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Category: Politics

Politics/Poverty

No InSite, No Insight

Posted on October 23, 2008 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

I’m recommending that you take a moment to read Connie Howard’s article, Well, Well, Well, No InSite, No Insight, about Vancouver’s, safe inje...

Politics

Election Day – Before and After voting

Posted on October 13, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Before you vote, here are a few techniques to make your time in the voting booth a bearable experience: -Wear something comfortable…but no sweater vests. ...

Politics/Violence

Weapons of mass applause

Posted on October 7, 2008 by stephen t berg / 8 Comments

This morning, sporadic clashes are still be going on between Thai police and PAD (People’s Alliance for Democracy) protesters. The police are using barbed...

Politics

Muttering

Posted on July 16, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Local Edmonton poet, Michael Gravel, offers this gem about people we’ve all observed. Those dissembled beings who owe their other-worldlyness to some kind...

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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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Stephen T Berg | 

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