Theme Thursday: Fish

This is a mixed kettle of fish.

From Prayers from the Ark, by Carmen Bernos de Gasztold, trans. by Rumer Godden. (click to read)



This little book has been on my shelf since my mother died and it came into my possession. I hadn't looked at it until this post. The author of the poems was a Benedictine nun in France, but, according to Godden, the poems "were written long before she came to the Abbaye, in a scant hard time . . . of enemy occupation, hunger, cold, frustration. . . . The Abbaye has only endorsed what she knew a prayer must be—if it is to have any meaning; not something dreamy or wishful, not a cry to be used in emergency, not even a plea, and not necessarily comforting. A prayer is a giving out, an offereing, compounded of honest work and acceptance of the shape in which one has been created . . ."

Rumer Godden herself is an author I read and reread. Taken from her Web site:
"One of her favourite axioms came from an Indian proverb that says

everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person.

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Seaweb is a proponent of ocean conservation.
Its monthly e-mail publication, Ocean Update, is very worthwhile. I've learned quite a bit over the years I've been receiving it.

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The Vermont band Phish