Cynthia Ford on ☕️ Coffee & Covid 2025 🦠

[Cynthia Ford]

There is a channel on youtube, the Grief Channel, which doesn't acknowledge what we know, but which offers mirroring and methods for coping with grief. https://www.youtube.com/@griefchannel Terrible suffering is growing as fast as conformity to spineless sadism, which Jordan Peterson says porn users are being conditioned slowly into, but if we believe, in an ecumenical sense, that there is divine purpose in the universe, we have it in us to align with that purpose. Not to repress our shock and grief and rage, but to feel it in the context of being aligned with the sacred. This is a poem by the Nobel winning poet, Seamus Heaney, Catholic, who during his dying sent the first last words by text in Latin:do not be afraid.

It doesn't feel like it, but we have it in us to fight this. I am sorry for your loss and pain.

A Kite for Michael and Christopher (English)

All through that Sunday afternoon

a kite flew above Sunday,

a tightened drumhead, an armful of blown chaff.

I'd seen it grey and slippy in the making,

I'd tapped it when it dried out white and stiff,

I'd tied the bows of newspaper

along its six-foot tail.

But now it was far up like a small black lark

and now it dragged as if the bellied string

were a wet rope hauled upon

to lift a shoal.

My friend says that the human soul

is about the weight of a snipe,

yet the soul at anchor there,

the string that sags and ascends,

weigh like a furrow assumed into the heavens.

Before the kite plunges down into the wood

and this line goes useless

take in your two hands, boys, and feel

the strumming, rooted, long-tailed pull of grief.

You were born fit for it.

Stand in here in front of me

and take the strain.

(I've screwed up the lineation, probably, sorry)

https://www.babelmatrix.org/works/en/Heaney%2C_Seamus-1939/A_Kite_for_Michael_and_Christopher/hu