Doesn’t this look like a great time? Eating fresh cherries while working on your tan at the beach…
Always remember to wear sunscreen!
One More Day
There’s only one more day until I get a four-day weekend because of the Fourth of July holiday. I need some time to relax, not have anything I have to do, and enjoy my time with Isabella. Other than Saturday when we might have some rain showers, we’re supposed to have nice weather. Maybe I’ll decide to get out and about in nature, but that will depend on how lazy I decide I want to be. More than likely, I’ll spend the time reading, and Isabella will spend her time sleeping. It’s become our pattern. It’s always been Isabella’s routine, but she’s a cat. They tend to sleep 12-16 hours a day. What a life!
With just one workday left this week, I am hoping that it will be a fairly quiet one today (✊on🪵). I have a document to finish preparing for an upcoming exhibit, and that’s about it. The research is mostly done, and all I have to do is put it all together in another document. But, when I get back to work on Monday, I’ll have to hit the ground running. It’s going to be a busy day. I have one meeting after another starting at 10 am and ending with a work dinner that evening.
Have a wonderful day!
Love Returned
Love Returned
By Bayard Taylor
He was a boy when first we met;
His eyes were mixed of dew and fire,
And on his candid brow was set
The sweetness of a chaste desire:
But in his veins the pulses beat
Of passion, waiting for its wing,
As ardent veins of summer heat
Throb through the innocence of spring.
As manhood came, his stature grew,
And fiercer burned his restless eyes,
Until I trembled, as he drew
From wedded hearts their young disguise.
Like wind-fed flame his ardor rose,
And brought, like flame, a stormy rain:
In tumult, sweeter than repose,
He tossed the souls of joy and pain.
So many years of absence change!
I knew him not when he returned:
His step was slow, his brow was strange,
His quiet eye no longer burned.
When at my heart I heard his knock,
No voice within his right confessed:
I could not venture to unlock
Its chambers to an alien guest.
Then, at the threshold, spent and worn
With fruitless travel, down he lay:
And I beheld the gleams of morn
On his reviving beauty play.
I knelt, and kissed his holy lips,
I washed his feet with pious care;
And from my life the long eclipse
Drew off; and left his sunshine there.
He burns no more with youthful fire;
He melts no more in foolish tears;
Serene and sweet, his eyes inspire
The steady faith of balanced years.
His folded wings no longer thrill,
But in some peaceful flight of prayer:
He nestles in my heart so still,
I scarcely feel his presence there.
O Love, that stern probation o’er,
Thy calmer blessing is secure!
Thy beauteous feet shall stray no more,
Thy peace and patience shall endure!
The lightest wind deflowers the rose,
The rainbow with the sun departs,
But thou art centred in repose,
And rooted in my heart of hearts!
Bayard Taylor (1825-1878) was an American poet, novelist, travel writer, literary critic, diplomat, lecturer, and translator. He was a frustrated poet who, even though he published twenty volumes of poetry, resented the mass appeal of his travel writings, because his desire was to be known as a poet. Even his travel writings have been relegated to the dustbin of literary history, and he is known today solely for his translation of both volumes of Goethe’s Faust.
Bayard was born on the January 11, 1825, in the small town of Kennett Square, Pennsylvania into a Quaker family. His parents were reasonably well-off farmers and could afford to give their son a decent education at academies in West Chester and Unionville. Although he entered the printing business as an apprentice, he was a keen writer of poetry and took great inspiration from the influential Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Encouraged by Griswold he published his first volume of poems at the age of 19 and called it Ximena, or the Battle of the Sierra Morena and other Poems. It sold badly but was noticed by the editor of the New York Tribune.
He worked as a journalist on the New York Tribune and other publications and this profession turned out to be his gateway to extensive worldwide travel when sent on assignments abroad. He even turned his hand to lyric writing for famous singers and completed a period of diplomatic service in St Petersburg, Russia.
He was lucky that his first commission was a European trip covering Germany, Italy, France, and England. He spent two years happily travelling at a slow pace, sending reports back to the Tribune. He was also engaged by other publications such as The Saturday Evening Post and The United States Gazette. On his return to the States, he was encouraged to publish his first travel book, based on his recent adventures. Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff was published in New York in two separate volumes in 1846. Further assignments followed but this time within the United States and Mexico. Taylor was now comfortably established in both journalism and as an author. He also had some success with a set of lyrics written for a visiting Swedish singer called Jenny Lind which were sung at concerts around the country. Within a few years he was off again on his travels, this time to Egypt and other countries in the Middle East.
In 1853, Taylor started from England and sailed to India, China, and then Japan. He was back in the States at the end of 1853 and then began a successful lecture tour. Two more years passed before the next overseas trip and this time he chose the countries of Northern Europe such as Sweden. Here he was inspired to write a long poem in narrative form called Lars.
Incredibly he found the time to serve as a diplomat and was appointed chargé d’affaires at the United States embassy in St Petersburg in 1863, accompanied by his second wife Maria. The following year they were back home at Kennett Square and Taylor wrote four novels with limited success. Poetry was his forte.
