Blue flag iris in our wildlife pond says good morning.

So I’m a religion nerd from way back and one of my very favorite topics is the differences between Christian denominations. (It’s a neat party trick. In my mind. Others may disagree…) The Useful Charts channel has been doing an excellent series on the family tree of Christian denominations. The most recent episode is about the churches coming out of the Second Great Awakening, which are some of the most fascinating groups precisely because they were willing to throw traditional theology out the window and start from scratch. Next time he will take up the Holiness movement, the Third Great Awakening, and Pentecostalism—which is the tradition in which I grew up. So fun!

Parker Millsap’s new album is great. The title track is my favorite so far.

We’re really good at accidentally growing mushrooms

William Anderson, Green Man:

The image of the tree that speaks, prophesies or warns seems to express a recurrent need of the soul—something that we can all experience. When we stand beneath a copse of beeches roaring in a high wind, we seem to hear one of the voices of Nature only our innermost being can comprehend. It sends a message that indicates that nothing we claim for ourselves is ours, that the life force that sustains us is as beyond our power to control as the wind is beyond the power of the trees to resist its lashings, and that we are rooted only for a short time in history, far shorter than the lives of the beeches singing and chanting above us. When we surrender our hearts and minds to their sounds, we undergo a purification which is tinged with the feeling of sacrifice and of making holy everything we have been given - a feeling echoed by many of the tinest representations of the Green Man we will come to consider.

The Green Man is the guardian and revealer of mysteries. In his mask form he is linked to the universal significances of the mask which are those of a part in a drama to be taken up and dropped again and of the world of spirits and of what lies behind death. As the disgorger or devourer of vegetation he speaks of the mysteries of creation in time, of the hidden sources of inspiration, and of the dark nothingness out of which we come and to which we return. As the fruit of vegetation, he signifies the mystery of law and intelligence in natural forms and expresses our own instinctive desire to anthropomorphize everything that is beautiful, touching or powerful in the world about us. In all his forms he is the Poet who in revealing mysteries opens up even more wonderful and enticing mysteries beyond the words he speaks.

Megan Garber:

In the future, the writers warned, we will surrender ourselves to our entertainment. We will become so distracted and dazed by our fictions that we’ll lose our sense of what is real. We will make our escapes so comprehensive that we cannot free ourselves from them. The result will be a populace that forgets how to think, how to empathize with one another, even how to govern and be governed.

That future has already arrived. We live our lives, willingly or not, within the metaverse.

Rachel found the cleverest little frog taking a nap on our fence. I believe it is a gray treefrog.

Sugar snap pea pods are developing!

Dougald Hine suggests

an approach to tradition that deviates from the default moves of both progressive and conservative currents within modernity. Where they sought either to destroy or to preserve, we might recognize the possibility of composting the traditions that matter to us; tending to their decay in such a way as to contribute to the possibility of life going on.

Some things will be left behind in a future beyond the current madness of modernity. Some of those things will be missed and some will be abandoned gleefully. Some things will be carried forward, but not unchanged. Part of the work to be done is to engage in practices derived from what has come before in a way that makes sense in a new context.