Goodbye, Cruel Month

Hello, May flowers.

To a Fabulist Considering Her Breakfast Nook

"The wallpaper looks so much nicer,"
she said, "now that it's almost spring.

And somehow these processed pastries taste better,
too, while our chairs float three inches off the floor."

Restraint has its limits

A spring afternoon (and
if I still owned a drum set

I’d
strike,

stammer
accidental syncopation,

false
start, fall out of tempo.

And if I, for a while or late into the night,
banged on the snare, the toms, the hi-hat,

the cymbals--crash!--crescendo,
just for the joy of afternoons, evenings, late nights,

what cause could my neighbors
possibly have to complain?)

Asceticism and the Environment (Intermission and Roadmap)

When I started to write about this, I fully intended to finish the entire series before Holy Pascha, but, alas!, I am not perfect and have barely begun. I will try to do better. But, in the interest of getting things going again and, figuring that it's easier to write an outline than fully flesh out an idea, I thought I'd give a sort of short road map of what I plan to write about:

Part II: A restatement of the problem and a defense of the possibility of ascetical environmentalism

Part III: On the traditional Christian understanding of Creation (as I understand it and as best as I can express it in a blog post).

Part IV: On the traditional Christian understanding of Asceticism (as I understand it and as best as I can express it in a blog post).

Part V: Practical reasons for fasting as an ecological act

Part VI: Mystical and Theological reasons for fasting as an ecological act

Part VII: Interesting Examples

Part VIII (optional): Unspecified closing remarks

I was actually planning to devote an entire post just to asceticism and its relations to birds, but decided that would be too much and anyway 8 Parts is probably enough.

So, that is the plan anyway.

'i took the time to check your blog, and all i got was this lousy haiku'

wandering Oakland
an unkempt college student
drums on a djembe