conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide a description for a book titled Hallelujah Anyway about Blake, picture-poems, illuminated with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Poetry.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This is a book to delight the mind and the eye - the first collection of the poet the author's unique and remarkable "picture-poems." As a creative form, the the author picture-poem is descended from the "illuminated printing" of William Blake. Blake devised an etching process for his pages of hand-lettered poems; but the author works more freely with watercolor, casein, inks, and other media, as he blends word and image in intricate but always visually compelling patterns of shape, color, and meaning. The fusion of two arts in Hallelujah Anyway gives us an intensification and an enlargement of the poetic process - an extra dimension - not in the limited sense of an "illustrated" poem (the author does not write a poem and then simply draw a picture to go with it), but as a new kind of simultaneous creativity.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Hallelujah Anyway
  This is dedicated with much love and gratitude to the people who helped me so much this time: Father Jim Harbaugh, S.J., Father Tom Weston, S.J., Rabbi Margaret Holub, Tim Pfaff, Judith Rubin, Doug Foster, Jake Morrissey, Janine Reid, Neshama Franklin, the Reverend Veronica Goines; and to the people of St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, Marin City, California (Services at 11:00).
  Oh, is that all? Justice, mercy, and humility? That's nice. Right off the bat I can tell you that "walk humbly with thy God" is not going to happen anytime soon, for me or my closest friends. Arrogance  Us. My humility can kick your humility's butt. What Micah is talking about is grad school curriculum, while, spiritually speaking, I remain in junior high school, superior and cringing at the same time. And "to do justice" may be a trick, since we all think we do this anyway. We think that if our values aren't the correct ones, we would have other ones, which would then be the correct ones.
  Otherwise, these words are both plainsong and sublime. How can you not love mercy—kindness, compassion, forgiveness? It's like not loving dessert, or cheese. If nothing makes people happier than service, especially to the poor, why not tap into the model of the Buddha, Jesus, or Wavy Gravy, the knowledge that if you do loving things, you'll have loving feelings?
  At first glance, they seem inextricable. Trauma, which is stored differently in the brain than memory, seeps out of us as warnings of worse to come. Our self-centered fears whisper at us all day: our fear of exposure, of death, and that we will lose those we love most, that we will lose whatever advantage we hold, whatever meager gains we've made. We live in terror that our butts will show and people will run from us, screaming.
  Just to hear the words "mercy" or "merciful" can transform the whole day, because as the old saying goes, the soul rejoices in hearing what it already knows. Something lights up in me. We know mercy is always our salvation—as we age, as our grandchildren go down the same dark streets that called to their parents, as the ice caps melt. But I wish it was something else. I wish it was being able to figure things out, at which I am very good, or to assign blame, at which I am better, or to convince people of the rightness of my ideas. I wish it was a political savior who believes the same things I believe, who possesses the force of great moral strength that (of course) agrees with my own deepest values. But no, hope of renewal and restoration is found in the merciful fibrillating heart of the world.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide four more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Being alive here on earth has always been a mixed grill at best, lovely, hard, and confusing. Good and bad things happen to good and bad people. That's not much of a system: a better one would be a silverware drawer for joy, sorrows, doldrums, madness, ease. But no, Eden explodes and we enter a dangerous, terrifying world, the same place where goodness, love, and kind intelligence lift us so often. The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.
  This is a little depressing, that nearly every species has to be afraid in order to live. Of course it makes sense for a colony of wild rabbits to be afraid when the harrier hawk appears overhead; no surprise that you hear the concerned background music swell from the bushes. But I've seen toothy foxes up close on my hikes, and they bolt. They really don't seem interested in getting to know me. (Their loss.) They're afraid of an older woman with sore feet and hands, because life is scary.
  How—if we are to believe that there is meaning in our brief time here on earth, that mercy is the ground of our being, and love is sovereign—do we explain childhood cancer, earthquakes, addiction? Where is mercy in a beloved's suicide? In the Christian tradition, we say that Christ continues to be crucified, in tsunamis, sick children, political prisoners, and that we must respond.
  This is what I believe, so I show up and get water for people, real people, which is to say, annoying people. Mother Teresa cradling strangers at dawn is very romantic, but in life, there's also your thirsty bigoted father, your lying sister, the whole human race, living and dying and rising with Christ.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Provide the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And I suddenly saw and could feel in my adult heart that my father had viewed the fisherman as a harmless, hapless, jovial, ignorant redneck. He was not colluding with him, but understanding him. And I did, right then.
