Contentment I

There's a happy cricket in the yard
and clean sheets between which to slip.  Now
tired muscles can rest
and mind slide softly
into sleep while the cricket sings
and the spinning earth
brings the quiet coolness of night.


Two recent pictures:

a delightful culinary experiment: tabbouleh  made with quinoa

Heron on the Genesee

This afternoon I (finally) watched the 5th Harry Potter movie.  It is an intense struggle against evil, a struggle of trying to find the good worth fighting for.  Reflecting on the film, I realized that his very struggle is likely one of the things that makes the film so popular.

Good and evil are very real parts of our world.  In a culture full of apathy, there is something very appealing about a group of people who will band together and do something to fight against the evil.  In some ways, the imagined evil in the fantasy world of these stories can teach us something about the evil that is already present in our world.

At the end of the movie, Harry quotes Dumbledore (often the voice of wisdom in these stories) , saying

[...] even though we've got a fight ahead of us, we've got one thing that Voldemort doesn't have -- something worth fighting for. 

What are they fighting for?  Friends and family, peace and laughter, truth?  The answer is slightly ambiguous, but the statement is striking nevertheless, if only because it makes the fight of Voldemort seem so futile.

What are we fighting for?  The joyful reign and light of Christ to permeate every part of our world, bringing glory to our triune God?  That all may know this God of all love, beauty, grace and truth? 

I challenge you to consider this question, and let the answer transform the way you live.

a poem

Here's another poem by Wendell Berry. Between reading his poems and being friends with writers, I've decided I should read more poetry.

A STONE JUG

A bulldozer digging in a pond

on my mother's family's land

unearths two stoneware jugs

buried four feet in the ground,

one broken and one intact.

Who put them there? When? Why?

We suppose, but can't explain.

Those who have come and gone

are gone. How lost to us

they are whose lives passed here

in the sun's beauty and sorrow!

And who in a hundred years

will know us as we are

in our present living and dying

here under the very sun, lost

to the future as to the past?