“I see many squirrels, and treats, and belly rubs in my… I mean your future.”

“Patient Trust,” a prayer from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.

We are quite naturally impatient in everything

to reach the end without delay.

We should like to skip the intermediate stages.

We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress

that it is made by passing through

some stages of instability – and that it may take a very long time.

And so, I think it is with you;

your ideas mature gradually – let them grow,

let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,

as though you could be today what time

(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)

will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be.

Give Our Lord the benefit of believing

that his hand is leading you,

and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself

in suspense and incomplete.

Looking out from Bunker Hill onto Damariscotta Lake

I recently stumbled on a quote/clip from Austin Kleon, one of those grand simplicities that wonderfully pulls more than its apparent weight:

YOU WILL NEED:

• CURIOSITY
• KINDNESS
• STAMINA
• A WILLINGNESS 
TO LOOK STUPID

Rockland Harbor

On passivity:

The average American child by eighteen has seen four thousand hours of commercials, yet very few televisions have been smashed by axes…

    ~Robert Bly (1990)~

“What? You guys sit like this.”

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.

“What do you mean this is not my spot?”

Fun to think of how much playful, generative space there is in Leah Libresco Sargeant’s phrase “Festivals of Particularity.”