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Jack Leahy's avatar

Mssr. Pageau mentions Matthew 10:16 “I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves."

I recently saw a documentary called Canada's Arctic Wolves: The Ghosts of the Arctic. It is absolutely brutal. It is literally dog eat dog. The competition between packs is ruthless. Survival is tenuous in winter and in summer. And we are sent out into this like sheep! Yikes. Let's not kid ourselves. The Way of Nature is not all moonbeams and chickadees. It's also like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0QFE-hxgI8&ab_channel=RealWild

What does it mean to be shrewd as a serpent? I am no ophiologist (I had to look that up) but snakes tend to hide in out of the way places. In tall grass, for example. Yet we are also to be as harmless/innocent as doves. Which probably means we don't get to use our hiding places to strike out against those who would harm us, i.e the wolves

I love the discussion that goes on at this substack. I think it is an important one. Yet, as Paul once put it we are up against a monster that grows in deserts (the desert of the real). The choice draws closer to find the real desert and live there or not. A time to find our caves and hermitages and monasteries in the mountains, forests and deserts. Where we might be able to live true lives according to the Way. If we do, maybe someday a new generation of Desert Fathers and Mothers will arise. That would be worth it.

Again I think of my favorite Robinson Jeffers poem that struck me as essential 30 years ago:

The Soul's Desert -- Robinson Jeffers

August 30, 1939

They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they say is echoes of echoes.

Beware of taking sides; only watch.

These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little journalists, but the governments

Of the great nations; men favorably

Representative of massed humanity. Observe them. Wrath and laughter

Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time

To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own soul's desert

And look for God--having seen man.

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Peco's avatar

Paul, I can’t recall if you have quoted from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in your essays, but I thought I’d mention this bit from The Dry Salvages (part I) which I recently came across while going through the poem. It includes some vivid references to nature and the machine:

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river

Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable,

Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;

Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;

Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.

The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten

By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.

Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder

Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated

By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting…

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