a kind of salvation

Excerpt from #112, Laudato Si' - On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis

Yet we can once more broaden our vision. We have the freedom needed to limit and direct technology; we can put it at the service of another type of progress, one which is healthier, more human, more social, more integral. 

tin can luminaries!  fun craft - instructions on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmAON87-KaQ

Liberation from the dominant technocratic paradigm does in fact happen sometimes, for example, when cooperatives of small producers adopt less polluting means of production, and opt for a non-consumerist model of life, recreation and community. 

Or when technology is directed primarily to resolving people’s concrete problems, truly helping them live with more dignity and less suffering. 

Or indeed when the desire to create and contemplate beauty manages to overcome reductionism through a kind of salvation which occurs in beauty and in those who behold it. 

The grill works!  Thanks, Austin!

An authentic humanity, calling for a new synthesis, seems to dwell in the midst of our technological culture, almost unnoticed, like a mist seeping gently beneath a closed door. 

Gently seeping outside our front door.  That which we call a rotting pumpkin for the first four months living in our apartment, our neighbors call: The Life Cycle.

Will the promise last, in spite of everything, with all that is authentic rising up in stubborn resistance?

the long lesson

Again I resume the long lesson:

how small a thing can be pleasing,

how little in this hard world it takes

to satisfy the mind and bring it to its rest.

- Wendell Berry

Smooth Granny Smiths: one for each weekday lunch (plus one, just in case).

CUCUMBERS grown – I helped some by remembering to water each day!  

But God did even that yesterday.

A refrigerator burgeoning with recycled Tupperware with ever-elusive contents (yogurt or hummus?).

The promise of a blank canvas.

(Check back.  I'm thinking COLOR.)