Just listened to: a recording of Messiaen’s L’Ascension (1933) by Paavo Järvi conducting Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich on Alpha Classics (2019) while on a short sunset walk. Because sometimes you wanna go beyond la frontière Debussy. A devout, twenty-something, 20th-century French organist composes a short, innovative, delicious four-course symphonic prix fixe from a mathematically constrained but phenomenally boundless (thus predictably unpredictable) harmonic palette, neither tonal nor dodecaphonic. And a world-class, Grammy-winning Estonian conductor and his first-rate Zürcher waitstaff serve it with all the attention and grace you expect at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
It occurred to me the other day that my days of religious doubt in 2014 and 2015 may mark the beginning of my having become a more sensitive sleeper.
“Why does my heart feel so bad? Why does my soul feed so bad?” All year, You’ve had the strangle moral imperative to joy buzzing around my ears. It could be that I’m putting too much stock in a single command of Paul’s. But with:
- “get to” being the word of the year,
- Travis having made such an impression on me with the primacy he assigns to joy, and
- all the specific words that have come to me on the subject this year,
it has been hard to avoid. And more than ever, the role of joy as an anchor for the words I say to others remaining words of life and not words of death has become apparent. I may not need to dig the well of self-love in order to love others, as so many folks extrabiblically claim, but I do apparently need to dig the well of joy: I have spoken brusquely again and again in recent weeks—this despite all the recent emphasis I have placed in my mind on letting “all my words be full of grace.” Why? Because it’s “out of the overflow of the heart” that “the mouth speaks.” If I...
// read full article →It isn’t necessarily wrong to find oneself in a bad mood. But it is wrong not to do something about a bad mood. That’s the lesson of this evening.
I’m not sure I enjoy any sociospatial context more than free-spirited, small-group conversation at a table at Webster’s Bookstore Café, surrounded by the sight and smell of used books, the taste of good tea, and the sound of vintage hipster music that isn’t even trying to be cool. (I just wish they stayed open past 7 PM!)
She’s tall but tired of hearing ’bout it ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Carla: I didn’t know I was going to have to put Mr. Yuk on a candle!
Éa: It’s not my fault. You had delicious-looking candles!
Just watched In the Mood for Love (2000), written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. An exquisite Hong Kong pas de deux and series of color-coded pseudo tableaux vivants depicting the sad, halting victory of moral vanity over smoldering desire.
I deal with interruptions and pop-up requests at work much more gracefully than I do at home. I haven’t yet internalized and automatized “doing everything without grumbling or arguing” (Philippians 2:14). This despite the facilitation that my realizing that the Prime Desire is always fulfillable should bring. I must be missing a piece at home, something I have at work but don’t have at home. What is it?
At work, I’m glad when work piles up. At home, that stresses me out. At work, when someone approaches me about something they want done, I smile and sometimes even thank them for the cool thing to work on. (Naturally, this is not true when the thing they’re approaching me about is something I built that has broken.) But when someone approaches me about something they want done at home, I grumble and resent.
What are the contextual differences that might account for the differences in my response?
Edit 11/21/25: I was writing about this same stuff almost exactly a year ago.
There’s no such thing as self-reliance.
Sometimes my life—my whole life—feels like a driveway on a continually and very snowy day: As soon I’ve shoveled one side of it clear, enough fresh snow has fallen on the other side to prevent me from ever getting out.
“Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, in everything give thanks; for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). There’s a synergy between these three commands. It’s easier to rejoice when you’re praying continually and giving thanks in everything; it’s easier to pray continually when you’re rejoicing always and giving thanks in everything (after all, to whom are we to give thanks for things like existence?); it’s easier to give thanks in everything when you’re rejoicing always and praying continually.
But all these require that you be here now and do what you’re doing, thinking not of other things.
Life is a driveway.
I’m gonna be clearing it
All life long. ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just listened to: a recording of Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas (1820–1822) by Penelope Crawford on Musica Omnia (2011) during a rainy walk through the neighborhood. A master of the fortepiano plays the final trilogy of a (by then deaf) master of piano composition. Together, they bless us with helpings of hymn-like lyricism, proto-jazz, and Debussy—the last two written eighty years ahead of schedule. (They also serve us some C Minor storminess. But with this guy, what else is new?)
“It’s not so much a battle of the sexes as it is a mutual aid society.”
— me, to Carla, about complementing one another and having learned to live together well
“That man was a lamp.”
– Jesus, John 6:35a, of the John the Baptist
He who is grateful can’t help but be gracious.
“I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living” (Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, emphasis mine). I want to carry this thought with me all the time as I age; it teaches me how to relate to others, all of whom will die someday, and how to relate to myself, who will also die someday.
Just listened to Kings Kaleidoscope (2023) by Kings Kaleidoscope. Therapeutically upbeat chamber beatbox pop that sits just on this side of my K-LOVE hate line (thanks to its offering some musical adventuresomeness alongside its therapeutics).
In my current experience of the English language, “Why?” is increasingly used exclusively as a prefix for lament, dispute, or displeasure rather than as the start of a question born of humble curiosity.
Why? (And I mean that in both ways.)
Just watched Get Out (2017), written and directed by Jordan Peele. Well-written, expertly cast, Hitchcockian contrivance as feature-length parable about being Black in a White world. Is it naïve to think it could be a revelation to some? Probably, but the movie did, I think, succeed in helping cultivate my own capacity for sympathy. An astounding directorial debut.
Just listened to: Yesterday’s Wine (1971) by Willie Nelson. More Christian moral instruction in a single, ten-line song than in whole catalogs of Christian devotional music. What a dirty, liberal, redneck hippie. And what an understated, if occasionally soporific, country mini-masterpiece the whole album.
It’s not regimen or self-discipline I’ll need if I want to write songs, silly. I have that. It’s company. In the sea of commitments I swim in, it’s commitments alone that cause efforts to float. It’s time to start a songwriting group.
George Herbert speaks to me again:
…Get to live; Then live and use it: else it is not true That thou hast gotten. Surely use alone Makes money not a contemptible stone
— The Church-Porch, “Perirrhanterium” (25)
He is saying what I am saying: Money is for doing. Keep it moving. Don’t store it up.
The Bible says nothing about the importance of setting or achieving goals per se. If you set no goals, yet you love—that is, if you act as though God and those around you are important and their good matters to you—you’re doing alright. If you achieve no goals, yet you love, you’re doing alright.