Listen to this post:
Memory is most commonly understood to be something like a computer hard drive. Experience is stored by the brain like a computer writes to a disk. When memory fails, it is a mechanical failure. Eventually the hard drive degrades to the point of unreliability.
This is, like most machine models, wrong. Memory is a place, an Otherworld, which we visit. Like Imagination, Faery, and Dreaming, it exists alongside the waking world—sometimes parallel, sometimes not.
A rule of good manners, perhaps good morals: those with options should not criticize those without them.
I love this video on shillelagh making by Eoin Reardon. Also, from another of his videos, I learned the wonderfully symmetrical rule about renewing the finish on a handle (and maybe a walking stick?): re-oil once a day for a week; once a week for a month; once a month for a year; then twice yearly.
Stove-mas continues! The interior work is done. Tomorrow they’ll finish the chimney outside. There’s a practical reason for the 45 in the stovepipe but I love the character it gives it.
Greg Cello:
Marriage has a way of exposing the parts of us that solitude allows us to hide, and fatherhood intensifies the exposure. The home becomes the place where a man discovers whether he is capable of giving himself without first calculating what will be returned to him; it becomes, at its best, the place where God steadily removes the illusion that a meaningful life can be built upon self-protection.
Merry Stove-mas! Woodstove is being installed today. As much as I believe in DIY, the risk of burning the house down convinced me to let the experts handle it.
Hey, ancestors, I want to talk to you about mom. You all know she’s in assisted living and on hospice care now. She knows the end is in sight, though we can’t judge the distance. I think she felt that nearness yesterday after a visit with one of the hospice folks. I called her last night. She’s afraid she’ll die and go to Hell.
We know that fear is groundless, but she very much does not.
