Archive for 2008

2008-01-14

Monday, January 14th, 2008

Outer-directed, I see that the world is coming apart.
Huge movements, inertia grinding, mismatched.
The news reports the beginnings and the denials of the end.
History is reforming itself slower than most can follow
   but the signs are there - the vast disassembly is begun.

Inner-directed, I stood up from watching
   the apocalyptic video,  "What a Way to Go", and walked 
      to the balcony to see how far the moon's phase had advanced.
And I found there, the gray twilight clouds and a soft rain
   and I found the breeze and the moisture like a lover.
I smiled my thanks to the Beloved for this and for all my blessings, 
   so many, so very many
      and I felt peace and happiness welling up in full measure.

Inner and outer - the world ends - and a man might find peace.

I am here, transient.   The world, as I know it, is the same.
   I don't know my future or the world's
      what every it will be, it will be - but love is now.

If we live or die, if it lives or dies, so be it.
   Do as you will, Beloved.
      For this moment,  I can feel your rain and treasure my blessings.

                                      gallagher
                                      14Jan07
                                      - Rainy Christchurch

— Copyright 1965-2008 by Dennis Gallagher —

2008-02-15 – Genesis – First Light

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I originally purchased the samadhimuse.com domain name nearly a year ago but I had to wait until I had time to sit down and work my way through how to write a WordPress plug-in. Luckily, I’ve spent most of my professional years in the IT industry so I had the background to be able to do this.

With approximately a thousand poems already entered into computer format, I didn’t want to retype them all in again. The purpose of the plug-in was, then, to convert these many poems from the ASCII format they were in into one which could be dropped directly into WordPress posts and have them cross-referenced and dated appropriately and automatically.

books.jpgEssentially, as of today this plug-in is functional and I’ve used it to transferred the first 752 poems onto the site. These poems span the period from 1968 to 1989 but do not, by any means, represent all my work from that period.

Many more poems from these years and others await transfer. And, in addition to all those which have been previously copied into computer files, there are many more yet which still exist only on paper and which I need to type in. This project will, as you can imagine, be an undertaking which will span years.

2008-02-17 – connecting categories

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Over the last two days, I’ve been connecting up categories for the initial 752 poems. The date and people categories were mostly created and linked correctly by the plug-in when it dropped the poems in but the places categories all needed to be tweaked by hand.scribe-computerframe.gif

I’ve also found out (bummer) that while the initial vertical layout within poems of blocks of text and intervening blanks lines looked fine after the plug-in installed the poems, it doesn’t survive the first edit session.

However, if I readjust the vertical layout during the first edit session, then it seems to remains stable thereafter through subsequent edits.

I’ve also typed in one or two poems in addition to the 752 either because I liked them and they were at hand or because they were over on the samadhisoft.com site and I wanted them to live here on samadhimuse.com.

Once all the categories are correct for the initial block of 752, I will begin to transfer more poems onto the site.