// Wendell Berry on time… and travel – -- …though he was coming from as far as progress had reached, he belonged to an older time. It did not occur to him, any more than it would have occurred to his grandfather, to wait upon a machine for something he could furnish for himself. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqahqEyrJho/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on lightning wounds & overgrowth… -- He stayed in hospitals while his life grew back around the wound, as a lightning-struck tree will sometimes heal over the scar, until finally they gave him his papers and let him go. And now, though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside himself he was tender and a little afraid. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqYAGWRrsmS/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on a man at his love… -- At his best, Elton was a man in love – with her but not just with her. He was in love too with the world, with their place in the world, with that scanty farm, with his own life, with farming. At those times she lived in his love as in a spacious house. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqVYH0oLFQh/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on song amidst margins too narrow… -- Elton never felt that any mistake was affordable; he and Mary were living within margins that were too narrow. He required perfection of himself. When he failed, he was like the sun in a cloud, alone and burning, furious in his doubt, furious at her because she trusted in him though he doubted. How could she dare to love him, who did not love himself? And then, sometimes accountably, sometimes not, the cloud would move away, and he would light up everything around him. His own force and intelligence would be clear within him then; he would be skillful and joyful, passionate in his love of order, funny and tender. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqSzWRfrvOu/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#1491s #BetweenTwoKnees – Sooooooo goooooood! (at Seattle Repertory Theatre) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqPPe_POieP/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on how the inability to forgive them led to their rejection incessantly ruling over him… -- What troubled her were the dark and mostly silent angers that often settled upon him and estranged him from everything. At those times, she knew, he doubted himself, and he suffered and raged in his doubt. He may have been born with this doubt in him, she sometimes imagined; it was as though his soul were like a little moon that would be dark at times and bright at others. But she knew also that her parents’ rejection of him had cost him dearly. Even as he defied them to matter to him, they held a power over him that he could not shake off. In his inability to forgive them, he consented to this power, and their rejection stood by him and measured him day by day. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqLH8ZIrXHw/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on the all of knowing how… -- Once, when they had killed hogs and Elton and Mary had stayed at home to finish rendering their lard, the boiling fat had foamed up and begun to run over the sides of the kettle. Mary ran to the house and called Walter on the party line. “Tell him to throw the fire to it,” Walter said. “Tell him to dip out some lard and throw it on the fire.” Elton did so, unbelieving, but the fire flared, grew hotter, the foaming lard subsided in the kettle, and Elton’s face relaxed from anxiety and self-accusation into a grin. “Well,” he said, quoting Walter in Walter’s voice, “it’s all in knowing how.” -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqIdRAyraGt/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on unceasing love… -- “People sometimes talk of God’s love as if it’s a pleasant thing. But it is terrible, in a way. Think of all it includes. It included Thad Coulter, drunk and mean and foolish, before he killed Mr. Feltner, and it included him afterwards.” -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqF6-XqLeoW/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on ceaselessness… -- It seemed to him that she knew everything he knew, and loved him anyhow. She loved him, minute by minute, not only as he had been but as he had become. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqAyrEarTRF/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on those who keep the memory of a place… -- The blacksmith – a low, broad, grizzled man by the name of Elder Johnson – was the best within many miles, a fact well known to himself, which sometimes made him difficult. He also remembered precisely every horse or mule he had ever nailed a shoe on, and so he was one of the keepers of the town’s memory. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp5Ev4OL8Di/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on comparison as the thief of joy… -- And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp2hcUprQRo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on picking it all up… -- I had learned what I knew, the bare outline of the event, without asking questions, both fearing the pain that I knew surrounded the story and honoring the silence that surrounded the pain. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpz6ZABrNdr/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on the time of our lives… -- It is always the first morning of Creation and always the last day, always the now that is in time and the Now that is not, that has filled time with reminders of Itself. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpxWfilLeXH/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Wendell Berry on death and presence… -- But the past is present also. And this, I think, is a part of the greater mystery we call eternity. Though Mat Feltner has been dead for twenty-five years, and I am now older than he was when I was born and have grandchildren of my own, I know his hands, their way of holding a hammer or a hoe or a set of checklines, as well as I know my own. I know his way of talking, his way of cocking his head when he began a story, the smoking pipe stem held an inch from his lips. I have in my mind, not just as a memory but as a consolation, his welcome to me when I returned home from the university and, later, from jobs in distant cities. When I sat down beside him, his hand would clap lightly onto my leg above the knee; my absence might have lasted many months, but he would say as though we had been together the day before, “Hello, Andy.” The shape of his hand is printed on the flesh of my thigh as vividly as a birthmark. -- Wendell Berry, Fidelity: Five Stories (fiction), 1992 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpkmWlurDTw/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Bono on fights not with the world, but with yourself… -- Service, ambition, duty, loyalty, the desire to be the best, the desire to say yes – not such bad character traits to have cherished. I always thought of them as strengths, but lately I wonder if somewhere along the line they became a cover for something more suspicious. The demand to be at the center of the action. To make God in our own image, to help her across the road as if she were a little old lady. This perpetual longing to be filled with the extraordinary so that you begin to lose appreciation for the ordinary. If your shoulder is black and blue from trying to enter every locked room, maybe there are rooms you do not need to enter. Or maybe some doors have a key in the lock that will gently turn. This long struggle for art, for justice, for self-aggrandizement. All this ambition, all this ego. Are these goals fired by the engine of a sense of duty or of a swollen sense of self ? So often the fight is not with the world but with yourself. -- Bono – Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (memoir) – 2022 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpfZOROry13/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Bono on the latter days weakness of strength… -- Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer work for you in the second half; they positively work against you. The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr put it to me like this: “It’s our strengths rather than our weaknesses that often hold us back.” -- Bono – Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (memoir) – 2022 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpc2ng8r7Z9/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

// Bono on theolocation… -- So where is God? Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable. In the slums and cardboard boxes where the poor have to play house. In the doorways as we step over the divine on our way to work. In the silence of a mother who has unknowingly infected her child with a virus that will end both their lives. God is in the cries heard under the rubble of war, in the bare hands digging for air. God is with the terrorized. At sea with the desperate, clinging onto drowning dreams. God is with the refugee. I hear his only son was one. God is with the poor and the vulnerable, and God is with us if we are with them. -- Bono – Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story (memoir) – 2022 (at Crown Hill) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpVIgdhLf-y/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=