Taylor confided to Walt Whitman that he found in his own nature “a physical attraction and tender and noble love of man for man.” Taylor’s novel Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania (1870), which depicted men holding hands and kissing, is considered the first American gay novel by modern scholars. It presented a special attachment between two men and discussed the nature and significance of such a relationship, romantic but not sexual. Critics are divided in interpreting Taylor’s novel as a political argument for gay relationships or an idealization of male spirituality. This novel is said to be based on the romantic relationship between poets Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake. In Keith Stern’s Queers in History, it is revealed that the love of Taylor’s life was George Henry Boker, although both men married women. The American banker, diplomat, and poet George Boker wrote to Taylor in 1856 that he had “never loved anything human as I love you. It is a joy and a pride to my heart to know that this feeling is returned.”
His travelling days were not finished, and he was appointed to another diplomatic post, this time in Berlin. Unfortunately, he died only a few months after arriving in the German capital. Bayard Taylor died in Berlin on the December 19, 1878, at aged 53.
Migraine Monday
I woke up with a bad migraine, so this is going to be a short post, since I’m going back to bed.
Hiding
“Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” says the Lord; “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says the Lord.
—Jeremiah 23:24
There are many LGBTQ+ people who never come out of the closet for any number of reasons. Often that reason is religious. LGBTQ+ Christians often are made to feel great shame over their sexuality, and they fear losing their family, friends, and sometimes even their jobs. Others who live countries where being LGBTQ+ is a crime remain in the closet because they fear for their lives because the punishment for being LGBTQ+ is either imprisonment or death. There are other reasons as well, most arguments against the LGBTQ+ community is or originally was based on religious beliefs. It is so sad that we live in a world that does not fully accept all people regardless of their sexuality, race, gender, religion, ancestry, etc. For others, they do not even come out to themselves let alone others. Jeremiah 23:24 that God proclaims, “Can anyone hide himself in secret places, So I shall not see him?” In other words, we do not have to come out to God, who is omnipotent, omniscient omnipresent, and omnibenevolent.
I have always believed that God created me as gay. Many people argue that it is a choice, I do not believe that it is. We are born this way. We are created by God, who does not make mistakes. Jeremiah 29:11-12 says, “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.” If I ever got a tattoo of a Bible verse, this would be it. It is my core philosophy that God has a plan for me, and I pray that He will guide me on the path to fulfill his plan. When God created us, our sexuality was part of that creation, and we should be proud to be part of God’s plan. Whether someone comes out or not, God created us in a way for a purpose and we should not hide form ourselves because we cannot hide from God. Proverbs 16:3 says, “Commit your works to the Lord, and your thoughts will be established.”
God knows that many struggle with their sexuality. We may recognize an attraction to men early in our lives. We may find we are attracted to both men and women. We may realize that we are born with the wrong gender. We may not even know what these feelings means, but God does. Whether we feel supported or not by the outside world, what we can be sure of is that we are accepted by God for how he created us. God will give us the strength we need to carry out His plan for us. Philippians 4:13 says, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” The closet can be a lonely place, and coming out can help end that loneliness, but we are never truly alone. God is omnipotent and all-powerful. God is omniscient and all-knowing. God is omnipresent and is always with us. God is omnibenevolent and will always love us. He is the personification of goodness, so we should not fear coming out to God because he already knows and already loves us.
In the “Parable of the Talents,” (Matthew 25:14–30), Jesus tells of a master who was leaving his house to travel, and, before leaving, entrusted his property to his servants. According to the abilities of each man, one servant received five talents, the second had received two, and the third received only one. The property entrusted to the three servants was worth eight talents. Upon returning home, after a long absence, the master asks his three servants for an account of the talents he entrusted to them. The first and the second servants explain that they each put their talents to work and have doubled the value of the property with which they were entrusted. The third servant, however, had merely hidden his talent, burying it in the ground. The third servant is punished and banished from the master. Thought his story is about a sum of money, there is a double meaning here. The use of the word “talent” to mean “gift or skill” in English and other languages originated from an interpretation of this parable sometime late in the 13th century. God gives us many talents, one of those is that He created all of being, including our sexuality.
Whether you remain in the closet only long enough to realize that you are in the closet, or you never emerge from the closet, you are still the person God created and the person God wants you to be. We have to be ourselves. We literally can’t be anyone else. If we hide who we are, we are hiding a gift given by God. It may not be safe for you to come out, but know that God sees you, He knows you, and He loves you. So, the least you can do is know yourself and love yourself. The Bible tells us to embrace Jesus and His sacrifice and live our lives based on that model. Part of being a healthy individual is figuring out who God wants us to be and learning to grow into and love that person. Paul tells us in Romans 12:2, “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.” First John 4:19 tells us, “We love Him because He first loved us.” I will end with this verse from Ephesians 2:10, “For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.”
A note on the context of Jeremiah 23:24:
Jeremiah 23:24 is a short passage from a series of prophesies in which the Jeremiah is supposedly in conflict with other prophets in his society. Jeremiah, one of the major prophets in the Bible, lived during the late 7th and early 6th centuries BC. He prophesied that Jerusalem would be handed over to the Babylonian army, which it did in 587 BC. Biblical scholars have argued that this verse and the one before it first had an independent existence before it became part of the collection of prophesies in Jeremiah 23:9-40. I usually do not take verses out of context, but this is one time that I will, especially since some scholars believe that it was part of an independent prophesy. As a stand-alone verse, Jeremiah proclaims that his God is not just a localized god like many of the gods of the polytheistic people around Judah, but an omnipresent God from whom no person can hide. When read as part of Jeremiah 23:9-40, it should be regarded as a passionate argument against a view held by some prophets that God’s nearness guarantees peace and security.
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