We went out for a Night Walk out in our field not twenty minutes ago this New Year’s Eve, with friends staying over the night. It was great fun rushing about in the snow and cold with hot chocolate waiting surely in a warm kitchen at the end of it. And so it was. We thrashed and ran and tumbled and screamed aloud at the cold night air and wished the sky would open and swallow us whole into a dark envelope of love. And so it did. Reborn and thrown up back into the wide, snow’d, night, we shuffled back through heavy dark to the house off somewhere to the left and lit from within. How warm and inviting it looked from outside! But not before I threw the camera around some more and tapped the well again.

Happy New Year if it hasn’t yet arrived, and welcome to January 2006 if it has!

Starkness from beauty. Beauty from starkness. Choose your poison.

I am so often left empty when gazing on beauty. I feel so removed from it, that I crave it and reject it at the same time. I love beauty; partly because there is so little of it in the world, and partly because there is so much of it in the world. Pergolesi seeps from my computer as I lean back and conceptualize the image above here; play with it and twist it some. Voices of angels and love of a presence I can never accept float to my ears (well, my one good ear at the mo’). Its like a warm bath to listen to the Stabat. It is so beautiful I feel my throat closing in grief. Is it because I will never be able to really live what it is to be in the thrall of Faith? Is it perhaps like being acutely aware of possibility and yet being shuffled down another road? I often have wished I had Faith. I see icons of religion, of Faith, and my heart burns for them. I want – somewhere in my heart – to feel that power. I want to feel the ecstasy flow into me and gouge my soul with light. This will never happen. So perhaps I am the critic who recognizes beauty in god, yet will never be part of that creative process.

This beauty, ecstasy, has been so destructive in the world. How hateful of Israel to put up that damned wall. I want to spray paint on it or blow it up or something. I want to to kill the beheaders in Iraq. I want to shake sense into the wretches blowing themselves up in Israel. I want to kick all IDF soldiers in the nuts until they beg forgiveness for the destruction of Palestinian lands/resources. Did you know that often the simplest tactic in IDF offences is simply to go into a Palestinian village and cut down all the olive trees? This deprives the inhabitants of a livelihood as it takes decades for an olive tree to grow to fruit-bearing years. What will they do then? It fosters such deep-seated anger that even an uninvolved Canadian thousands of miles away tastes the bile of this act. This all is an old story. Most know that any Faith causes as much grief as ecstasy. Would that all peoples were as clever as I to realize that we are all that we are on this earth. You die, and you’re dead. Fin.