Brothers watching a crop duster, near Fallon, WA, June 2014.
Sun dog.
Holy shit.
Garbanzos coated in bright red fertilizer, Fallon, WA, April 2014.
In April on the Palouse, you might look south and see a staggering sunny day, then turn around north to dark, threatening skies. The winter wheat by this time is vivid and green, but the fields still awaiting garbanzos and lentils remain in cake-brown furrows. You can still smell winter when the clouds pass over you and the wind hits your chest, but when they float past, the sun makes you sweat and pull off your jacket.
Morro Bay, California, December, 2013.
Christendom is dead! Long live the micro-Christendoms! →
“So in many ways, being a friend is much easier than trying to save the world. And yet, it’s also much harder. Your life will get messier. You’ll have to struggle with how best to help your friend and those decisions can be heart-breaking at times. Volunteering a few hours at the food pantry or sponsoring a child in Africa is a whole lot easier and cleaner than making friends and opening up your life to the needs, demands and sin of others. To say nothing of how your needs, wants and sins will affect them.”
“So the number of babies killed in the USA through abortion in four months is about the same number of Americans killed during the whole of the Second World War.”
One of several staggering statements in Augusto Zimmerman's Feminism and Gendercide of Unwanted Girls. Here are a couple more:
None of the early feminists believed that abortion was a woman’s right. On the contrary, they believed that women’s equality would end abortion for good. Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), whose “Declaration of Sentiments” (1848) is credited with initiating the struggle towards women’s suffrage in the United States, explains in a letter to a supporter, in 1873: “When we consider that women are treated as property, it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.”
…
Because of sex-selection abortions, a survey of a dozen villages in India has found that out of a total population of ten thousand, only fifty were girls. In neighbouring China two-thirds of all children born are males because of selective abortion against female babies. In the countryside, the ratio of boys to girls is four to one. One academic source has suggested that there could be a ratio of 168 males for every 100 girls in Danzhou. According to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, by the year 2020 there will be 30 million more men than women of marriageable age in China. One in five young Chinese men will be unable to find a bride.
“They said she was stuck
as though she was a nine-pound human fork
pronged in the dishwasher,
an umbrella that wouldn’t fold to size.
I pushed until I thought I’d turn inside out
and yet she sat in my cervix for hours,
as the contractions collapsed on me
like skyscrapers,
as they talked about the knife.Second time round, the sour sensation
”
of complete idiocy
for willing this pain again, going through it,
risking so much for someone
who remained at the fringes of knowing,
ghosted by awful wisdom
that birth isn’t the end of it, nor the worst –
episiotomy; infections; afterpains; breastfeeding.
But my body remembered,
it took the first shunt of his head, yawned, then
toboganned him out in a gush of brine,
red as a crab. I remember his arms
like socks full of eggs, muscular, fists bunched,
as though he’d been prepared to fight.
“Yes, we take pleasure in color, integrity, harmony, radiance, and so on; and yet, as anyone who troubles to consult his or her experience of the world knows, we also frequently find ourselves stirred and moved and delighted by objects whose visible appearances or tones or other qualities violate all of these canons of aesthetic value, and that somehow “shine” with a fuller beauty as a result. Conversely, many objects that possess all these ideal features often bore us, or even appall us, with their banality. At times, the obscure enchants us and the lucid leaves us untouched; plangent dissonances can awaken our imaginations far more delightfully than simple harmonies that quickly become insipid; a face almost wholly devoid of conventionally pleasing features can seem unutterably beautiful to us in its very disproportion, while the most exquisite profile can do no more than charm us. The tenebrous canvases of Rembrandt are beautiful, while the shrill daubs of Thomas Kinkade, with all their sugary glitter, are repellant. Whatever the beautiful is, it is not simply harmony or symmetry or consonance or ordonnance or brightness, all of which can become anodyne or vacuous of themselves; the beautiful can be encountered—sometimes shatteringly—precisely where all of these things are deficient or largely absent. Beauty is something other than the visible or audible or conceptual agreement of parts, and the experience of beauty can never be wholly reduced to any set of material constituents. It is something mysterious, prodigal, often unanticipated, even capricious. We can find ourselves suddenly amazed by some strange and indefinable glory in a barren field, an urban ruin, the splendid disarray of a storm-wracked forest, and so on.”
Another one from Michael Gregory.
Image via theparisreview.
Art credit Michael Gregory.
“All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.”
I don’t know, man. This song is too good.
“We lost our oldest child, our daughter Anna, suddenly in April 2008 at the age of 27; our other three daughters and three sons lost their beloved sister. Two months later, a longtime, long-distance friend of my husband was visiting us. As we sat together on our screened porch after dinner, he confided that he had been so shocked when he first received the news of Anna’s death in an accident halfway around the world that he almost didn’t respond at all. What immobilized him initially was the unimaginable thought of such harm coming to his own oldest daughter.
But he had gathered himself up and sent an eloquent letter to us, accompanied by one of the most beautifully specific gifts we have ever received – a gift rich with profound meaning. We were so moved at the time; even now, this powerful symbol and the thin stuff of words never fails to bring comfort and provide a window into that greater life. “What if,” I mused with him that evening, “you had kept silent? What part of us might not have mended, or been carried even for that day?” I know that my husband and I have survived the pressing weight of this profound grief in large part because of the grace of God conveyed through those who have gracefully moved toward us and chosen to sit alongside us.
How much grace do we withhold when we hold back? How much more might this suffering soul, this wounded Body, this broken world be healed if we who belong to Christ would simply move toward instead of holding back, or even retreating, in the face of anguish? How often do we respond not in any sort of “fullness of time,” but only at our convenience, restrained by our measured degree of comfort, if at all? Sometimes I wish He didn’t trust us so much. Sometimes I wish He didn’t entrust us with so much.
”
“The desert he rode was red and red the dust he raised, the small dust that powdered the legs of the horse he rode, the horse he led.”
Keeping the switches clear of ice in Chicago. Marshall W. Beecher, found here.
“EXPERIENCE in carpenter work need not be extensive in order to build an open-front poultry house. Anyone who has any aptness for learning how to handle tools can soon master the essentials of house building—and will not find the work of construction very difficult.
Right here, in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, two city girls have started in the “poultry business and are making a success of it. They had had no experience with poultry or in carpenter work, but they determined to build their own poultry houses and they did it and did it well. If two inexperienced city girls can frame, board in, and shingle a building and make a good job of it, others can certainly learn to do it and the man or well grown boy who thinks that he can’t, ought to brace up and try.
”