Caleb > Recent Status Updates

Like children repeating words they do not understand, we say the words [of the Jesus Prayer], waiting for the Spirit to help us in our weakness.

It was a peaceful, uneventful, glorious Sunday afternoon. Yet Kiyoaki remained convinced that at the bottom of this world, which was like a leather bag filled with water, there was a little hole, and it seemed to him that he could hear time leaking from it, drop by drop.

A man capable of love, or I should say rather a man who was by nature incapable of not loving; but a man who could not wholeheartedly accept the love of another—such a one was Sensei.

Between the spirits of Alveric and Lirazel lay all the distance there is between Earth and Elfland; and love bridged the distance, which can bridge further than that.

Go then with your face turned towards that light that beats from fairyland, and that faintly illumines the dusk between sunset and early stars, and this shall guide you till you come to the frontier and have passed the fields we know.

[A]utumn, that season of peculiar and inexhaustible influence on the mind of taste and tenderness, that season which has drawn from every poet, worthy of being read, some attempt at description, or some lines of feeling.

Only stories and magic really endure.

My peachicken has turned out to be a cock which means that in three years if he survives dogs, foxes, weasels, mink, and internal worms, he will have a tail-spread of four feet. He has one trick: he runs up to anyone holding a cigaret and snatches it away and eats it. He has eaten two hot cigarets so far.

The Maple Oats really send me. I mean they are a heap of improvement over saltless oatmeal, horse biscuit, stewed Kleenex, and the other delicacies that I have been eating. They send Regina too but I think it is because they smell like what the cows here eat. We are going to get Louis to see if he can get them in Atlanta for us.

I have just got back from 2 days in NYC. There is one advantage in it because although you see several people you wish you didn’t know, you see thousands you’re glad you don’t know.

‘That’s “Over the hills and far away,” that is. My father used to say to me, whenever we heard that tune, “Ah, lad, I come from over the hills and far away.” There’s a many tunes I don’t make head or tail of; but that speaks to me like the blackbird’s whistle. I suppose it’s the name: there’s a deal in the name of a tune.’

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smaller sign of the bud.

His steps never wandered to the hedge-banks and the lane-side in search of the once familiar herbs: these too belonged to the past, from which his life had shrunk away, like a rivulet that has sunk far down from the grassy fringe of its old breadth into a little shivering thread, that cuts a groove for itself in the barren sand.

In general, we must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them.

Put yourself in the way of the gift.

It was a wooden mouse with a tarred string tail, a common enough toy but fashioned with such love of mouse that it was almost more mouse-like than a real one. It revealed, so to speak, the essence of mouse, swift and slinking, endearing and alarming all at once.

A lovely appreciation of Goudge here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...

This is gorgeous.

Affliction in itself is not enough for the attainment of total detachment. Unconsoled affliction is necessary. There must be no consolation. No apparent consolation. Ineffable consolation then comes down.

From Rossetti’s introduction: Throughout the Vita Nuova there is a strain like the first falling murmur which reaches the ear in some remote meadow, and prepares us to look upon the sea.

Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth.