I’ve been in the ER with mom since 7am today. Likely a bad episode of vertigo but they’re doing tests to make sure it’s nothing more. At one point, apropos of nothing, a voice I hadn’t heard before suddenly said “the kingdom of heaven is like unto a treasure hidden in a field.” It became quickly obvious that it was a woman reading to her husband. But the unexpectedness and the setting made it feel like a moment of grace in a tiring day.
Kenneth S. Cohen, The Way of Qigong:
The Chinese are fond of repeating, “To relax, you must be tranquil.” And we need to regard relaxation as a process of surrendering to a deeper wisdom, rather than acquiring, through effort, a new ability. Developing large muscles requires effort; cultivating relaxation requires letting go.
“It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown.”
Grapes!
My friend and neighbor has a new book out today: Orthodox Saints of Wales
Monarch butterfly in the garden this evening. Also, I was able to get relatively close to a red shouldered hawk during my walk in the cemetery—but not close enough for good pictures.
In a few years, when fully automated, unfailingly polite AI customer service is installed, we’ll miss the Soup Nazis of the world.
Future Jeremy: if you ever get the “oh my, my lord” earworm again, this is its source. “Shooby” by Nicole C. Mullen
Syncretism all the way down
Some of us children of empire are rightly worried about further damage to colonized cultures. We try, therefore, to build walls around these cultures and call any breach of those walls “cultural appropriation.” The fear of cultural appropriation, though, is itself a product of empire. Such a fear attempts to freeze those cultures at a moment in time, specifically the moment when the colonizers “discovered” those cultures. Only an imperial mind would make the mistake of ignoring a culture’s entire history, pretending that it had sprung into existence only when noticed by imperial eyes.