An Appalachian Country Rag--Rustic Refrain

graphic: Hide and Seek, watercolor by Vera Jones
flowers

A Country Rag

Women's History

Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

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"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself -- President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Note: The allegorical poem below was written following a particuarly harrowing trip back from Asheville NC with Carolyn Moore, ACR's Contributing Editor and later Vice President, to visit her neice and family there. Snow turned into sleet and ice as we climbed up through the roller coaster of mountains that lead down to flats eventually and home in Tri-Cities TN. Cars and trucks skidded helpless into ditches beside us as Carolyn determined on the road ahead. There were no formal pull-offs or side roads to the safety of an overnight hotel for us to choose, so it was go-ahead or spend the evening somehow stopped, chilled and car-bound. She focused on the task that wound us somehow blessedly into the warmth of the kitchen of John Steele -- retired chair of ETSU's Art Department, and her companion for quite a few years in travel and amusement, entertainments -- who fed us warmth, wine and amazement at the recent travails and triumph before we wound our weary way finally into Jonesborough and a restful night in our own beds.

"kol isha" (voice of a woman)

My body is a chant
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and in the hour of our death
Wrecks. Snow-laced trees and fields. Ice up our noses, in our ears. Tap on the glass and slush. You give us Robert Frost and a lost New England storm, carriages and warmly distant friends. Our end. Buddha, and rain. How to relate what we've survived, the curtained vision of another side -- a biding sign of love, high in wilderness climes on this determined ride
we do not die


FOUR GREAT VOWS

However innumerable all beings are
I vow to save them all
However inexhaustible my delusions are
I vow to extinguish them all
However immeasurable the Dharma Teachings are
I vow to master them all
However endless the Buddha's Way is
I vow to follow it completely


     Atlanta Soto Zen Center





Graphic: Passion, digital imagery
by Oliver Loveday, Eidson TN

SITA-RAM PRAYER (c. 5000BC)
quoted from IndiaStar

"Let us think of the splendor
Of Her that is One-Supreme,
She that is one without second,
That She may inspire our minds,
Our words, thoughts and deeds.

To Her who is the unending Time,
To Her who is without beginning,
To Her, who is without end
To Her, who began it all
To Her, who is the seed of all
To Her, who is the source of all
And to Her, who alone is the Self
That She may inspire us, together, all, all.
In the innermost heart of all,
To her, our prayer, our devotion, our love."



"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
     Exodus 20:3