via FPR, Wendell Berry:

Time is said to flow like a river. I have said so myself, and perhaps it does. But time is a great mystery, not to be declared by one simile, or by several. It flows also like molten metal, cooling and solidifying even as it passes. The past is as it was. As it was it is forever. It cannot be changed, not by us, not by God. No doubt it is forgettable. We do surely forget some of it, and surely all of it in time will be forgotten. Maybe we can forgive ourselves, or be forgiven, for our wrongs that we remember, but they remain nonetheless wrong. This is the true rigor mortis, this rigidification of all that is past. Under the rule of time, the past is as it was.

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry — “Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

— Malin, in The Age of Anxiety

From Wendell Berry’s essay “Christianity and The Survival of Creation” (Via A. Jacob’s Article):

Good human work honors God’s work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. But such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit.

AND

Oliver Burkeman:

In the end, though, it comes down to seeing that many of us carry around a fantasy of “the uninterrupted life” that does nothing but make real life harder than it needs to be. In any case, the fantasy is usually an impossible one: my finitude means I definitely can’t spend as much time on my work and with my family as I’d like – due to maths – and this wouldn’t change were I magically to acquire the power to dictate how every hour of my day unfolded. C. S. Lewis, writing of course from a Christian perspective, summed things up lucidly:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Christine Smallwood via James K.A Smith in Image Journal:

“It’s hard to know when something ends,” Dorothy says late in the novel. But maybe this isn’t just because of our own myopic inability to recognize the end; maybe it’s because, with kairos hovering over everything, you never know when an ending isn’t the end. When the dead are raised, not even death is the end. The question isn’t “What time is it?” but “Which time is it?” The absolute is available to everyone in every age. That means any blip of chronos holds the possibility of being kairos, a moment pregnant with possibility. As Daniel Weidner has said, speaking about the theologian Paul Tillich, kairos means “every moment might be the small gate through which the messiah will enter.” It might even mean that those moments of serendipity aren’t random coincidences but gifts, a sign that someone is whispering just to you.

Leafing thru this list of peotry resources from poet Christian Wiman, I found a great article on T.S. Eliot by former archbishop Rowan Williams.

From Rowan Williams (Poetic stanzas Eliot’s):

Where, then, is healing? Here Eliot is at his most stark: there is no escape, except into fantasy. There is only a penetrating further into the blackness and destructiveness of the world. Face the truth; face the fact that the world is a world of meaninglessness, of destruction, violence, death, and loss, that no light of ecstasy can change this. Only when we stop projecting patterns on to the world can we live without illusion, and living without illusion is the first step to salvation. “Only through time time is conquered.” And here the starkness gives way to gospel. If there is a God whose will is for the healing of men and women, he can heal only by acting in the worldliness of the world, in and through the vortex of loss and death. He must share the condition of our sickness, our damnation, so as to bring his life and his fullness into it.

        The wounded surgeon plies the steel

        That questions the distempered part;

        Beneath the bleeding hands we feel

        The sharp compassion of the healer’s art

        Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

This is the pivot of the Quartets: God has borne all that we bear and so has made the fabric of history his own garment. The world has no discernable meaning or pattern, but into it there has entered the compassion of God. Give up the futile struggle to dominate and organize the chaos of the world in systems and mythologies, and realize that the empty destitution of confronting darkness is the only way in which love can begin. Only if we are honest about the world can we see the choices that confront us. Either there is only destruction and death, or there is destruction and death that we can take into ourselves to let it burn away our self-obsession and so make room for active love, compassion, mutual giving, life in communion. And the only sign of this possibility is the ambivalent memory of a dead and betrayed man.

        The dripping blood our only drink,

        The bloody flesh our only food.

There is something in our soul that loathes true attention much more violently than flesh loathes fatigue. That something is much closer to evil than flesh is. That is why, every time we truly give our attention, we destroy some evil in ourselves. If one pays attention with this intention, fifteen minutes of attention is worth a lot of good works.

– Simone Weil

Laity Lodge recently shared a newsletter featuring the ancient Japanese calendar of 72 seasons. Each lasting about 5 days, the 72 mark lived changes with attuned awareness and (as the website details) “the names of each season beautifully depict the tiny, delicate changes in nature that occur around us, year in year out.”

I’ve decided to call this 5-day-season in Austin, TX “The peach tree flowered despite some chill and the xmas lights are still up.”

By Philip Larkin

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.