Bottled ※ Brain

And here we are, looking more and more like him each day, and becoming, in a sense, like him.

I love hymns. I love visiting churches with hymnals. I remember the hymnals as sweet-smelling maroon hardbacks aged by by overuse, with some pages detached and the spines torn. My grandmother’s Alliance church in Polomolok had those. During singing, the pastor would announce the song number; the congregation would flip the hymnal; the pianist would play the first two lines; then everyone sang. It's not a stretch to claim that such formal liturgies have largely gone out of flavor. I’ve heard of churches that split up because half of the congregation did not approve of drums. Many churches choose a more contemporary style of congregational singing, which is not wrong in itself. But I have a problem with shallow songs, with extremely repetitive lyrics, and hardly any reference to Scripture. Alistair Begg wrote about this phenomenon :  H]ear our loss of focus on the gospel in our songs. This is no comment on musical styles and tastes, but simply an observation about the lyrical c...

I know. I don’t post here as often as I should. When I do, I hardly write anything at all. I post fillers: random photos of my daily grind; quotations from books and articles I like to commit to memory; summaries of my meditations; epiphanies and random links to miscellaneous items I hope to return to but don’t. When I scroll through my blog history, I’m surprised that I’d posted about a film I would have otherwise forgotten if I hadn’t written about it in the recent past. In the early days of this blog I wrote many entries each month. There were years when I’d post something daily. It was fun. Updating blogger.com was enmeshed in my routine as toothbrushing; my day wouldn’t be complete without it. And then I gradually skipped it. The short of it is: life happened. And the internet became a dangerous place. I became more mature and private, relishing the absence of web footprint, while the world—including my circle of family, friends, and acquaintances—was only discovering the joys ...

 Craig Mod , who writes one of my favorite blogs :  I walk for weeks at a time. The longest walk I’ve done was about forty days. Do this day after day—the intense mileage, the intense wordage, the looking, the talking, the boredom-bathing, the wringing texture and life from a day—and you are changed. It’s impossible not to be. The whole thing, an ascetic practice. I even shave my head like some performative mendicant, one who lives off stories as alms. I’ve been doing walks like this for six years now, and they’ve made me more patient, kinder, more optimistic about the world, people, more amazed than ever at how many goofy-ass animals (monkeys jumping off bridges, tiny bears running like little pigs, mountain crabs that have no right to exist up on a lookout) are out there in the woods. I placed an order for his new book, Things Become Other Things: A Walking Memoir.

The sight of trees killed, maimed, and cut down depresses me. That's what I pretty much see along highways in South Cotabato these days. The powers-that-be widen the roads but kill the giant narra, mahogany, and acacia trees that have done nothing else but provide beauty and shade. When I'm elsewhere, I capture the beauty of trees, as in this quiet street in Fukuoka. The trees create a komorebi (木漏れ日), a " Japanese word for the play of sunlight and shadow created when sunlight filters through the leaves of trees. It describes the dappled light and shadow patterns on the ground beneath a forest canopy. Komorebi also carries a sense of serenity, tranquility, and appreciation for the fleeting beauty of nature, reflecting a deeper connection with the natural world."

David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue is brilliant! The ending will break your heart and make you laugh. I don't know how David—feeling close!—does it.

Here's my first post for the month of May: our dear Paul, smiling and keeping it all together.