The Great Sabotage - III
On Time Unmeasured and Soul Unplanned
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Tim.
Part I
On Time Unmeasured and Soul Unplanned
A Lyrical Meditation on the Power of the Imagination
I once took a walk into the Oxford countryside with my daughter, Lyric. She was seven. I don’t remember the occasion. But we seldom needed one. I walked daily for the two years we lived there. And it changed my life. On this particular walk, Lyric and I talked the entire time about her imagination. At one point, when we crested the hill of the Seven Sisters and took a break to climb a low-limbed oak tree, she explained to me why climbing a tree was better for you than playing on a jungle gym at the local park.
As we wound our way through the woods and across the hay field, aside the blackberry patch that grew on the side of a hill, we discussed how cloud shapes affect your imagination. Of course, we were not consulting a recent psychology study or the new research of neuroaesthetics. We were simply intuiting the physical world before us and pulling on thought-threads as they emerged.
Lyric, who is 18 now, often recounts that walk. She refers to it as a “core memory.” And neither one of us fully remembers our extemporaneously brilliant moments in the commentary. But we do remember the walk itself and the tree-climb, the blackberry patch, the fields, and the clouds.
England’s clouds move like island clouds because that’s what they are—I have to remind myself of that fact. One is always racing clouds. And that is not a bad thing. In fact, it is a very good thing.
Our tree-climb-cloud walk does not remain in our memories because it accomplished any great thing. We did not “have to” walk. We did not time our walk or measure it in miles. Though when I sit here and think on it, it was probably at least an eight-mile walk. But we did not log it anywhere.
Lyric would tell you that she “loved” that walk. And so would I—a walk with no agenda, naked of ambition, full of surprise, and timeless. If I pressed you, you could probably recount a similar experience—some indelible moment with a friend or loved one you treasure.
And if you pressed me, you would discover dozens of such walks—with a loved one, alone, at dusk, in rain, through snow, at dawn, under stars. And I’d tell you that the best things in life often happen in tree-climb-cloud moments of aimless happenstance.
And those moments keep their patina the more one thinks about them, writes about them, and learns from them. Not a school-learning. Such walks are not homework. But a different kind of learning. Lyric keeps the walk in her memory as core to her life, not because it helped her figure out a life-cipher, but because it figured her life.
In that sense, tree-climb-cloud walks teach us far better than new principles in neuroaesthetics. And maybe they don’t teach us at all. Maybe they learn us.
Maybe the landscape is telling the skyscape the mythology of Fathers and Daughters—a mythopoeia where the humans, through gesture, laughter, and thought, give to the world of cloud and tree and peacock and fox, the delightful lesson of Nothingtime. A time unmeasured and unplanned, a time re-collected in other times, of tranquility and peace. There, the trees and clouds learn of patience, grow sturdier with joy, and sing the virtue of holy participation. We, the myths of the Land.
Ever since I sat down to write you this note, I’ve grown more shy. How could I tell you all that sits on the tip of my pen?
And what of this mythos and its history? Slowly, the hills and blackberry patches dig deeper, crafting theses and novels illustrating the profound impact Fathers and Daughters and Mothers and Sons had upon the earth. They are not the terra incognita but terra luminosita—the great human light (lucis), the splendor all living things hold their breath to see, hear, and touch.
Even the rocks cry out in rhapsody, giving their petra-verse to interpret these creatures roaming the land with their souls ablaze, intuiting the mysteries with the angels search. The Logos itself, Jesus the Wise Architect, dances alongside Yahweh singing his delight in this new myth made of ancient thought, crafted with the richest philosophy, carved out of the marble of God’s imagination.
And the woods would write treatises in honor of the great myths of the land, building constitutions from the universal virtues found in the bedrock of the human intellect. And all the leaves clap, marveling how out of the simplicity of time spent came the strength to end wars and wisdom to cut new paths where the old ones had grown over.
Lyric would tell you there is power and mystery and beauty in a walk. All the land agrees.
