Remembering the singularity . . .

It's Sol's day . . . and warming trend is settling over TulseyTown. Forecasters say it's likely to last ten days, anyway.

SUNDAY SERMON 12.22.24

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold

… with cracked hands that ached

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him

...I'd wake and hear the cold splintering,

when the rooms were warm...

I'd rise and dress.

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know? What did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices.

--Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays,” Collected Works, Liveright Publishing 1966

If we fell asleep each night remembering “the singularity we once were” and awoke each morning with the bright awareness that every atom in our bodies can be traced to one of the first stars … we would be too wonder-struck by the miraculousness of it all to deal with the mundane. But the dishes have to be washed and the emails have to be written, so we avert our eyes from the majesty and mystery of a universe that made them in order to look at itself, from the majesty and mystery of what we are. – Maria Popova, in The Marginalian, 12.22.24.