Uncomfortable/Beauty

ABOVE: I took this photo for Big Boss to post on the store's social media--help he'd requested. He wants me to write the copy too. I wrote:
"Cake Ornamenting Tools from 1958. Hours of fun: turn gum drops into floral cake decorations!"

I'm regretting not buying the kit myself. Maybe it'll still be there today... (I had yesterday off.) It seems highly desirable, but it's funny what doesn't sell sometimes.
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A squirrel just ran past me, sitting outside this morning, with a black walnut in its mouth. With their bright green hulls, black walnuts look like tennis balls. I was surprised to see it--they're a sign of a changing season and seem ridiculous, deep in summer as we are. We're due for temps up around 100ºF (38ºC) this coming week--luckily only a few days of it.
But of course fruiting and harvesting time means fall will come... Thankfully!

And by now, Marz will be halfway through her fourth of six weeks on Camino. Notes in my sketchbooks had dwindled at this point, and thinking of Marz every day as I have been, now I realize why--this is a long, long haul.
The walking takes over...

I'm remembering why I cried when it was over too, even though I had not had a good time--having fallen into the rhythm, the beat, of your heart and your feet, there's some grief in being wrenched out of that and thrown back into the industrialized world.

I do have a few more notes and sketches--another foot report, of course:
"both little toes are all swollen and mashed up... hurt excruciatingly".
And a dog.

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"The World Will Be Saved by Beauty."

I went to the Turtle Fountain gardens with an old friend from publishing days, Denise, yesterday evening. It was a perfect peach of an evening. We sat on a bench and talked for hours... she's one of my best friends for that.

We laughed about the rulings that say you can't teach books or anything that makes anyone "uncomfortable" with their race or sex.

"What will be left to read?" Denise said. "Uncomfortable situations are the crux of literature."

Yeah, what will they read?

I talked to her about reading Dorothy Day, and how reassuring she is to me--one of her mottos could've been, "Get comfortable with being uncomfortable."

Photo below via the New Yorker, "Dorothy Day's Radical Faith".
Look, she's wearing shoes like Penny Cooper's! (Penny's only have one strap.)

 

ABOVE: Day at a protest for the United Farm Workers led by Caesar Chavez. "Devout and left-wing, Day believed we needed “a revolution of the heart.”

One of Day's mainstays was Dostoevsky. She wrote,
“I do not think I could have carried on with a loving heart all these years without Dostoevsky’s understanding of poverty, suffering, and drunkenness.”

(Dostoevsky survived four years in a Siberian prison camp, you know--for reading banned literature! The more things change...)

Dostoevsky also said, "The world will be saved by beauty", and this was one of Day's favorite quotes.

I love it too, and isn't that a crazy thing to say?
Denise and I talked a lot about what it means...

Dorothy Day on Reading [uncomfortable things]:

“Turn off your radio. Put away your daily paper. Read one review of events a week, and spend some time reading good books.
They tell too of days of striving and of strife.
They are of other centuries and also of our own.
They make us realize that all times are perilous, that men live in a dangerous world, in peril constantly of losing or maiming soul and body.
We get some sense of perspective reading such books.
Renewed courage and faith and even joy to live.”