Finished reading: Upstream by Mary Oliver 📚

“I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.”

I am sure I’ve said this before, but I have never once picked up Mary Oliver for even the quickest of reads and not felt that I’d been given some profound gift — articulated in and through a holy lightness, and often with quiet and wry humor. Nothing in nature is too small or too wild or too brute to be disclosed to her or by her in this way.

As Oliver puts it, toward the end of her essay “Swoon,” all of which has been spent observing the activities of a spider, there comes a moment when

the news culminates and, slowly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is music to be played with the lightest of fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
But a spider? Even that?
Even that.

Finished reading: Iron John by Robert Bly 📚

What a very, very weird book. And weirdly rich. Some thoughts and quotes here.

Currently Reading: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram 📚

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

Finished reading: The Character of Virtue by Stanley Hauerwas 📚

If I have any advice, it is simply this. Many generous people have made your life possible. Don’t be afraid of imitating them.

Currently Reading: The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie 📚

At its best, it is writing that one reads with one’s whole life, testing the work against one’s own life, and vice versa.

It is writing that invites the reader on a pilgrimage. … Certain books, certain writers, reach us at the center of ourselves, and we come to them in fear and trembling, in hope and expectation - reading so as to change, and perhaps to save, our lives.

Finished Reading (2023): Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura 📚

Simple and elegant, pointing clearly toward (and from) the profound.

We swim in rivers of culture that are “blackened and uninhabitable with utilitarian pragmatism and over-commodification.” But in that culture, we must “always be willing to present a bouquet of flowers” — even to those “who may not yet know that they desire beauty.”

Currently Reading: Aimless Love by Billy Collins 📚

I think this is my favorite piece of cover art for a book. Also one of the most fitting

📚 Felice Benuzzi:

To be perfectly honest, there were occasions when the thought of our impending adventure made me frightened. Sometimes, returning late to my barrack on a cold and rainy night, I thought what it would be like lying out in the dark, wet forest; dead tired, exhausted by hunger, drenched to the bone, in imminent danger of being attacked by wild beasts. That prospect I compared with the warm blankets in my bunk, the familiar oil-lamp and the good book I was now preparing to read.

At such moments it was the thought of the security offered by a regular even though an unpleasant life, the spirit which dooms the canary bird to its caged existence, a natural tendency to follow the line of least resistance, that predominated.

On the other hand, standing in the ranks at morning roll call and seeing Batian beckoning me with its shimmering glaciers, I sometimes felt like running away on the spot, to seek and to meet adventure halfway.

We poor mortals are made like this, a mixture of contrasts, shade and light, fears and exaltations.

📚 Felice Benuzzi:

Forced to endure the milieu we seemed almost afraid of losing our individuality. Sometimes one felt a childish urge to assert one’s personality in almost any manner, shouting nonsense, banging an empty tin, showing by every act that one was still able to do something other than to wait passively. I have seen normally calm people suddenly rise from their bunks and climb the roof poles of the barrack, barking like monkeys. I felt I understood them, and they had my full sympathy.

📚 Felice Benuzzi:

Time was no longer considered by the average prisoner as something of value to be exploited; time for them was an enemy, but for me this was no longer so.

I was already busy with a secret plan, a plan that was slowly taking definite shape.

A prisoner of the last world war wrote in his memoirs: “At the front one takes risks, but one does not suffer; in captivity one does not take risks but one suffers.”

In order to break the monotony of life one had only to start taking risks again, to try to get out of this Noah’s Ark, which was preserving us from the risks of war but isolating us from the world and its deluge of life. If there is no means of escaping to a neutral country or of living under a false name in occupied Somalia, then, I thought, at least I shall stage a break in this awful travesty of life.

I shall try to get out, climb Mount Kenya and return here. […]

I found it fascinating to elaborate, in the utmost secrecy, the first details of my scheme.

Life took on another rhythm, because it had a purpose.