Happiness
by Mary Oliver

Text of this poem unavailable; listen to the audio on GarrisonKeillor.com
 

“Happiness” by Mary Oliver from New and Selected Poems. Beacon Press © 1992. Used by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency. (buy now)

It's the birthday of French novelist Gustave Flaubert, (books by this author) born in Rouen, France (1821). Madame Bovary (1857) is now considered Flaubert's great masterpiece, but in his lifetime he was best known for his second book, Salammbô (1862), a novel about pagan rituals and human sacrifice that became a huge best-seller when it was published, though it is rarely read today.

Today is the Feast Day of Our Lady of Guadalupe, because it was on this day in 1531 that the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared on the cloak of a Mexican peasant, a man who had been baptized and given the name Juan Diego. Only 10 years earlier, Hernán Cortés had conquered Mexico and brought Christianity there.

On December 9th, he was on his way to attend Mass when he heard strange music and birds chirping from a nearby hill, and someone calling his name. He followed the sounds, and saw a vision of a young woman, dressed like Aztec royalty and bathed in light. He recognized her as the Virgin Mary, and she spoke in his language, Nahuatl, telling him that she wanted a shrine in her honor built on that spot, and that he should meet with the bishop and tell him so. When Juan Diego asked her what her name was, she called herself "Coatlaxopeuh," or "She who crushes the serpent," which the Spanish translated as Guadalupe, so that she became Our Lady of Guadalupe.

So Juan Diego went to Bishop Zumárraga, who was skeptical. Diego went back to the hill, defeated, but the Lady told him to try again. So he returned again to the bishop, who still didn't believe him and told him he would need a sign. She asked him to climb up the hill and pick the roses there. Even though the hill was a barren spot, not growing much more than cactus, Juan Diego found it covered in the type of roses that grew in Spain, where Bishop Zumárraga was born. The Lady helped Juan Diego arrange the roses inside his cloak, or tilma. She told him not to open his tilma until he reached the bishop.

When he opened his tilma for Bishop Zumárraga, the roses fell out and an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe appeared on the fabric of his tilma. The bishop was so amazed that he got down on his knees and agreed to build the shrine, whose construction started days later. It became the Basilica of St. Mary.

Each year, more than 20 million pilgrims visit the Basilica of St. Mary in Mexico City.

It's the birthday of the jack-of-all-trades whom Samuel Taylor Coleridge called "the first literary character of Europe, and the most original-minded Man." That's the physician, inventor, poet, philosopher, and scientist Erasmus Darwin, (books by this author) born in Elston, England (1731).

His famous grandson, Charles Darwin, wrote about his grandfather: "As a physician, he was eminent in the noble art of alleviating human suffering. He was in advance of his time in urging sanitary arrangements and in inculcating temperance. He was opposed to any restraint of the insane, excepting as far as was absolutely necessary. …With his prophetic spirit, he anticipated many new and now admitted scientific truths, as well as some mechanical inventions. [...] He strongly insisted on humanity to the lower animals. He earnestly admired philanthropy, and abhorred slavery. But he was unorthodox; and as soon as the grave closed over him he was grossly and often calumniated."

Darwin was such a fine physician that he was invited to be the personal physician to King George III (an offer he refused), although he treated the poor for free; he wrote the best-seller Zoonomia, or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–1796), which contained some early speculation about evolution; he discovered that sugar and starches are byproducts of what he called "plant digestion"; he designed a steam-powered car, a horizontal windmill, and a copy machine; and he wrote poems.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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