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Category: Culture

Culture/Environment/Politics

Occupy Wall Street–CBC’s Kevin O’Learly undone by Chris Hedges

Posted on October 14, 2011 by stephen t berg / 7 Comments

CBC’s Kevin O’Leary, whose model must surely be FOX’s Bill O’Reilly is evidently out of his depth here in this interview with Chris Hedges. After what is now ma...

Culture/Humour

Undercover

Posted on July 12, 2011 by stephen t berg / 5 Comments

All the young undercover police in their True Religion street clothes gather at Starbucks before the heavy traffic arrives. The older ones who come later—making...

Culture/Environment/Religion

Ugly Canadian Tourist meets Amish Environment

Posted on June 22, 2011 by stephen t berg / 11 Comments

Shipshewana, Indiana: I wonder about the Amish here in this dollhouse town. Things must splinter from time to time. Man-with-long-beard-in-buckboard must roll h...

Culture

Blue-soul skips from Chicago

Posted on June 4, 2011 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

I’m lying in bed at midnight waiting for the "skips." I have a copper wire antenna strung across my bedroom, anchored to opposite walls. My bedr...

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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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