Part II
On the Firelight of Our Souls
The Year We Set Sail
When I sat down to write this post, I intended to write something straight on cultural. But what came out was slant. After I finished, I sat back in my Adirondack chair and felt a kind of peace. I didn’t know if it was peace in the writing, the telling, or a moment of joy recalled, revisiting me. Maybe it was all the above. And I write this andendum now only to tell you that I believe we need more meditations in the world. And fewer hot takes, fewer “You should” articles, and more “Come with me” essays. If you read Chesterton much, you’ll find that he is doing something deeper than explaining how he came to faith or what faith is. He’s processing our world in real time. And he’s arguing a point he believes passionately. And he’s enjoying himself. That’s why his writing feels like he just wrote it yesterday. I find that I don’t have much time for “You should” … but I have all kinds of time for the firelight of our souls. I want to stoke those coals. I want to fan into flame the human heart. I want to harness the moonlight and fuel a countervision to all that yells and screams at us these days. What if this year, which is still young, wasn’t the year we fell mute in our anxiety of wars and AI, but was the year we set sail? My friend Ethan once wrote that to me on a big hardback copy of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems. “To Tim—the year we set sail.” And we did. And we can too. This is not an apology for a certain kind of writing; it is a setting of a new horizon for a certain kind of living. Living on purpose. Not living accidentally. Accidentally noticing how the days fill up with more than we name in our prayers of thanksgiving. Not living as a totem—that solitary figure of pagan idolatry that collects the wailings of a people angry and haunted and hopeless without knowing it. Totems do not journey anywhere. They eat entropy and fall away in the wind. The rain doesn’t water them; it wastes them. Totems do not sail because they cannot navigate the stars. And the breath from the ancient wind—Ruach—that stirs the oceans, the great waters where no ships wander, totems do not hear. But we do. We sail the pneuma-gales, we interpret the paths of the stars, we harness storms, and drink the rain, we run hard toward the horizon line, sprinting past entropy into everlasting and everlasting. The pagan world of the corporations and governments? It is they who are the totems, signaling the path to the pagan temples, where the priests, dressed in the cape of bird feathers, heat the blades, readying them for the blood sacrifice. This language of paganism and temples and sacrifices is not a farce, it is not a myth, it is the reality we’ve forgotten. Because we’ve listened to these totems for too long, and we think we are now too sophisticated for child sacrifice and the blood rituals of Dark Lords—even though we’re drowning in a culture that revels in both. And that’s exactly what they want us to believe. When C.S. Lewis gave a lecture at Durham and prophesied to his audience that we were castrating ourselves, abolishing ourselves, conquering nature, and giving our souls to those in power, it was hailed as one of the greatest lectures on ethics and the Moral Law. We don’t know what the Moral Law is because we’ve destroyed it. But Lewis wasn’t content to let his lecture sit in libraries of the learned. He wrote That Hideous Strength and showed, in a bloodbath scene that ends the book, how the evil minds of the age will not stand, in the end, over Nature. Because God is not silent on the matter of totems. And he does not tarry in ancient patience, letting the innocent be slaughtered. He will send an Alejandro. And the reckoning will come in all its fury. And we will gape and wonder how this God we thought was light could bring such a dark sword. But we’ve forgotten that we’ve only ever known the back of the world; it is brutal in the shadows, while the sun also rises. We pine for the front of the world, we set our chins and reach for the light, and find that the light comes with darkness added in, with darkness rounding the world, even as the light gives us the day to breathe—carpe diem! Yes, seize it! Gather ye rosebuds while ye may! For this is the year we set sail. This is the day we hoist the main sail. This is the day we step from the back of the world into a countervision. From anxiety to hope. Ah, hope, there is the word we’ve forgotten. Faith, _________, and love. Faith, the word of dogma—the dividing line of denominations. Love, the virtue that wins—the erotica of the world and the salvation of sinners. But what of hope? If faith is the sea, then hope is the fury of wind in our sails. It isn’t the peace on the coastline, it is the maelstrom upon the high waters. We are harnessing it while the totems rot. We are riding on the whitecaps, nearly rising from the reaching heaving waves, and we are shouting into the storm—eating its fury and crying out for more. And it comes—the storm does. We’re racing it to the end of the world, where the streets have no name, where the totems burn in our morning fires along the beach, for we are not the dead ones, we are not the hollow men, we are children of the still point, the raucous band of poet warriors alien to the world while treading the dawn like it’s our palace court. We are running into the high mountains of our hope, getting thicker with every step, leaving our ghost condition behind. Our fast ships are beached below the tree line. And the saints descend the high pass to greet us. And the great poets sing with us. And the great warriors salute us. And the stars burn with us. We, the Children of Hope.
Thank you for being here. For disrupting. Not with shouts, but with something more resonant and rebellious. Beauty.
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