Opening my eyes and crouching with one knee in the damp earth, I place the flat of my palm on the ground, feeling the tangled web of corded roots. It’s just a fraction of what’s down there. The merest glimpse of the forest’s dynamic internal system. Like the few visible veins on the back of your hand. “A tree is a passage between earth and sky,” as Richard Powers has written. But much of it is well hidden. Hard to believe that, even now, moisture and nutrients from the soil are silently traveling along not so very far beneath my fingers, inching up toward the foliage high above. Making their own climb through the forest as we make ours. That the leaves and needles are cooking them up, concocting the sugars and sap they need to survive. That much of the oxygen we’re breathing is simply a by-product—an airy sizzle in the pan.
This is what you call an awsome gift from a sibling who knows you well.
Kitchen Chalk Talk • This is Ursula Le Guin’s translation. The last two lines in this chapter read, “No competition,/so no blame.” Red Pine translates those lines “and because they don’t compete/they aren’t maligned.” I think Pines’s translation makes more sense, but Le Guin’s is certainly more abrupt and ethos-challenging.
And so [Weil’s] vision of God is different, her imagination of God is different, from how a lot of contemporary western people think about an all-powerful, all-knowing God. Weil thinks about God as having done exactly what she’s asking us to do, which is to make room for the other to exist in a way that requires us to give up power.
Reason versus The Bulwark has to be the most hollow, vacuous debate I have ever listened to.
Forgiving: A glimpse of a farther world.
It helps me to see that forgiveness isn’t so much a transactional repair of an old world. Rather, it is a glimpse of a more profoundly coherent new one. It is as we eventually come to feel ourselves at home in this new world that we experience the forgiveness given and received.
And this “new world“ (i.e., “reality”) is a world with an “inexhaustive range of future possibilities.”
This was good, and fits perfectly with James Lawson and Joseph Pieper. In my own brief obsession with Polanyi, Esther Meek was a delight. (See this “poem, prose, prose”.)
Patchwork Quilt • Flying into Bozeman, Montana. A throwback to June 2023, when this little guy was still breathing amniotic fluid and starting to curl his toes. (Clifford Besher’s “folds in the earth” reminded me of this.)
Diaper change
