Finished Reading: Repair by C. K. Williams 📚

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,

nothing that we'd ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for,

but something to which we've never adequately given credence,

which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,

that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

Consider this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer an addendum to my post about Psalm 11:

We may not and do not desire to act like offended critics or opportunists. Case by case and in each moment, as victors or vanquished, we desire to be those who are coresponsible for the shaping of history. The one who allows nothing that happens to deprive him of his coresponsibility for the course of history, knowing that it is God who placed it upon him, will find a fruitful relation to the events of history, beyond fruitless criticism and equally fruitless opportunism. Talk of going down heroically in the face of unavoidable defeat is basically quite nonheroic because it does not dare look into the future. The ultimately responsible question is not how I extricate myself heroically from a situation but [how] a coming generation is to go on living.

Stopped by Idaho Falls on the way to Salt Lake over the weekend. The downtown by Snake River is as pretty as ever

“The tree is really rooted in the sky.” – Simone Weil

Finished Reading: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy 📚

I need more fun novels like this in my life.

Oh Tetons, you big, beautiful rocks • Sighting on the road south to Salt Lake

New banner for the (s)newsletter. Planning to give Buttondown a try going forward

Keep the rain coming

Finished Reading (2023): The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney 📚

Ten perfectly and wonderfully thoughtful reflections on “the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability… its given, unforeseeable thereness.”

"To redress poetry... is to know and celebrate it not only as a matter of proffered argument and edifying content, but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul. And this is why I have tried to profess the pleasure and surprise of poetry, its rightness and thereness, the way it is at one moment unforseeable and at the next indispensable, the way it arrives at something unhindered and self-directing, sweeping ahead into its full potential."

🙂