Whose little boy are you?

In retrospect, I would have to recommend against epiphanies. They are difficult on an emotional level, and they also sometimes move you to foolish and inopportune acts, which was what happened in my case.

Xerxes, I read, ‘halted his unwieldy army for days that he might contemplate to his satisfaction’ the beauty of a single sycamore. You are Xerxes in Persia. Your army spreads on a vast and arid peneplain…you call to you all your sad captains, and give the order to halt. You have seen the tree with the lights in it, haven’t you? You must have. Xerxes buffeted on a plain, ambition drained in a puff. Your men are bewildered…there is nothing to catch the eye in this flatness, nothing but a hollow, hammering sky, a waste of sedge in the lee of windblown rocks, a meager ribbon of scrub willow tracing a slumbering watercourse…and that sycamore. You saw it; you will stand rapt and mute, exalted, remembering or not remembering over a period of days to shade your head with your robe. “He had its form wrought upon a medal of gold to help him remember it the rest of his life.” We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present? Pascal saw it; he grabbed pen and paper and scrawled the one word, and wore it sewn in his shirt the rest of his life. I don’t know what Pascal saw. I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.

I thought guys were complicated. Maybe they are. But maybe they're easy and it's really me who's complicated.

The teacher is a catalyst to convert information from a high energy state (list of facts) to a low energy state (visual concept associated with known concepts).

Alright! You sir, you sir, how about a shave?Come and visit your good friend Sweeney.You sir, too sir? Welcome to the grave.I will have vengenance.I will have salvation.Who sir, you sir?No ones in the chair, Come on! Come on!Sweeney's. Waiting. I want you bleeders.You sir! Anybody!Gentlemen now don't be shy!Not one man, no, nor ten men.Nor a hundred can assuage me.I will have you!And I will get him back even as he gloatsIn the meantime I'll practice on less honorable throats.And my Lucy lies in ashesAnd I'll never see my girl again.But the work waits!I'm alive at last!And I'm full of joy!

What I learned in Rwanda was that God is not absent when great evil is unleashed. Whether that evil is man-made or helped along by darker forces, God is right there, saving those who respond to His urgings and trying to heal the rest.

There are those who are legitimately corrupt, who cannot admit that legitimacy allows them to corrupt legitimacy, and to legitimately corrupt others.

He is only one of a million no, a billion stories you could tell about the living beings on just this side of the mountain. The fact is that there are more stories in the space of a single second, in a single square foot of dirt and air and water, then we could tell in a hundred years. The word amazing isn't much of a word for how amazing it is. The fact is that there are more stories in the world than there are fish in the sea or birds in the air or lies among politicians. You could be sad at how many stories go untold, but you could also be delighted at how many stories we catch and share in delight and wonder and astonishment and illumination and sometimes even epiphany.

Shadow is the blue patch where the light doesn’t hit. It is mystery itself, and mystery is the ancients’ ultima Thule, the modern explorer’s Point of Relative Inaccessibility, that boreal point most distant from all known lands. There the twin oceans of beauty and horror meet. The great glaciers are calving. Ice that sifted to earth as snow in the time of Christ shears from the pack with a roar and crumbles to water. It could be that our instruments have not looked deeply enough. The RNA deep in the mantis’s jaw is a beautiful ribbon. Did the crawling Polyphemus moth have in its watery heart one cell, and in that cell one special molecule, and that molecule one hydrogen atom, and round that atom’s nucleus one wild, distant electron that split showed a forest, swaying?