Sherry Chandler

Let Me Walk in Beauty

O Great Spirit,
whose voice I hear in the winds
and whose breath gives life to all the world, hear me.
I am small and weak.
I need your strength and wisdom.

Let me walk in beauty
and let my eyes ever behold the red and purple sunset.
Make my hands respect the things you have made and my ears grow sharp to hear your voice.

Make me wise so that I may understand the things you have taught my people.
Let me learn the lessons you have hidden in every leaf and rock.
I seek strength not to be greater than my brother or sister but to fight my greatest enemy, myself.

Make me always ready
to come to you with clean hands and straight eyes So when life fades as the fading sunset my spirit may come to you without shame.

-Chief Yellow Lark

Alan Bender writes to draw my attention to the Climate Emergency Fast, in which he is participating.

As global warming rapidly intensifies, the prospect of much more extensive hunger worldwide becomes increasingly likely, especially in poor countries, due to drought, Katrina-like storms, glacial melting and sea level rise. These impacts will lead to crop failures and economic and social disruption on a massive scale.

To draw attention to this threat and its moral implications, we are calling on thousands of concerned citizens to voluntarily give up food for one day on September 4th, 2007. Other participants will fast even longer beginning on that date, some for weeks. Our appeal to you is to consider joining us in this climate initiative called, “So Others Might Eat: The Climate Emergency Fast.” Give up food for one day now to draw attention to the fact that others may have no food tomorrow unless we halt global warming.

September 4th is the day Congress returns from its summer recess. What better way to mark that day than with a small personal sacrifice meant to send an urgent message: It’s time for our national leaders to take action to solve the climate threat!

Some people are fasting for this one day, others, like Alan, for two days, a month, indefinitely—so it may not be too late to join.

I think it might not even be necessary to fast as a public protest. You could do it as a private observance, a spiritual cleansing in honor of the earth that sustains us.

Go to the site. Look around. Think about it.

Just received this e-mail from the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning:

Be sure to tune in to ABC’s GOOD MORNING AMERICA tomorrow morning, WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 5, when Kentucky’s own Poet Laureate Jane Gentry Vance will appear on the show.

Tomorrow marks the 1-year “paper anniversary” of GMA’s four co-hosts’ appearing alongside one another, and as part of the celebration, longtime host and native Kentuckian Diane Sawyer will be honored with a poem created for her and read aloud by the Poet Laureate of her home state, our very own and much beloved Jane Gentry Vance.

Over the holiday weekend the GMA crews descended on Dr. Vance in her Kentucky home to tape her reading of “Diana of Times Square.” Be among the first to hear the poem tomorrow morning on the show, when Dr. Vance, from her own living room to yours, will honor a fellow Kentuckian with the perfect paper anniversary gift: the gift of words.

The segment should air sometime between 8 and 8:30. Don’t miss it!

Elaine Fowler Palencia has drawn my attention to this special call for submissions from Rhino:

RHINO is looking for some lively accounts of what’s happening Out There, beyond our isolated circles — for a potential midsection of the magazine. There’s always an Out There, an event, a place, or an idea we’ve not been exposed to. It may be a reading that renders a crowd breathless, a unique conversation in some obscure basement, a literary party so aglitter it puts a peculiar smile on your face, a happening at an artists’ colony you can only recall as a dream, the ceremonious arrival of a foreign poet, etc. — in other words, fabulously written pieces that are witness to — something to do with poetry. Authors may be caught up in the thing encountered. The intent is to refresh and educate, break out of huddles and cocoons, bring in a piece of the outside — however you define it — whether it is wild, weird, foreign, profound, confounding, inspiring or just entertaining.

Full submission guidelines here. The reading period is April 1 to October 1, so there’s still time to submit.

Explore the Rhino web presence here.