Skip to content
Grow Mercy
  • Home
  • About
  • Articles
  • Benedictine
  • Profile
  • Books
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Category: Music

Beauty/Music

Sometimes I think about Eva Cassidy

Posted on March 24, 2019 by stephen t berg / 14 Comments

Sometimes I think about Eva Cassidy whose voice was ointment to me, who sang cover songs, painting them with her own soaring colours while honouring their creat...

Freedom/Music

Ode to Saskatchewan towns along the Yellowhead Highway

Posted on January 8, 2017 by stephen t berg / 13 Comments

Let them say that he wrote crap poetry but that he loved the sound and feel of words: words, names, two, three or twenty at a time, coming together like sprocke...

Art/Music/Poetics

Thresholds – Edmonton Poetry Festival 2016

Posted on April 13, 2016 by stephen t berg / 4 Comments

Let me break with regular posts to offer this plug—as I’m honoured to host this event, which is part of the 2016 Edmonton Poetry Festival: Thresholds: Seven poe...

Beauty/Culture/Love/Music/Writing

“Wicked Game,” why so beautiful, why so evocative?

Posted on March 1, 2016 by stephen t berg / 3 Comments

Forgive this brief diversion from Grow Mercy’s usual concerns (not like it’s a first), but I’m down at Credo Coffee, and Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game” is just now...

Posts pagination

« Previous 1 2 3 … 6 Next »

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.

Follow Grow Mercy on Twitter

Follow @GrowMercy

Find me on Facebook

Stephen T Berg | 

Archives

Categories

Links and Blogs

  • Alison Hawthorne Deming
  • Andrea House
  • Benjamin Hertwig
  • Bleeding Heart Art Space
  • Calm Things
  • Connie Howard's Blog
  • Dana Wylie
  • Dave Von Bieker
  • Edward Van Vliet
  • Geez Magazine
  • Inscape Life Coaching
  • James Alison
  • Joyce Harback
  • Kelly Sheperd
  • Laurie MacFayden
  • Makes/Me/So/Digress
  • Mi Vida Landscapes
  • Michael Gravel
  • Natural Presence
  • Orion Magazine
  • Romancing Vinyl
  • Ryan McCormick
  • Teacher as Transformer
  • Thomas Trofimuk
  • Trevor Herriot’s Grass Notes
  • Wenda Salomons
  • Wendy Morton
  • Writer In Residence
© 2026 Grow Mercy
Powered by WordPress | Theme: Graphy by Themegraphy