Earth-Notes Toward Human Unity

•  It is time to dignify the work of the hands again. Even the most humble household tasks. It is time.
• Mockery is a terrible impediment to necessary change. Mockery is nuclear.
• It is time for simplicity and plain living to become the norm.
• Time for us to leave off speaking of progress in computational and mechanical terms, and seek instead connections of the heart.
• Time itself has always been the first instrument of the imagination. To re-imagine the world, one must first re-imagine the use of time.
• To renew the earth, one must take and spend the time.
• For two centuries now we have obsessively substituted the ownership of machines and the burning of fuel for the blessing of undivided attention connecting heart to human heart and humanity to the earth. But for all that we have gained in terms of physical comfort and material weath, we have lost so much. Even in our immediate neighborhoods, we no longer believe ourselves made for one another: capable of comforting one another and of managing our trials communally. Here is an obesity of self-regard, which makes us unfit for the hundred foot walk to the neighbors house to say how are you, and really how are you?
• The home. The castle of the soul. The possible ground of expression of every nuance of decency and human relationship: The look of adoration. The word spoken in comfort. The prayer uttered in sorrow. To keep it clean, this place. To decorate it in sincerity of heart. To fashion it into an instrument of hospitality. To fill it with the smell of wholesome food. What are these labors if not holy, and beyond the measure of every number, except perhaps for the holy number one, which represents unity and amity? How outrageous that our understanding is so diminished as to denigrate the work that might be done at home, because that work cannot and is not remunerated in money. Infinitely sad.
• Many will consider our low-tech labors a foolish waste of time. We ought to consider them as acts of love: love of the earth expressed in preserving as best we can the gifts of nature for the uses of the future; and also love of meaningful labor. Love of the movement of the body. Love of the consistent incarnational miracle of the body's labor and the mind's attention translating into order, utility, and beauty. Take for instance the chaos of the overfilled dirty-clothes hamper, the contents of which by means of the labors of the body, are transformed to a neat pile of clean and folded clothes, which can then be used to clothe and dignify the body. A bountiful circle. A virtuous cycle. We need more of these, in all places and at all levels. God grant us more.
• Nothing sadder and more wasteful than our modern underestimation of the body to heal itself and keep itself and the psyche happy. We do not sing when we work. We used to sing when we worked! Why not sing again?  
• It is time for us to speak not of growth but of managed decline. Material consumption must no longer be used as a means to wield power over the earth or its inhabitants. On the contrary, consumption must consciously be avoided and the world re-defined and re-experienced as a space of shared enjoyment, in which the primary effort is toward a prosperity of perception and imagination.
• Here is the inexplicable gift of life. What shall we do with it? Enjoy it. Love it. Live it. Cultivate it to greater and greater beauty by means of the collective application of the human imagination, which can often be done without a single cent or mechanical crutch. Consider Socrates, who taught without a book. Consider choirs, who produce music without any instruments other than the human voice. Consider the game of tag, whose only necessary ingredients are self-locomotive children and a knowledge of the game. Consider mere conversation, which is the most nourishing food of human friendship and conviviality that there can be. Consider the act of sexual love, with its power literally to produce humanity.
• There are no necessary limits to the growth of love, but there are many that we ourselves impose on love and human unity: avarice being the most obvious and the most viciously barbed.
• Let's choose love.

HB

Until Tuesday 22!