  The rooms were still and quiet, the therapist's office and my mother's bedroom. Sometimes at the lagoon, the water rushes out with furious velocity, but between high and low tide, it lingers, flat, before flowing out to join the blue-gray ocean. I felt a crabby compassion for my father, isolated in his ego, that jocular Kennedy persona, exiled from his family. And anyway, he was not the person who needed my forgiveness. Neither was the other man. God only knows—but maybe the man was saying he thought I looked like Buckwheat, which I kind of did, beautiful and innocent. The men were portals, practice, training wheels: we are always the ones who need to be absolved, taken back into our hearts. I forgave myself for the fisherman's words and behavior, for taking on his ugliness and making it something I believed to be true about myself. His words had gotten on me and in me, and then I had hoarded them, building evidence that I was right about being fundamentally wrong. I forgave myself for not having nice thick rhino skin. I shimmied him off me. I forgave myself for my father's contempt and fear of women, gently released him to himself, in the same way you gently lift a hitchhiking monarch off your shoulder in a butterfly pavilion.
  I curled up with Mom and Stevie. My mother had beautiful English skin, and long dark hair, but these aren't who she was, any more than my hair was who I was. We are the final inside nesting doll. A baby feels and smells like God. You can get information from any point on a baby's body, the toes, the soft spot, and this information is life, merciful energy, unruined radiance. Babies are waves, mosaic chips of the unified field. Is it possible, since skin is the largest organ of the body, that new babies don't know the inside from the outside when they first come out? That there is no difference? That they are Möbius strips? This is how we came; wow. Talk about whole.
  Images of tiny things, babies, yeast, and mustard seeds can guide us; things that grow are what change everything. Moments of compassion, giving, grief, and wonder shift our behavior, get inside us and change realms we might not have agreed to have changed. Each field is weeds and wheat, but mix the wheat with yeast, the most ordinary of elements, and it starts changing the flour. It becomes bread and so do we, bread to eat and to offer. The world keeps going on. You can have yet another cup of coffee and keep working on your plans. Or you can take the risk to be changed, surrounded, and indwelled by this strange yeasty mash called mercy, there for the asking at the frog pond, the River Jordan, the channel that flows between the lagoon and the sea.
  Thank you, Riverhead Books—Jake Morrissey, beloved editor and friend; and Geoff Kloske, Katie Freeman, Lydia Hirt, Anna Jardine, Kevin Murphy. Riverhead rocks.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: And I suddenly saw and could feel in my adult heart that my father had viewed the fisherman as a harmless, hapless, jovial, ignorant redneck. He was not colluding with him, but understanding him. And I did, right then.
  The rooms were still and quiet, the therapist's office and my mother's bedroom. Sometimes at the lagoon, the water rushes out with furious velocity, but between high and low tide, it lingers, flat, before flowing out to join the blue-gray ocean. I felt a crabby compassion for my father, isolated in his ego, that jocular Kennedy persona, exiled from his family. And anyway, he was not the person who needed my forgiveness. Neither was the other man. God only knows—but maybe the man was saying he thought I looked like Buckwheat, which I kind of did, beautiful and innocent. The men were portals, practice, training wheels: we are always the ones who need to be absolved, taken back into our hearts. I forgave myself for the fisherman's words and behavior, for taking on his ugliness and making it something I believed to be true about myself. His words had gotten on me and in me, and then I had hoarded them, building evidence that I was right about being fundamentally wrong. I forgave myself for not having nice thick rhino skin. I shimmied him off me. I forgave myself for my father's contempt and fear of women, gently released him to himself, in the same way you gently lift a hitchhiking monarch off your shoulder in a butterfly pavilion.
  I curled up with Mom and Stevie. My mother had beautiful English skin, and long dark hair, but these aren't who she was, any more than my hair was who I was. We are the final inside nesting doll. A baby feels and smells like God. You can get information from any point on a baby's body, the toes, the soft spot, and this information is life, merciful energy, unruined radiance. Babies are waves, mosaic chips of the unified field. Is it possible, since skin is the largest organ of the body, that new babies don't know the inside from the outside when they first come out? That there is no difference? That they are Möbius strips? This is how we came; wow. Talk about whole.
  Images of tiny things, babies, yeast, and mustard seeds can guide us; things that grow are what change everything. Moments of compassion, giving, grief, and wonder shift our behavior, get inside us and change realms we might not have agreed to have changed. Each field is weeds and wheat, but mix the wheat with yeast, the most ordinary of elements, and it starts changing the flour. It becomes bread and so do we, bread to eat and to offer. The world keeps going on. You can have yet another cup of coffee and keep working on your plans. Or you can take the risk to be changed, surrounded, and indwelled by this strange yeasty mash called mercy, there for the asking at the frog pond, the River Jordan, the channel that flows between the lagoon and the sea.
  Thank you, Riverhead Books—Jake Morrissey, beloved editor and friend; and Geoff Kloske, Katie Freeman, Lydia Hirt, Anna Jardine, Kevin Murphy.