“A thing is wisest when it is most fully itself, when it tastes most like itself, in keeping with its nature. It is “foolish” when it forgets to be what it is, when it no longer has its proper flavor, as when salt loses its strength, or when oil becomes rancid, or when wine turns to vinegar. Salt is one of those primary realities that can contribute to enhancing the quality of other things but that is itself hopeless once it goes bad: as in the case of water and fire, what can substitute for salt? What shall fire itself be kindled with? What can wash and quench thirst like water? If “wise salt” communicates a bit of the power and eternity of the sea, “foolish salt” has forgotten it’s origins, can no longer make man’s taste buds rejoice, can no longer heighten flavor. It can no longer be destined for man’s mouth but only for trampling by his feet.”
Love the quick profit, the annual raise, vacation with pay. Want more of everything ready-made. Be afraid to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head. Not even your future will be a mystery any more. Your mind will be punched in a card and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something they will call you. When they want you to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot understand. Praise ignorance, for what man has not encountered he has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.
Above all trust in the slow work of God We are quite naturally impatient in everything To reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages We are impatient of being On the ways to something Unknown and something new And yet, it is the law of all progress progress That it is made by passing through Some stages of instability And that it may take a very long time. And so, I think it is with you Your ideas mature gradually- let them grow Let them shape themselves, without undue haste Don’t try to force them on As though you could be better today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) Will make of you tomorrow Only God could say what this new spirit will be Give our lord the benefit of believing That his hand is leading you And accept the anxiety of feeling yourself In suspense and incomplete.
Perhaps the most basic element at our universal core is that we are compelled to comprehend Shakespeare’s “bringer” of joy. As we witness the eclipse today, may our hearts touch joy and catch a glimpse of the bringer who is perpetually weaving our worlds together.
In Act Five, Scene One of A Midsummer Night’s Dream…
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: That is, the madman.
The lover, all as frantic, Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling, Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists—I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonimous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity and that kind of love, which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex; and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone.
Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, and Mark Ruffalo star in Yorgos Lanthimos’s film.Illustration by Agata Nowicka, From New Yorker (December 1, 2023) Grand Appetites and “Poor Things by Anthony Lane
“I’m so tired.Or maybe just my spirit is.My soul has been buckled, crumpled, flattened Duncan Wedderburn, by the sights I have seen.” Bella
A brilliant story and performance, delving into the meaning of conscious femininity from imagination itself, where “time is a jumble” and objectivity is maintained amidst power, madness, degradation, sadness, and even horror. The mystery of cruelty is front and center.
In this film we watch Bella move on the spiral from childishness to that of childlike wonder, becoming a fully synchronized woman with passion, curiosity, and intention to know the world so that she can have a part in changing it. She is a “changeable feast” who navigates through witnessing her “empathy … creeping towards what [she] would describe… a contemptuous rage.”
As Bella freely questions and quests, the trappings of culture are comedically illumined in a fresh and confronting manner, perhaps loosening their grip on the audience just a little as we prepare to engage this political climate. May the dramatic cinematography be a mirror to our own capacity to embrace the pains of transformation!
Tonight we boldly start to unpack the poet’s claim that “the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and has overturned the order of the soul” –this, a calling to release the chains of guilt and indignation and CONSCIOUSLY TURN to love, ” the only engine of survival.”
“Your servant here he has been told to say it clear, say it cold, it’s over, it ain’t going any further…The future… it is murder.”
Cohen conjures the images of a “woman hanging upside down, her features covered by her fallen gown,” recalling the oldest written myth of a feminine goddess, Inanna, who chooses to descend and face Ereshkigal. Realizing what these women represent symbolically, together, is mostly hidden until we wake to the mudslide of our own broken nights, mirrored rooms, secret lives, and self-torture. Inanna hangs there until we stop pursuing “absolute control,” “crack and careless sex.” She hangs there as we continue asking for the “return of the Berlin Wall, Stalin and St. Paul.” And as she hangs there, we are challenged to acknowledge how, even with our ideal intentions, we are “taking the only tree that’s left to stuff the hole of culture.”
Image is from A Hidden Life, true story of a conscientious objector during WWII. Bl. Franz Jägerstätter refused to fight for the Nazis in World War II, highlighting the true meaning of the way of the cross.
To receive this blessing, all you have to do is let your heart break. Let it crack open. Let it fall apart so that you can see its secret chambers, the hidden spaces where you have hesitated to go.
Your entire life is here, inscribed whole upon your heart’s walls: every path taken or left behind, every face you turned toward or turned away, every word spoken in love or in rage, every line of your life you would prefer to leave in shadow, every story that shimmers with treasures known and those you have yet to find.
It could take you days to wander these rooms. Forty, at least.
And so let this be a season for wandering, for trusting the breaking, for tracing the rupture that will return you
to the One who waits, who watches, who works within the rending to make your heart whole.
—Jan Richardson
2016 update: “Rend Your Heart” appears in my new book Circle of Grace: A Book of Blessings for the Seasons. You can find the book here.
