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Month: May 2020

Potential/Presence/Soul

Significant Strides in Soul Spotting

Posted on May 24, 2020 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

We have it on forensic authority that the ache in your heartcan be filled with sunlight; the gnawing doubt about acceptance can be traced to the doorstep of you...

Art/Beauty/Light

Colours that Break Your Heart

Posted on May 19, 2020 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

Colours that Break Your Heart Lots of them in nature.Take the willow leaf, for instance, tentative to emanate in still-chilly-April, but there it is, that first...

Love/Mother's Day

1938 Barley Harvest and Our Mother 1922 – 2013

Posted on May 10, 2020 by stephen t berg / 16 Comments

Under the belch of a 10-20 Titan tractor,smell of hot bearings, grease and barley dust, by the steel wheel, bowing belt and fly wheel, the feeder, cutter, cylin...

Authenticity/Presence

Adulthood

Posted on May 3, 2020 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

Adulthood No use to run to the camera while crimson lights up a cloud bank on the eastern horizon. It never looks right. Maybe, you wonder, with some enhancemen...

Over the coming months, I’ll be slowly retiring Grow Mercy. This Easter marks 20 years and some 1500 posts. (And here, a deep bow to you, for reading and/or responding.) I’ll not, however, be retiring the impulse behind Grow Mercy, but will be shifting, exploring, following a hybridized urge, and a genre to suit. For me, what these decades have increasingly revealed is how writing is a spiritual path. Now, for whatever time and energy remains for me, I’ll be tilting more toward The Ragged Psalmist, still inchoate, but the handle feels like it fits. I do hope you’ll subscribe.

Why — The Ragged Psalmist?

Because some stubborn ember, still warm, compels me to write some cobbled songs — praise and lament, cries and sighs — and sound them back to the sacred Mystery.

To throw a wrench into a world geared up for business; to resist the moneychangers in their corporate temples — because poetry is political, and light is its administrative wing.

Because old lies and old words screw us over and must be remade to tell the truth; because our glossary of mockery needs burial, and the lexicon that’s left needs anointing.

To strive to honour the life of a sparrow; attend the spell of a dead star — whose light we still see; to feel, down to the bone, the quantum foam, we all flail in.

To thicken compassion and thin out aggression; to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one, not even the hater.

To let failure, discouragement, suffering and perishing have their say, without any spoon of bromide; to let joy, delight, and beauty come as they may.

To penetrate darkness and delusion — and so discover all this love in us.

Because mindfulness and mercy need constant oxygen.

Because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of our “forgiving victim” on the body suit of my heart.

Because reality points to unity — and we must hurry to catch up.

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