little I

The image of the man sitting with his gold coins stacked on the table, counting them, counting them, is an image of spiritual smallness, even absurdity.  Yet I log on to my retirement account every day, and look at the balance, look at the balance.

thy

True love is a kind of inner work, neither passive nor discovered, but in a constant state of sustaining creation.

Willard

No candle, by burning, ever raises itself up, but only, slowly, burns itself lovely down.

more steel

The need to transcend death, and its handmaiden, age.  This need, heightened and sharpened, is its own fulfillment.  That is the truth of the resurrection.

steel of man

I wait to cross 58th Street, where they have been working and temporary plates of steel have been placed to cover the trenches.  Cars pass over the steel, an inch thick.  It gives an inch or so, but holds.  A dump truck filled to the brim with sand goes over.  The steel plate holds - an inch-thick plate of steel spanning a five-foot trench, holding up that passing weight.  A simple thing, but it awes me to think of what that material is doing, particularly on the stretching underside of the plate, the material holding itself together, no different than a cable stretched between two poles.  The passing truck, in every sense, depending from above.

Lyndon

Who isn't, partly, a scam artist?  Particularly to one's self.  Virtue in this is to be so slightly, and in a manner elevating and sound.  But perhaps I think of it wrongly - for sometimes it seems to me that there is something of the scam even in standing up and walking around.