My senses and faculties help me to find the way from here to Killarney but on the way back to God they bewilder and impede me.
-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village
Saturday, July 25, 2026
the last laugh..........................
You can do and say a lot of things in hindsight, kicking and screaming and what-about-ing til the cows come home. But the returns are the returns and you can’t change that.
-Downtown Josh Brown, as he interviews Ron Baron, an early (and big) investor in Elon Musk
Old habits interrupted.................
Every morning for the past twelve years (well, 345 days out of 365 anyway), I have walked for 45+ minutes down the hill from our house, across the little bridge, around the OSU-N/COTC campus, and back.
Apparently, bridges do not live forever, as ours has been taken out of commission for the next "111 days."
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| Younger Steve would have crossed this anyway |
Whatever, walks still need to be walked. There are more that 40 miles of paved "recreational trails" around here. This morning, my Sweetie and I traveled by car to the original Licking County bike path (+/-3.5 miles between Granville and Newark, initially paved in the mid-1970s.) It is as pretty as I remember it.
We will try a different path tomorrow.
choices........................
In judging myself, I confront what is inferior in me and recoil from it. Yet none of us can measure our true worth. I can only live in the hope that those around me might say: he is honest; he is kind to the helpless; when the powerful struck, he stood his ground. Such judgments point to generally discoverable moral truths. We have always possessed Taylor’s shared “standards of value”—we have always loved the higher and shunned the lower, even when pretending otherwise.
From the reformation of character follows the public affirmation of the conditions to which good character should aspire. I would do so humbly, guided by truth as I perceive it. Fit is better than fat, for obvious reasons. Together is better than alone, and together for life better still. Strong is better than weak. Let me name the one and pursue the other, knowing that we are flawed vessels, hostage to fortune, and bound often to fall short. Still, all of us can inch toward our highest selves.
-Martin Gurri, as cut-and-pasted from here
As for "God"...................
As for "God," old-time members sometimes comment that "A.A. has only two things to say about the subject: First, there is one. And second, you're not it. From there, you're on your own."
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
a very mysterious thing..........
So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don't know where the pictures came from. And I don't believe anyone knows exactly how he 'makes things up'. Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you 'have an idea' could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?
-C. S. Lewis, Of Other Worlds, from the chapter describing the birth of Aslan and Narnia
two gifts....................
We do not think of it every day, but we never forget it: the beloved shall grow old, or ill, and be taken away finally. No matter how ferociously we fight, how tenderly we love, how bitterly we argue, how pervasively we berate the universe, how cunningly we hide, this is what shall happen. In the wide circles of timelessness, everything material and temporal will fail, including the manifestations of the beloved. In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to ask questions. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
-Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
Monday, July 20, 2026
be stories worth examining............
It seems that there's quite the divide between the happy face we post online and the disinterest we actually have in the narrative of our own years.
The first step is to take a breath and dare to entertain the thought that in the debris of your life would be stories worth examining. That they are, as I just wrote, a kind of treasure.
The less we do this, the more unanchored we become, and susceptible to a virtual reality that will fill our entire waking hours given a ghost of a chance. To give your lost stories some attention is a surprisingly radical act.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
Let's blame Napoleon...........
For most of human history, children learned by living. A mother's hand guiding yours through bread dough. A father's voice teaching songs that carried ancestral memory. Village elders telling stories that encoded wisdom. Learning was intimate, immediate, and integrated with life itself. No grades, no bells, no sitting still for six hours. Knowledge flowed through relationship and practice.
Then Prussia lost a war. 1806. Napoleon crushed the Prussian army at Jena-Auerstedt. The Prussian government blamed their people. Too undisciplined, too free-thinking, too human. So they built a machine to manufacture better humans.
The created the first compulsory state-run school system in history. Children were sorted by age like industrial products. Marched between classes at the sound of bells like factory workers, forced to sit in rows like soldiers, and taught to memorize and repeat, never question or create.
The goal was to produce citizens who obeyed reflectively, solders who followed orders without thinking, and workers who showed up on time and did what they were told. Humans began confusing obedience with morality and conformity with intelligence.
It worked so well that America imported it wholesale. Horace Mann, the "Father of American Education," traveled to Prussia in 1843 and came back evangelical about their system. He called it "the perfect system for shaping citizens."
a metaphysical quest...............
Michelangelo identifies with the biblical hero, casting himself as a patriotic warrior who uses his particular gifts not only to advance his art but as a weapon in the virtuous struggle of Florence against its enemies.
But there is more to these lines than mere chest-thumping. Michelangleo always conceived the sculptor's craft as a metaphysical quest. This most material of art forms becomes in Michelangelo's conception a means of probing for pure spirit beneath a shell of gross matter, one that defines the artist as well as the matter upon which he works his will. This was not merely an abstract conceit: Michelangelo saw the art of sculpture as, crucially, a process of self-discovery, of self-actualization. In a passage that was almost certainly known to him, the late classical philosopher Plotinus used the art of sculpture as a metaphor for the means by which we perfect our moral selves: "Withdraw into yourself and look. If you do not see beauty within you, do as does the sculptor of a statue that is to be beautiful: he cuts away here, he smoothes it there, he makes this line lighter, this one purer, until he disengages beautiful lineaments in the marble. Do you do this too. . . ." Reversing the analogy, the artist, discovering form within the mass, experiences release from his own carnal nature. The giant slain by the sculptor's bow, then, is in some sense Michelangelo himself, or at least the grosser aspects of his nature that he defeats through the redemptive power of his art.
-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
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| Michelangelo David 1501-04 |
Sunday, July 19, 2026
Glitches..........................
When AI tries to create and direct joyous human dancing, it fails. The dancers look like retired accountants at a wedding.
Not quite true for us...................
.........................the critters beat us to them:
We ate our first tomato and cucumber from the garden today. The garden is a good one this year but I made the mistake of planting too closely.
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