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the heart of it

Posted on September 21, 2025 by stephen t berg / 12 Comments

  Without an element of atheism, no religion can be credible. -Fanny Howe for all our days pass away; our years come to an end like a sigh. -Psalm 90 in them th...

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A Sudden Sun Shooting through a Stand of Elm

Posted on September 9, 2025 by stephen t berg / 10 Comments

  1.There are times when life can culminate in a quarter mile of country road: dark before dawn, a heavy fog, and you, blind to the breathing bodies galloping n...

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A Loneliness of Freeways

Posted on August 27, 2025 by stephen t berg / 17 Comments

  Today I live less than a five-minute walk to an eight-lane freeway,and when I leave the house, I imagine an ocean—waves crashing close, then washing bac...

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Ode to the Abandonment of Poetry

Posted on August 13, 2025 by stephen t berg / 16 Comments

  I Was I failing you, boring you? So you grabbed your Boho coat, your Trilby hat, your sheaf of song sheets, and stole away, down some sibylline road. Or, is t...

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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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