Hello Again

The more I try to learn about html, the worse I become at it. 

Stubborn broad that I am, I insisted on learning website-building myself.  So, armed with no less than three html DIY books from the library, I succeeded in utterly collapsing my previous blog (and somehow violating my Google terms of service so that they suspended my account).

So here I am again, after a day of driving myself nuts trying to recover my old account.  Ah, but it's all right.  Blogger has a ton of helpful tools for hopeless cases like me who can't but mess up my blog design and posts.  That stubborn part of me, however, is still itching to learn how to do all this myself, to break free of templates and a finite selection of colors and fonts and design options.  One day, I'll wow you all with my website-building skillz.  =)  For now, this will do.  (And it really is all right--I have my old posts saved.)

The upside is that I get to quote another lovely poetic line as the title of my blog.  This one, "the soul in paraphrase," is from the gorgeous-minded George Herbert, a seventeenth-century Welsh poet.  I remember reading Herbert as an undergrad and feeling simply astounded by the precision of his images.  I came across "Prayer" again a couple of years ago and found myself reading it over again and again.  I've revisited it many times since.  How lovely to think of prayer as "something understood."  I was getting around to just that point in my old blog--about how my conception of prayer has evolved, and is in fact still evolving.

Most of my public writing has really been just this, anyway:  a soul in paraphrase.  Dear Mr. Herbert had already said it so perfectly, and if I could just borrow it...well, then perhaps we can agree in the course of our writing and reading that something has been understood between us.

Here's the entire poem:

"Prayer"

Prayer, the Church's banquet, Angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;
Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days'-world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices, something understood.