Related to my last post:
Truth is the asymptotic limit of sensitive attempts to be responsible to our actual experience of the world… ‘sensitive attempts to be responsible’ means truth is the result of attention. (As opposed to inspection.) Of looking informed by love. Of really looking.
(Jan Zwicky, in Wisdom and Metaphor, quoted by Ian McGilchrist)
In the current issue of Plough Ben Quash explains an idea he calls mystical empiricism:
The empiricism bit is looking at the world and its objects, its creatures, with intense attention. Not idealizing them but looking at them as they are. And it’s mystical because precisely in that close attention to the very particularities of things, you find yourself suddenly feeling yourself to be in touch with ultimacy, with grace, with divine self-communication. These creatures are conduits of God’s presence and purpose, precisely in their unique particularities. Observation of them becomes a sort of mystical form of encounter with the divine.
That’s a term I’d been groping for.
I propose that those of us opposed to Trump’s plan to take Greenland by force quietly protest by eating more Danishes. In addition to being an excuse to consume pastry, a movement might force the president’s supporters to start referring to them as “freedom pastries,” which I would count as a win.
My father once took a shovel to a groundhog. He said afterward that it had charged my baby sister, but that was bullshit: he was just sick of the varmints digging up his garden.
The groundhog, not being more heavily armed, did not get up again.
“There is nothing so dumb as a tree in full leaf.” (Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist)
Enjoy it while it lasts: I’ll be carving the leaves tomorrow.
To do this week:
One of these things is not like the other. One of these things does not belong.
I can still hand-code HTML and CSS but hang me if I will ever be able to remember markdown syntax beyond boldface and italics. Hence, if you saw it, my short-lived ordered-list testing post in which I hit “post” instead of simply closing it. Apparently it’s going be that kind of day (#2).
This morning I saw in a blog post something I thought I would like to have, and so: took out writing paper and pen, wrote a note explaining what I wanted, enclosed a check, addressed and stamped the envelope, and clipped it to the mailbox. Because the group selling the calendars as a fundraiser do not engage in what used to be called “e-commerce.” I appreciate the implicit suggestion that if you cannot figure out how to request a calendar via physical-world channels, you are not likely one of their people anyhow.
Last month I saw a Baltimore Oriole at my window feeder, probably the same one twice, as they only visit in winter and then rarely. This morning another one came by that I thought might be a female but was instead a bird in its first winter: orange like nothing else around here, but dully so. I am going to put some raisins on the ledge and see if I can make a regular.