Dear All

Xmas is already preying on my mind.So I thought why not send out my newsletter in pieces so that it will also be a work of art about our fractured world and about how we do what we want and not what we ought.Or do we?
Well, my daughter Annabel has opened a shop selling Geiger counters.Or is it Geiger shoes.Well, I don’t suppose it matters.Whatever it is, she’s doing well with the Russian oligarchs and with our  English friends.After all, every woman needs a pocket calculator nowadays and shoes are always welcome

I myself prefer an abacus.The leap to the abstract has always struck me as dangerous.Economics and warfare, that’s  what maths is for.And who even knows what Economics is now?
Annabel has already got fifteen children.You may recall she has had five husbands and is looking for a new one.My optometrist says it’s a mistake to go looking.But then he is married already.So I was wondering about joining soulmates until I realised I have a husband.Just that he’s dead,y ou know.But does it matter?Some women have husbands in the Intelligence Services and they don’t see them for years.Now there’s a thought.
How do you meet men in the Intelligence Services?Or how do they pick wives?Maybe I’ll give that one a miss for now.
You may wonder how Annabel works and looks after all her children.I  wonder myself but I never like to be intrusive and some of them are now at University.PPE that is what they read.A load of codswallop, I say.Studying Greek and Hebrew is a lot more demanding and more useful both spiritually and for advice about Love.Not to mention War.It’s all there and I think the Pope was right to ban us reading the Bible.It needs a lot of work  by theologians to make it sound like a good  guide to life
We’d spend all day stoning adulterers or homosexuals and what good did that ever do.With S and M about some enjoy being stoned, one way or another.I’ve almost done it myself but I am too mean to buy cannabis when I get free calcium channel blockers on prescription.What calcium channels are God only knows.Beta blockers, anti-cholesterol, aspirin, it makes me feel sick.So then I take sea sickness pills just sitting here gawping out  of this French window looking for the robin.

Well,I  think I shall have to regroup and begin again.Just on the letter.After Annabel’s father ran away I decided I’d marry a woman next time and eerily, now I can.Except I never meer any free ones

Well, I will definitely put some more news in before Xmas.That is if we’ve not been bombed by Trump as his sense of direction and anything else seems lacking.I bet God and Satan made this little story up.And it will run and run.Where are those comforters Job had?
Lots of love
Bye Kristy

FROM MUMSNET

“On another note, my dad is a pharmacist and had someone come in and complain that the Caneston pessaries weren’t working. Turned out she’d been eating them.

I wonder what she used the applicator for?

As we lay together in the night
Open to the other and their gaze
We saw the spirit and its loving light

Now I dwell alone and out of sight
I miss  the other and his different ways
Did we rest together in the night?

Where’s the spirit,  I’m alone distraught.
Can it be other to my downcast face?
We saw the spirit, now I’ve lost its light.

God is  not a fish that can be caught
May peaceful contemplation  help  to aloss erase
Did we dream together in the night?

Grace  to find one’s path as comes midnight
Dies irae, requiem  sauvage.
We saw the spirit and its loving light

What is night and where are my own days?
Can I  endure its  piercing  mental pain
As I lie alone at  dead of night
Send the spirit, enfold me in   light

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68606/spiritual-poetry

“The root of “spirit” is the Latin spirare, to breathe. Whatever lives on the breath, then, must have its spiritual dimension— including all poems, even the most unlikely. Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams: all poets of spiritual life. A useful exercise of soul would be to open any doorstop-sized anthology at random a dozen times and find in each of the resulting pages its spiritual dimension. If the poems are worth the cost of their ink, it can be done.

But, no, I’ve been asked to choose, to recommend. The poems I suggest here are this moment’s choices, not “the best spiritual poems” (a phrase weighing nothing in so intimate and personal a context). The “gates” are an equally personal selection of entrance points into spiritual life. Some of the poems are well known, others less so. Each stands representative of many others. Each also, for me, plunges into the heart of the matter at hand, bearing witness in some essential way.”

GATE 1. PERMEABILITY
Although the wind
blows terribly here,
the moonlight also leaks
between the roof planks
of this ruined house.

Izumi Shikibu (Japan, 974?-1034?) [translated by Jane Hirshfield with Mariko Aratani]