Welcome, but you have been warned

I have wanted to keep a web-journal for a while. I wanted it to be a paean to birding and how it has revived my spirituality. But I haven't been birding much lately, and I still have some spirituality, and I suspect the birding-communing with God connection might be a wee bit esoteric for many, even those who know and love me.

I am still planning to say rather a lot about birds. You have been warned. But I also wanted a place to also post new and old thoughts and musings and poemish things about God and liturgy and Christian spirituality. Feel free to copy down and use any of them however you wish. And I'm going to be irreverent at times as well, and angry and sad and occasionally downright despairing. Again, you have been warned. And occasionally I might tell strange and riotous stories, like those from my first year of college, a keen young missionary's child fresh out of East Africa--running through the woods with a squirrel collar while a reluctant crowd of American college students tracked me, that sort of thing.

I make no promises to write every day, every week—but I will write when there’s time enough and things to say. And when I get a chance I will post a host of poems and musing from the manuscript of prayers I have.

By the way, in case you don't know, I am in Scotland, in Edinburgh, living at the foot of Arthur's Seat and studying on a cobbled street in George Square. This is my life this year:

flannel sheets curry from the back of the Mosque woolly sweaters bedroom slippers magpies double-decker buses berries libraries goat’s milk yogurt the tracery of branches on leafless trees distracted sheep slate seas old stone houses long red hair

And the question of the day, nay, the year, is this:
Why am I in grad school when I could be pretending to save the world?

The answer, improbably, lies somewhere near these words of Michel Foucault:

There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all.

[That's probably illegal. Is it illegal to quote people on the Internet? I need a former student, wise in the ways of the world, to inform me...]

At any rate, I am back in school after a long time out of it. And I have sunk beneath the weight of too many words, my eyes grown worse—words used in argument, as means to an end, with little attention to their own peculiar aesthetic or to their power to move more than the mind…

So just in case
Your lives, like mine,
Through necessity or bare neglect,
Give short shrift
Of late
To poetry:

a few words from T.S. Eliot:

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And to know the place for the first time.

[Again with the need for a wise student.]

Be well on your various explorations!