Literature Link for Jan.2, 2022- Renewal
• The Plant Hunters. The definitive account of the remarkable botanical entrepreneurs of the 19th century is Alice Coats’s The Plant Hunters. We owe to Robert Fortune, George Forrest, David Douglas and others the plants that are ubiquitous in our gardens today, but which were acquired by way of perilous expeditions and the arduous collection of specimens. Buddleias, azaleas, rhododendrons, hydrangeas and many more are staples today, but they were brought back to the UK by men who risked life and limb, climbed mountains, braved bandits and pirates, or scoured remote areas of China, like Ernest Wilson in his pursuit of Davidia involucrata, the handkerchief tree, the ultimate horticultural trophy of the early 20th century. [non-fiction, theme of renewal, public library]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/26/further-reading-penelope-lively-renewal
• “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” by Leslie Silko [short story] Silko, a Native American author, sets her story in a Laguno Pueblo where the death of Teofilo sets up the plot of the story. “The title “The Man to Send Rain Clouds” alludes to the Pueblo belief that the dead are associated with rain clouds. The narrator makes several references to the Indian burial ceremony and the history of the Pueblo people. The story’s title is taken from a traditional prayer in which the Indians pray for the spirit of the deceased to send rain clouds so crops will grow and the community will not starve. To the Pueblo, death is not the end of existence, but part of a cycle in which the human spirit returns to its source and then helps the community by returning with rain clouds” [hence renewal]. Here is a pdf:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4695&context=nmq
• “The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love” from Maria Popova offering us commentary about the great Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh. For the “practice of transforming fear into love
he anchors this transmutation practice in four mantras ‘effective for watering the seeds of happiness in yourself and your beloved and for transforming fear, suffering, and loneliness.’”https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/12/01/thich-nhat-hanh-fear-love/?mc_cid=d4f1120f54&mc_eid=f7e16bcddc
• “Spring is like a perhaps hand” by e.e.cummings.
“ Spring is like a perhaps hand /(which comes carefully/ out of Nowhere)arranging/ a window,into which people look …without breaking anything.” https://poets.org/poem/spring-perhaps-hand
In faith,
Dale Dunnigan