After a month of brutal heat, we’re getting a beautiful couple of days.
Pull the water hose.
It stirs through the lavender:
I, too, am wakened.
Descending fully into this world
James Hillman, The Soul’s Code: The Platonic myth of growing down with which we began this chapter says the soul descends in four modes-via the body, the parents, place, and circumstances. These four ways can be instructions for completing the image you brought with you on arrival. First, your body: Growing down means going with the sag of gravity that accompanies aging. … Second, admitting yourself to be one among your people and a member of the family tree, including its twisted and rotten branches.
From a year ago today: “The men who live in my memory”
Fried green tomatoes!
We’ve reached that part of southern Indiana’s summer where literally every day’s forecast is humid with a chance of thunderstorms.
🚨 New Wendell Berry essay collection alert 🚨
Peasant cosmogony
Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: Seamus Heaney understood the landscape in which as a child in small-farm Derry he grew up as ‘sacramental, a system of signs that called automatically upon systems of thinking and feeling.’ Kevin Williams has remarked how the Catholicism of Heaney’s upbringing was part of an environment that was paradoxically not ‘specifically Christian’. Heaney wrote that ‘Much of the flora of the place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word religious in religare, to bind fast.
This wonderful story was alluded to in an Emerald episode on death: “The Story of Jumping Mouse” (pdf)
I’ve never seen evidence of good men in national politics. The best are only good in relation to the swine roaming DC hallways. Truly good men are only ever known personally and are invisible to every form of worldly power.