Taking a Nap

Luke 8:
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"Now it came to pass on a certain day, that he went into a ship with his disciples...
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But as they sailed he fell asleep..."

Drawing by Ali Wright, shared with permission.  Thanks, Ali.

Good for me to remember at times when a nap is needful but my North American culturalized brain objects to my taking one.

On writing fiction. From William Faulkner's 1950 Nobel Speech in Stockholm

...the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1949/faulkner-speech.html

Welcome, Finnegan.

Speaking Under the Stars

I've been reading the last chapters of the book of John.

I noticed Jesus' words at the end of chapter 14:  "Arise, let us go hence."

Then chapters 15-17 continue the discourse that he began as he and his disciples sat together at the passover feast and the end of that (chapter 17) is his wonderful intercessory prayer.

So I imagined that these chapters may have been a message to his disciples, spoken out of doors, beneath a night sky, somewhere between the upper room in Jerusalem and the Gethsemane garden.

Cloudy or clear, given the general absence of light pollution, the sky would have been magnificent.

And I imagine, under that night sky, these phrases:

"All things that the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that he shall take of mine, and shall shew it unto you."

"These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace."

"O Father...I have given unto them the words which thou gavest me; and they have received them, and have known surely that I came out from the, and they have believed that thou didst send me. I pray for them."

"They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.  Sanctify them through thy truth."

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us;"