Nowhere Near the Luminous Grail

The man who loves to argue is not the man who wants to reach the end of arguing!

Personal pronouns are a kind of magic, a deft interior signal to and from the sense of what matters, yet also in love with their own referencing, and thus prone to deception.

Let's be honest: coloring inside and outside the lines are equally incorrect because both are contingent on accepting the line's purposive existence in the first place.

I was not actually in Albany until years later when it was impossible to go back to Albany and from that point on leaving Albany at all was a fantasy, like the prisoner who knows he's only getting out in a casket but likes to dream of horse-drawn carriages, limousines, state-paid cabs, etc.

A nagging sense that personal experience, as such, is nowhere near the luminous grail it presents itself to be.

Given to landscapes that are riven with gullies rather than canyons (and somewhat late in the process realizing the significance of owls).

The Lord says "you can be right or you can be at peace" and Sean says "define right and peace, pal."

Catholic before anyone said there were options, apostate when it was first clear there were, half-assed Buddhism when one began to intuit that apostasy was not actually helpful, Mertonian Catholicism when the confusion began in earnest and then - in the Country of Turtles, with Chrisoula as my guide - the deluge.

The magnitude of communion that sex can't even pretend to reach.

A gray t-shirt I can't throw away even though it's barely wearable anymore, as if I were a pantheist, or at least pantheistic, or maybe just poor and realistic.

Counting implies order, is one way to understand the origins and ongoing fructivity of this and other writing projects.

In my dream, two robins studied a fallen nest in the yard, yet precisely when I wondered should I go outside and try to place it back in the tree, risking intrusion in order to maximize helpfulness, they flew into a nearby maple tree with a perfect nest in it and a female voice somewhere said "to wit."

Well, I sleep well for once and can't even pretend to be unhappy upon waking and reading and writing so the sentences skip like hummingbirds over the watery swale I so often so willingly sink into the heart of and I'm not sorry, not sorry at all.

The bureau is piled with books (seventeen) and over-stuffed manila folders (four) while underneath it is a cardboard box with the ninety-seven essays/articles/etc that were most helpful in the 2017 - 2018 epistemological speed-up, all of which I am now trying to organize into a curriculum I can teach from (though where and for whom I can't say).

There are alternatives to ways of thinking that produce undesirable results, one doesn't have to "suck it up," one doesn't have to "stand it."

A fine mist where the river flows past the horse pasture.

But you see, a point comes where it's clear that you're duping yourself, and that the duping isn't always noticeable, and so even when you conclude you're no longer duping yourself you might still be duping yourself.

You are not allowed to say "the insight can't happen in a bowling alley" and when the insight happens in a bowling alley you are not allowed to say "the insight happened in a bowling alley."

Like that mockingbird on the phone wires in Florence Massachusetts in early summer 1990 and the man who saw me gazing at it and said kindly "it's a mockingbird," knowing precisely the worship to which I aspired and the gaps in my knowing that falsified it inevitably.

At what point does Hansel realize his fate is in the hands of his sister and what effect if any does the realization have on his mental conception of witches?