Continue Reading »One night each week he was allowed to leave his father, his mother, and his younger brother Tom asleep in their small house next door and run here, up the dark spiral stairs to his grandparents’ cupola, and in this sorcerer’s tower sleep with thunders and visions, to wake befor the crystal jingle of milk bottles and perform his ritual magic.
What you have here in this book then is a gathering of dandelions from all those years. The wine metaphor which appears again and again in these pages is wonderfully apt. I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts to open the memories out and see what they had to offer.
Ray Bradbury, Just This Side of Byzantium — An Introduction, Dandelion Wine
Summer doesn’t officially arrive for a while, but after an hour out in the Texas sun on my quarantine walk, you can start to feel the sweat pooling around your neck and dripping down your scalp. I saw somebody on Twitter recommending this as a good time to start reading (or re-reading) Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Why not?
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This popped up on my Twitter this morning from a unexpected and practically random source. The following story is told in Sam Weller’s biography of Ray Bradbury.
Continue Reading »Last night’s story time for the kid. I like to get into it, so I started to read it like I was spitting bars, street style. After a few pages he asked me to stop spitting on him. 🎤🔥
The soul has to make a choice, and the outcome will either break it into pieces or enable it to sail to its destination in God. And the choice comes down to this: Will the soul accept or reject suffering? Will it make this suffering its own, or struggle against it, seeing it as something alien to itself?
…If he chooses to accept his suffering, he must embrace it with the wholeness of his life; he must discover and accept the proper relation to his suffering. If he can do this, he will have transformed his suffering so that in the end his only reality will be God. But if he continues to resist his suffering, refusing to find his salvation in it, his anguish will continue unabated.
The question is ultimately this: Will he offer himself as a voluntary sacrifice to the will of God? …He must accept as his own will, as his own desire, the will of God for his life. If this happens, he will cease being anxious about his sufferings, for he will see that they too are the signs and tokens of God’s presence.
~Archimandrite Aimilianos, Psalms and the Life of Faith, p. 100-102.