Not not not not
I decree that Nothing about me is to be of other existence, My solo self is to be completely sovereign. My boundaries are to be impassable, inviolable. Let me be…
“My feeling was, the soul is startled by the telephone and never at ease in its presence” – From “Indecision”, Benjamin Kunkel
In the months before Ecuador I was all about The Uses of Freedom–or Der Gebrauch der Freiheit if you’re German. Late at night I would look at the words of…
Down down down
Down down down. Circling circling circling. Circled, finally. Circled, lastly. Further down, digging in, digging down. In trench, entrench. Down down down. Circling circling circling. Spiralled, spirals. A final spiral.…
Pentecost: The Dove Descending Breaks the Air
From Little Gidding, TS Eliot: The dove descending breaks the air With flames of incandescent terror Of which the tongues declare The one discharge from sin and error. The only…
In July my father went to take the waters
In July my father went to take the waters and left me, with my mother and elder brother, a prey to the blinding white heat of the summer days. Just…
Denise Levertov, “Conversion of Brother Lawrence”
I particularly love the lines “your way was not to exalt nor avoid the Adamic legacy, you simply made it irrelevant” – which neatly summarises Brother Lawrence’s way of deceptive…
“A closed mind and know-it-allness are fundamentally forms of resistance to the truth of real things” – Josef Pieper on prudence
From “The Four Cardinal Virtues“: No man is altogether self-sufficient in matters of prudence’; without docilitas there is no perfect prudence. Docilitas, however, is of course not the ‘docility’ and…
Why hasn’t an earthquake toppled the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
I’m sure you’ve asked yourself the same question… well, here is the answer…. Basically, it’s all down to the soil: After studying available seismological, geotechnical and structural information, the research…
Séamus Sweeney 