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Stress

Posted on May 29, 2009 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Feel good about caring for yourself…feel good about just goofing off. Good friends, humour and vacations are worth their weight in gold, as are calming he...

Uncategorized

Slouching toward LA

Posted on May 1, 2009 by stephen t berg / 6 Comments

I fill out my customs card and make my way through the rope maze and wait. A heavy-set oval-jawed lady behind glass waves me up and I hand her my passport and p...

Politics/Uncategorized

George Carlin hippy-dippy weatherman to withering satirist (1937-2008)

Posted on June 24, 2008 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

George Carlin died yesterday. Sad news. My fondness for him began the first time I saw him on Ed Sullivan. I don’t remember his material for that show but...

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Quality Comfort

Posted on May 22, 2008 by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

When the rain falls and the temp dips and you inexplicably slip into 1973, the first thing you’ll want to do is robe yourself with a button-up horse blank...

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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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