What if we order our lives around rhythms and practices and habits that foster depth and make us more human?
Author: Rachel E. Hicks
OLD BOOKS, Part IV: On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner
“[W]e begin to praise writers themselves for their oddity, not for their wisdom, universality, or even art.”
OLD BOOKS, Part III: Standing by Words, by Wendell Berry
“When mind predominates…then the individual is ‘liberated’; all his or her wants and wishes are made equal to any other wants and wishes and assume the status of legitimate values or goals. The usefulness of this state of affairs to an economy based on consumption is obvious.”
Return of Joy
But a more noticeable and fuller joy is returning, and it is unexpected and delightful.
OLD BOOKS, Part II: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, by E. F. Schumacher
“Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the wellbeing of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be ‘uneconomic,’ you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper.”
OLD BOOKS, Part I: The Captive Mind, by Czeslaw Milosz
“Still we lived; and since we were writers, we tried to write. True, from time to time one of us dropped out, shipped off to a concentration camp or shot. There was no help for this. We were like people marooned on a dissolving floe of ice; we dared not think of the moment when it would melt away.”
OLD BOOKS – Intro
“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to men being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.” G. K. Chesterton
Do the Next Thing
From practice, I’m learning to take the next step forward after hovering in the kind of moments that threaten to stop my heart from pain. I now have behind me a little history of doing the next thing right when it seems the most impossible.
Crisis, Fatigue, Rilke, Prayer
It’s awkward to walk about so undone inside, sure that my inward raggedness is displayed on my face, in my skin, in my new gray hairs.
Something Wildly More
Beauty, too, exists wildly in excess of a survival paradigm. The fact that humans yearn for beauty, recognize it, understand instinctually that it is a force that exists both within and outside of ourselves, seek to create it, seek to capture it—why is that?