Good Morning Kossacks and Welcome to Morning Open Thread (MOT)
We're known as the MOTley Crew and you can find us here every morning at 6:30 a.m. Eastern (and perhaps sometimes earlier!). Feel free to volunteer to take a day - permanently or just once in awhile. With the Auto Publish feature you can set it and forget it. Sometimes the diarist du jour shows up much later: that's the beauty of Open Thread...it carries on without you! Volunteer in the comment threads.
Click on the MOT - Morning Open Thread ♥ if you'd like us to show up in your stream.
John Keats
When I Have Fears
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
- John Keats
On this day, nine years ago, I made my first return home to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. With about 80% of the city flooded and the area under marshal law, the ride in was neither easy nor direct and my spirits sank as I took in the devastation surrounding me; a seed of hopelessness searched steadily and determinedly for a place to bury itself in my heart. Before me was a land of utter stillness, a consuming silence, and the stench of death. And in those first few hours of searching for understanding of what had happened, I came to truly understand Keats' fear.
But this diary is about faith: a confidence and trust in the substance of hope. So on to some music in celebration of a city that has the will to recreate itself and the courage to do so well knowing that it will one day cease to be.
Grab a cup of coffee and pull up a chair. What's on your mind this morning?