“Can you believe it?! The sun is out!”
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.
I love idea of “moral odysseys” (taken from Ryan S. Olsen). I’ve written bits and pieces here and there, but it would be fun to sit down and sketch out my own moral odyssey thus far. In any case, there’s a great deal to be said about the willingness to have an odyssey of the moral life at all — and, frankly, about the joy there is in it. (See here and here, for example.)
I always assumed that if the American right were to embrace an authoritarian spouting Christian platitudes, that figure would labor to feign authenticity. He would teach himself to quote scripture by chapter and verse and provide all the right answers to questions about his relationship with God when asked. Evangelicals would be able to sniff out a phony, and would righteously despise him for his cynicism in trying to exploit their faith. So he’d need to present a convincing portrait of a follower of Jesus to earn their trust.
That assumption was naive.
The polish applied in adjectival designation inclines one to believe that a definition has been achieved, a conclusion won. A pile of qualities furnishes a synoptic view of the whole, and so begins the slippage from the conditional mood to the declarative. […]
Imagine now a state of affairs in which the confident, naive realism of the whole profiling agenda cements and democratizes itself in mainstream culture, where people become psychometric natives and, owing to a peculiar sort of Stockholm syndrome, learn to enjoy it—even invest themselves in assessments as an avenue of self-discovery and well-being. Imagine that, and you will have imagined the scene today…
It’s all in the ears
“Fear and vigilance are not the bedrock of healthy communities.”
Portland cityscape, post ice storm
He he. Locals…
In Maine
whether it rains or it snows,
or any time the wind blows,
there can be little doubt
the power will go out
