Happy Birthday month (we think)!

What if climate change is a hoax? Well, even granting the hypothetical, it’s entirely possible that the list of things we should be doing wouldn’t change much.

Meanwhile…

    ~Wendell Berry~

Yup.

I love Chesterton’s line, “For we have grown old and our father is younger than we are.” But I didn’t know that Augustine said it first.

This really makes me want my own VHS shrine in our house

A message and a link from my friend Luke: “A four hour and forty minute treatise by the three greatest philosophers to walk the planet.”

Hear! Hear!

The magic of the revolving door.

Not settling for moral outrage but instead holding out for moral compass.

It’s not about reaching people but asking yourself “Can you be reached? Can you receive people?”

“Sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness.” (From Galway Kinnell’s arresting poem)

And there’s so much more from this conversation with Greg Boyle from No Small Endeavor, which was the best thing I have listened to in as long as I can remember.

And a thousand total perfect strangers stand and they won’t stop clapping. And all Mario can do is hold his face in his hands, overwhelmed that this room full of strangers had returned him to himself. And they were reached by him, which returned them to themselves. Which is the way it’s supposed to work.

Scenes from Gardiner, ME

My daily life always feels like a riddle that I haven’t cracked. … The simple fact is that I don’t have to go anywhere at all in order to feel that nothing makes sense, that nothing is as I expected it to be. I am confronted by so much novelty just in being alive that I am dependent on routine to nail any of it in place, and then those routines can stand endless tinkering, to make room for me to learn more and more, so that the world won’t seem so incomprehensible—that old illusion. Of course, learning more just illuminates further the infinity that you don’t know.

What a fantastic essay from Phil Christman. So much more here than the title implies, even if the conclusion is clear from the start.

“Here I am, having an epiphany in the middle of my silly quotidian life… I am realizing something obvious—that the quality of attention we bring to things is more important than the freshness of the things we bring attention to.”