And May Is Here

I planned of going to the bank to update my accounts. Good thing I remembered it is holiday today, it’s Labor Day. Spent a couple of hours instead pruning my Fukien tea plants and Green dust plants. Much as I want to shape them  in perfect  round, I could not do it. Josef is more of the artist than I am.  Even the weeds around my flowering Vinca have to be removed too. 8 am is already hot so it is always better to start around 5:30 am. Nowadays, the days are longer than nights.

Aside from being a holiday, today is our village fiesta. It is the feast day of St. Joseph the Worker.  Except for a morning mass and a band playing  on our streets, there is not much to it. There are games I think at the gym this afternoon.

I was cleaning up my tab when I noticed that most of the photos saved on my gallery are of Nate and Oreo. I still have to transfer them on my hard disk for safety. Stress-free days are those spent with kids and pets – no deadline, no traffic, no particular time to do scheduled chores. It is always fun when they are around.  You learn something from them too. The value of time is not measured by the minutes or hours spent with them but by the joys and happiness you get out of it. Sometimes when I am in front of my PC like this, I just used my right  hand to type on the keyboard while holding Oreo on my lap. Sometimes, he would step on the keyboard and a long line of a letter appears…haha!

 

 

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The May Magnificat

A close friend sent me this early this morning. She knows I always love the month of May. It is the month of Mama Mary.  What a lovely way to start the month reading a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet and a Jesuit priest.

According to Poetry Foundation,  “Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the three or four greatest poets of the Victorian era. He is regarded by different readers as the greatest Victorian poet of religion, of nature, or of melancholy. However, because his style was so radically different from that of his contemporaries, his best poems were not accepted for publication during his lifetime, and his achievement was not fully recognized until after World War I”.

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

May is Mary’s month, and I

Muse at that and wonder why :

Her feasts follow reason,

Dated due to season—

Candlemas, Lady Day ;

But the Lady Month, May,

Why fasten that upon her,

With a feasting in her honour ?

Is it only its being brighter

Than the most are must delight her ?

Is it opportunist

And flowers finds soonest ?

Ask of her, the mighty mother :

Her reply puts this other

Question : What is Spring?—

Growth in every thing—

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,

Grass and greenworld all together ;

Star-eyed strawberry-breasted

Throstle above her nested

Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin

Forms and warms the life within ;

And bird and blossom swell

In sod or sheath or shell.

All things rising, all things sizing

Mary sees, sympathizing

With that world of good

Nature’s motherhood.

Their magnifying of each its kind

With delight calls to mind

How she did in her stored

Magnify the Lord.

Well but there was more than this :

Spring’s universal bliss

Much, had much to say

To offering Mary May.

When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple

Bloom lights the orchard-apple

And thicket and thorp are merry

With silver-surfèd cherry

And azuring-over greybell makes

Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes

And magic cuckoocall

Caps, clears, and clinches all—

This ecstasy all through mothering earth

Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth

To remember and exultation

In God who was her salvation.

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