milk and honey avatar

milk and honey

Coaxing the last tomatoes from the vine 📷 🌱
late season cherry tomatoes, red and green-going-to-red

They taste better than they look. No surprise there, for “What’d life be without homegrown tomatoes?”

Welcome, Morning - Anne Sexton
 
There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry “hello there, Anne”
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.  

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.


So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.


The Joy that isn’t shared, I’ve heard,
dies young.

A difficult question
Jonah Goldberg: "If Hitler’s bunker was in a hospital in 1945, you can be sure we would have flattened it from the air (no doubt after dropping leaflets—just as Israel has). But Israel has not done that. Nor should it do anything of the sort. They sent troops in—carrying incubators by the way—to minimize collateral damage...
[What's a real solution to] the very real problem of Hamas using Palestinian babies to protect their murderers and rapists?"
Writers Who've Stuck with Me (or With Whom I've Stuck)
an ongoing list
P.G. Wodehouse • G.K. Chesterton • Dorothy L. Sayers • C.S. Lewis • Frederick Buechner • Kathleen Norris • Alan Jacobs • Terry Teachout • David French • Evelyn Underhill • Garrison Keillor, editor (for his Good Poems collections) • Naomi Shihab Nye • T.S. Eliot • Roger Scruton • John Donne • John Milton • Abraham Lincoln • Anthony Trollope • Jane Kenyon • John McPhee • David Brooks • Li-Young Lee • Tom Stoppard • Michael Chabon • Laurie Colwin • The author of the Johannine epistles • The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews • Witold Rybczynski • Angelo Pellegrini • Calvin Trillin (the "Tummy Trilogy" and beyond) • William Carlos Williams • Christopher Alexander, et al. (A Pattern Language) • Anne Lamott • Yuval Levin • Philip Yancey • Colum McCann • Hilary Mantel • William deBuys • Alex Harris, photographer • Victoria Goddard • Iris Murdoch • Virginia Woolf • Hampton Sides • Louis Menand • Sophocles • Charles Dickens • Jane Austen • Wendell Berrly • John Buchan • Dorianne Laux • Charles Portis • Annie Dillard • Lewis Hyde • Sappho • 📘