A friend recently lent me a book and I repaid him by reading it. The book, The Golden Spruce by John Vaillant, is about an unusual Sitka spruce, several hundred years old, which had golden needles in place of the usual green ones. Golden foliage is an odd but regularly occurring plant mutation, highly prized [...]
Category Archives: Right Living
The Golden Spruce and our Forests.
19-Apr-13In Paradisum David Morgan.
08-Feb-13There is not much that can be done in the face of our certain mortality. Two nights ago I heard from friends that David Morgan, professor of French Literature at Furman University and for several years one of the teachers at Rusticatio Virginiana, lay on his deathbed and had probably only hours to live. I [...]
The Atlantic seems to have discovered that we moderns have an insatiable appetite for anything plausibly scientific on the topic of love and marriage (or our lack thereof), and out comes another article, centering on the neurological experience of love. Despite the attempt to headline this article with “there’s no such thing as everlasting love” [...]
What a fabulous profile. We have a city called Cincinnati, and Uruguay has an actual Cincinnatus. This is what Jefferson hoped for but neither was nor could help to create. It is not surprising that suffering – fourteen years in jail, more than ten in solitary confinement – helped to produce this. Some kind of [...]
Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung, Death.
20-Dec-12I had the sudden conviction that I should finally more fully explore the writings of Marie-Louise von Franz, a second-generation Jungian whose writings I have been impressed by in the past. I am in general always partial to people who have some kind of redemptive salvific Messianic purpose in their work: ‘Like all of us, [...]
Winter in the Cabin.
01-Dec-12For the past week it has been consistently cold and wintry here in the cabin. There is snow on the ground, and I have to walk in from the road; my dirt driveway is now closed off. Snowshoes are not required yet, but snow that has fallen is starting to pile up. I spend some [...]
Sickness very much getting the better of me in the days following Thanksgiving, I spent three days indoors and very nearly all the time in bed. Having a great number of books at my disposal, being in the family house, for whatever inscrutable reason I read Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality on Friday, and Wallace Stegner’s Crossing [...]
I was born Catholic, and I remain so, but I do not believe I became a real Christian until four years ago, when I had what we may as well call my conversion. It happened as follows. Some young men have difficulty measuring up to their fathers. My brother and I have had something of [...]
The Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.
04-Oct-12I think of Saint Francis whenever I encounter the least of the little creatures around me. Today I found two spiders in my bathtub, who could not climb the slick sides of the tub. Recently someone put up a picture on Facebook of a spider. Half the comments were “gross” and the other half were [...]
Jon Talton.
16-Jan-13This guy is well worth reading. This is an older piece, but he’s still got zip and actual insight. He’s looking at the large issues and not just whatever the hell the head-chimps are tweeting.