Photo from a friend in Hallowell. That’s the highest level in 25 years. The flood standard for the Kennebec River is 35,000 cubic feet per second. Today in Sidney, my hometown 15 minutes north of here, the flow was 144,000 cubic feet per second.

“We seem only happy enough to be partners in the abolition of the body.” — This is one of the scariest things I have ever read. And combined with this, I feel unequivocally like this.

Mary Oliver:

The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-strung heart.

The “comforts” of home.

Rangifer Canis familiaris

Christian Wiman:

I want to write a book true to the storm of forms and needs, the intuitions and impossibilities, that I feel myself to be. That I feel life to be.

!!!!!!!

Group polarization (/every public conversation) in 15 seconds.

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.

Lights are up, our single ornament and improvised tree topper placed with précision. But I’ll always be partial to the Charlie Brown tree.