Rod and Robe

New post. Link in comments.

"I thought of those arrogant bastards—fat, sleek birds who wouldn’t know a coyote if it bit them on their feathered asses. They swagger across the University of Minnesota campus like tenured professors, blocking roads and staring down freshmen with a cold, reptilian indifference. They lounge on the manicured lawns of Edina and St. Paul, pecking at expensive mulch and mocking the very concept of a bag limit. They have negotiated a separate peace with humanity, trading the majesty of the woods for the safety of a cul-de-sac."

The Purge Listen, it's a joke.

"To sit in this theater of the apophatic is to realize that the “nothing” we see is actually a heavy, working silence. It is the grit of the earth turning over in its sleep."

This Theater of the Apophatic Stillness, Silence, and Renewal

Working on a new essay.

"When left to my own thoughts I usually am trying to figure out how to say something like “You are not hunting grouse, you are hunting the "Ground of Being," though I’d never say that aloud because you’d get punched, and rightly so. But I love Paul Tillich, the old German theologian who understood that the true God isn’t a bearded manager in the sky but the very structure of existence itself. He would’ve liked the woods in February."

Frozen Ground February always feels like the month when the world decides if it actually wants to continue or if it would prefer to simply stop.

Your God is Too Small.

Your God is Too Small A Dispatch from Minneapolis

"Stillness like this scours the mind clean. After the clatter of stainless steel and the endless demands of a holiday meal, this silence was a physical gift. It left me with only the raw, visceral facts of existence: the squeak of my new boots, the cold inhalation that tasted of pine resin and ozone, and the dull, steady thrum of my pulse. The grouse, the invisible target, was now just an abstract quid pro quo for the act of being-in this immense, quiet architecture."

Link in the comments.

"I learned immediately that the word “guts” is a theological term, a slippery abundance of organs—stomach, liver, lights—all nested in a startling, engineered proximity. How easily something could be taken apart."

Link in comments.