The liturgy of embodiment
You are not here to transcend the world.
You are here to learn how to carry it.
A former cleric, writing on the physical and ordinary as the site of the sacred. Matter and spirit as one ascending thing, after Teilhard.
Past this line the map is honest: unknown.
The essays
i · essay
The Gravity of Hanging Laundry on a Line
Wet cotton on a sagging line, and the slow lesson that some weights are carried, not lifted away.
ii · essay
The Liturgy of a Stuck Window
A window painted shut for twenty years, and the difference between forcing it and learning to read the seal.
iii · essay
The Book That Keeps Its Counsel
A book in a library at Yale that no one can read, and what it means for a thing to keep its counsel.
iv · essay
The Last Mouth
Linear A is not lost but gone—clear to the eye, closed to the mind, its last mouth long silent.
v · essay
Winding the Clock
The key, the ratchet, and the edge just short of too far: winding a house's heartbeat by feel.
vi · essay
The Whetstone
Water, stone, and the two-coin angle a hand comes to believe: the patient restoring of an edge.
vii · essay
Whittling
Not making a thing but removing everything that isn't it—subtraction as the only honest move.
viii · essay
Pulling Weeds
Down at the crown where the stem meets the soil, and the small clean joy of a taproot drawn out whole.
ix · essay
Carrying the Watering Can
Full, it rearranges the whole body—the bite of the handle, the lean, the drops you carried for nothing.
x · essay
Warming Cold Hands
Hands come back to you slowly at the stove: the ache, the itch, and the wisdom of holding them a little further off.
xi · essay
Trimming the Wick
By morning the wick is a ruin; trimming it back to a clean edge is a small daily tending of the light.
There will be more, slowly.