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Wanderings, Wonderings
There’s a certain liquid but frictioned struggle when I walk through the grass in the morning after it rains. My feet, less sure now, more prone to missteps and the cruelty of unbalancing, skim through the green sea of clover and vetch, leaving long strokes like ski tracks behind me. But I do not turn to look at these tracks as I walk, because I do not trust my own footfalls. This, then, is what aging is: a gradual mistrust of all the powers and agile techniques and reflexive movements that I once took for granted, like a good Catholic who, when he sees death’s cowled head bobbing up over…
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The Second Sunday Of Advent
“Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because he cannot be at home in it, because he is out of place in it, and yet he must be in it, his place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons, tortured, exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.” — Thomas Merton This is the…
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Bandito
I stood out in the back yard this morning just before dawn, looking up at the gourd birdhouses and listening to the gradual crescendo of birdsong as the eastern sky brightened by degrees. I thought back to yesterday, a singularly grueling day, wasting my finite hours in the company of people with whom I have nothing in common, hours in which I was forced to work with my alleged “supervisor,” a younger woman so vapid, so mean-spirited, so coarse, so comprehensively ugly that I am tempted to think I live and breathe under God’s curse. But such thoughts make me recoil with that familiar jerking reflex action. You’re not…
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Under Gaze
I sit in the cool shade of the tree I park under at work. I’m probably foolish, but it seems to me that the leaves are moving in deliberate patterns, that the tree is gesturing to me with its arms, that my presence is not unnoticed, nor is it unimportant. I think about taking a nap, but a mockingbird wants to talk. I sit with my chin in my palm and listen to my own self. This is the biggest responsibility I’ve ever taken on, the biggest risk, this looming thing. Think I can do it? Guess I have to try. Are You going to help me any? Reckon You…
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Perchance, Perchance
My questions never end, you know. And sometimes I am unprepared to even ask them, to form them into sensible words. I awaken sometimes and am so sure, so very sure, that someone...someone was talking with me just before I opened my eyes. I kick back to the surface of Here and when I lift my conscious face out of Wherever I Was, I am disoriented and off-balance, as if someone pulled a crutch from beneath my arm or a chair from under me. Perhaps my Father has sealed the answers to my questions in a scroll, in a book, and perhaps I am the only one worthy to break…
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A Wonderful Plan
This morning I read a post by Dr. Bruce Charlton, a post examining the idea of finding the spiritual — the significant — in everyday life. Dr. Charlton uses Rudolf Steiner as a platform from which to dive into this topic. I had never heard of Steiner before reading of him in the past on Dr. Charlton’s blog, and I will confess that my attempts to read Steiner have not panned out well. I lack the intellectual muscle-tone to heft this sort of weighty writing (I often have to read some of Dr. Charlton’s essays several times before I can grasp the points he is making). But the central idea…