Flying AA1330 on A321S. Need Another Day.

First flight out of Dallas. 6:36 a.m. on-time departure.

Foot traffic unusually light at DFW, as are the lines at Security and at the Gate.

Ah yes, September 11. And, the morning of September 11th.

Pilot gets on the intercom, and announces that we’re flying on an Airbus A321S. 168,000 pounds, 450 mph at cruising altitude.

Plane unusually quiet. More seats empty than usual for this flight.

Pilot dims the lights in the cabin.

Cabin is silent as the plane taxis up to the runway.

It’s dark in the cabin, my seat mate snoozes. Me? Restless. Churning.

Continue reading “Flying AA1330 on A321S. Need Another Day.”

Sunday Morning

HELP ME I murmur
as if I knew
to whom I speak
or what I’m asking for…

M.C. Richards, from “Morning Prayer” in Opening our Moral Eye

 


Photo: paramore.livejournal (via Nini Poppins)

Sunday Morning

Lord, make a factory of peace,
Make more hope,
Hate, the least.
Make war as small as a speck of sand
And terrorism a wick on a candle that burns to ashes.
And make love and peace as big as a skyscraper.
And hope like a mountain that’s 1,000 feet tall.
And make the volume of friendship be so loud
It shakes the ground.

~ Alex House, “The Volume of Friendship.”  Alex House lives in Upton, Massachusetts. He wrote this poem in Sunday school on Feb. 16, 2003, when he was 8 years old


Notes:

  • Inspired by: Tim Kreider – “Go Ahead, Millenials, Destroy us” – “As with all historic tipping points, it seems inevitable in retrospect: Of course it was the young people, the actual victims of the slaughter, who have finally begun to turn the tide against guns in this country. Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies. But they forgot what adults always forget: that our children grow up, and remember everything, and forgive nothing. […]  My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down…Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions…the moribund and vampiric two-party system, the savage theology of capitalism — rip it all to the ground. I for one can’t wait till we’re gone. I just wish I could live to see the world without us.
  • Poem: Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels
  • Photo:  Chris A with The.Magician (via see more)

Sunday Morning

A few days ago I spent a couple of minutes in St. Mary’s Basilica—it was a weekday—where perhaps a dozen people were kneeling in prayer.

Every now and then someone’s cell phone rang.

Horizontal communication refused to surrender, it kept on battling its vertical counterpart.

~ Adam Zagajewski, Slight Exaggeration: An Essay


Notes:

Sunday Morning

You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else.

What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”

I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.

~ Wendell Berry,  Hannah Coulter


Notes: