the autumnal equinox will arrive tonight at 9:54 (New York time), when our sun will cross the celestial equator, resulting in an equal amount of sunlight reaching both the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and day and night shall be equal (give or take) all around the globe. Equinox means “equal night.”

For us, it spells the beginning of fall.



Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.


It is time for harvest and feasts; for darker days and longer sleep; to retire sweet Virginias for English and Balkan; and for wearing wool, tweed, leather, and denim. We’re halfway to the solstice.
     

Monday, March 20, 2017

‘A Prayer in Spring’

     

Spring Day at Jeløya by Edvard Munch,
1915, oil on canvas, privately owned.


A Prayer in Spring

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,
The which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends He will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.

Robert Frost



The Spring Equinox arrived early this morning. Happy Rosicrucian New Year! We even had nice weather to enjoy today in these parts. (New York, not Jeløya.)

     

Sunday, December 18, 2016

‘A Hermit’s Winter Night’

     
Hermit card of the Rider-Waite tarot deck, c. 1910.

I’m not saying either Robert Frost or his poem here has any connection to tarot symbolism. I’m only personally putting the two together during a cold weekend on the precipice of winter. H/T to the Academy of American Poets for all the text below.



“An Old Man’s Winter Night”
By Robert Frost

All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him—at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off;—and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon,—such as she was,
So late-arising,—to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.



Bro. Colin Browne’s Masonic tarot deck Hermit.    
“An Old Man’s Winter Night” was originally published in the 1916 edition of Mountain Interval (Henry Holt and Company) and appeared again in the revised edition of Mountain Interval in 1921 (Henry Holt and Company).

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco. His collections of poetry include New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962). Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes during his lifetime and served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 1958 to 1959. He died on January 29, 1963.
     

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

‘Rhymes of Robert Frost and Rumi’

     
If you like artistic creativity in your spiritual life—and who doesn’t?—or simply if you enjoy music and poetry—ditto—there are two great events coming soon to New York City. New York Open Center will host Amir Vahab for an evening of musical interpretation of Sufi poems, and the Anthroposophical Society will present Andy Leaf, who will frame the verse of Robert Frost in the Society’s spiritual science perspective. From the respective publicity:


Sufi Songs of Rumi, Hafiz
and Other Sufi Poets
Amir Vahab and Ensemble
with the Daf Caravan
Saturday, October 3 at 8 p.m.

New York Open Center
22 East 30th Street
Manhattan



Courtesy NY Open Center
Amir Vahab has been described by The New York Times as an “ambassador for a silenced music.” One of New York City’s most celebrated composers/vocalists of Sufi and folk music, he sings in the evocative, traditional Persian style which embodies millennia of mystical tradition. His work transcends political boundaries while maintaining traditional sensibilities in a way few artists can manage. Vahab’s music is rooted in tradition, but has been influenced by contemporary sounds. Like Amir himself, his music symbolizes diversity-in-unity. He is teaching and lecturing private and group classes in universities, libraries, museums, and cultural centers on the one hand and, on the other, he organizes music therapy and sound healing workshops.



This evening, Amir Vahab and ensemble will perform songs selected from the poetry of the great Sufi masters Rumi and Hafiz and other legendary mystical poets to transport us to 13th century Persia with all its beauty and exoticism. The ensemble also will perform lively traditional music from Turkish, Kurdish, and other sources featuring the mystical reed flute, ancient lutes, and the daf drum. The concert will conclude with a dynamic drumming performance that echoes the universal heartbeat of existence.



Robert Frost in the Light
of Spiritual Science and Vice Versa
Presented by Andy Leaf
Saturday, October 10 at 2 p.m.

138 West 15th Street
Manhattan
Admission: donations


Since college days in the mid 1950s, Andy Leaf has had a passionate interest in the spirituality expressed in the poetry of Robert Frost and Emily Dickinson. This Saturday program will be an informal exploration of how spiritual science can enhance appreciation of Frost’s poetry in ways conventional criticism does not—and which can, in turn, enrich our experience of truths revealed in Anthroposophy. The focus will be on a few selected, representative poems.

Andy Leaf has studied Anthroposophy since 1967. He served as a teacher and administrator in the Waldorf School of Garden City, New York from 1967 to 1978. Subsequently, he has been an instructor, program designer, and consultant in training and organizational development. As principal of his own consulting practice, Leaf & Associates, he has consulted with Waldorf Schools in the United States and Canada on issues of organizational health and leadership.