>>>>Jane Through The Seasons

Having tried and failed in the past, owing mostly to poor self-discipline, I keep a foot with those who say it is not easy to learn a new language on your own. But having also persisted through to make a  considerable progress in picking up a foreign language, my other foot is with those who say it is not impossible to learn a language on your own because there are several fun ways to do so these days. For it is because of these fun avenues that I have been able to take my French lessons seriously for over a year now. Through language learning apps like Duolingo, YouTube videos like Comme Une Française TV and Learn French with Alexa; watching French movies and listening to French music as well as following the exercises in a used copy of French: A Self-Teaching Guide, I have been making good progress in understanding how to speak, write and read in French. And now I want to try another method to help advance my literacy: I will be translating here on the blog some poems by the sur

One of my favorite things to do these days is to watch water boil: watch steam curl and wind out of hot water. I like to listen to the drum-like roar of fired-up water. I also like coming up with new blends of tea to entertain my moods. Waiting as my tea steeps, trying the first cup then comparing it to the second cup and testing my awareness through the third cup. Also, these days, I am not very collected. A series of significant happenings have left me somewhat disoriented. It makes it quite challenging to string sentences together, so I prefer to avoid writing paragraphs. But this blog is one of the things I love to do for fun and it doesn't feel good to put it off for long so I have been thinking that I ought to start making tea here too.  In fact, I recently went to a reading on gastrodiplomacy ––because I didn't know what it was and the event was free, and I had just altered an old skirt into a fun new dress and wanted to wear it somewhere––and it convinced me tha

"Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art––as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature" (Rainer Maria Rilke. Letters to a Young Poet . Trans. Stephen Mitchell. NY: Modern Library , 2001, p. 108). In Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch ––which I am yet to read––Henry Miller writes “whoever uses the spirit that is in him creatively is an artist. To make living itself an art, that is the goal.” Miller’s words are somewhat similar to the last advice, quoted above, in the last letter Rilke offers Kappus, in Letters to a Young Poe t. To bring the  Between the Pages of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet  series to a close, I

Oi Dear Reader, I hope things are well with you. Things are well with me, too, and I've something to share: In The Remembered Arts dazzling new fall issue, aptly titled, "Beauty in the Extreme," you'll find also a series of my new abstract images entitled Kpeti (a Krobo word––Mother's tongue––meaning middle). I hope you'll find the issue as well as my images interesting. Thanks. ^_^ --- JAO

I came across something beautiful and because good things ought to be shared, here you go: The light-force which emanates from the star-constituted through the marriage of contemplation with activity, and which is the antithesis of the thesis that “there is nothing new under the sun” is hope . It proclaims to the world: “What has been is that which prepares what will be, and what has been done is that which prepares what will be done; there is only that which is new under the sun. Each day is a unique event and revelation which will never be repeated.” Hope is not something subjective due to an optimistic or sanguine temperament, or to a desire for compensation in the sense of modern Freudian and Adlerian psychology. It is a light-force which radiates objectively and which directs creative evolution towards the world’s future. It is the celestial and spiritual counterpart of the terrestrial and natural instinct of biological reproduction which, with mutation, produces natural sel