Nick Cave says something I’ve often heard from Christians:

Freedom finds itself in captivity. Disorder, randomness, chaos and anarchy are where the imagination goes to die, or so I’ve found.

So it is with matters of faith and the freeness of belief. I experience a certain vague ‘spiritualness’ within the world’s chaos, an approximate understanding that God is implicit in some latent, metaphysical way, yet it is only really in church - that profoundly fallible human institution - that I become truly spiritually liberated. I am swept up in a poetic story that is both true and imaginative and fully participatory, where my spiritual imagination can be both contained and free. The church may appear to some as small, even stifling, its congregation herdlike, yet within its architecture, music, litanies, and stories, I find a place of immense spiritual recognition and liberation.

Cave appears to be talking about art–but I’ve heard this deployed in other contexts as well. My question, whenever I hear this is always: Do you mean something like the creative freedom that can be found, say, within the sonnet form? Or do you mean that true freedom can only be found within the rule of the Church? The former I can get with. The latter sounds quite Orwellian to those of us who aren’t Christians. Again, I believe I understand what is meant by most of the people who say this sort of thing. The phrasing, though, makes some of us twitchy.

I am a Jack-o-lantern traditionalist: no stencils or fancy carving tools, just a pencil and a small knife. Here’s this year’s pumpkin.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that a neighborhood cat has taken up residence in our backyard. Today I built him a house out of (mostly) scrap. We put a brooder heater in there to keep him warmish over winter.

Cool story of how Paul Sellers was commissioned in 2008 to make credenzas for the White House cabinet room with only a month lead time. As you’d expect from him, the result was beautiful.

Repaired and refinished a cedar chest I picked up over the summer.

Before:

After:

Every year since Darcy was two, we’ve gone to Huber Orchard to get our pumpkin for carving. It’s one of our favorite traditions.

Really good TED talk on humanity’s relationship with fire and how (as an animist might say) we have fallen out of right relationship with it. Pyne also has written a related book that looks interesting.

The Excesses of God
Robinson Jeffers

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

Wendell Berry, Another Day: Sabbath Poems, 2013-2023