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Month: August 2022

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Your abrading angel

Posted on August 28, 2022 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

  pins you with her eyes, “Put down your book,” she says, “high time to read between the lines of your tangled life,that’s where the clarity is, Honey.” “Back t...

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To be a Fool for Beauty

Posted on August 19, 2022 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

you must be weirdly young or brazenly old,alternatively, a sufferer and a worshipper, a defender less driven by grievance (that old rut), than curiosity,and lik...

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Such a Dream

Posted on August 4, 2022 by stephen t berg / 18 Comments

  I didn’t know that when my father died, he’d be back,and wearing his robin’s-egg-blue suit to Sunday dinner,his tie loosened, jacket slung over the oak armcha...

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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