I've seen more battles lost than I have battles won

And I've got this intuition, says it's all for your fun.

Manifest Destiny

Why We Are Truly a Nation:

Because we rage inside

the old boundaries,

like a young girl leaving the Church,

scared of her parents.

Because we all dream of saving

the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,

shielding the herd with our bodies.

Because grief unites us,

like the locked antlers of moose

who die on their knees in pairs.

William Matthews.

The Thing That Hath Been, It Is That Which Shall Be

You can’t have a scientific debate with a conclusion that isn’t allowed to change.

As the old line goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into - which is why I rarely engage in debates about evolution anymore.

Not because I think it can’t… pic.twitter.com/wew6IBO4vP

— Alex Boge (@alexboge) March 29, 2026

Snip:

In practice, almost everyone I encounter arguing against evolution is coming from a creationist framework - typically rooted in literal interpretations found in traditions like Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. And that matters, because it’s not just disagreement over data - it’s a commitment to a conclusion that can’t be revised, grounded in faith rather than evidence - a framework that holds the conclusion in place.

At most, you’ll get limited acceptance of “microevolution,” while rejecting the broader framework regardless of the evidence.

And critically, no new evidence is ever brought forward.

Instead, the pattern is always the same:
- arguing definitions,
- setting arbitrary or impossible standards,
- or demanding that evolution occur within a timeframe of their choosing, incompatible with the theory.

So the discussion never progresses. It just cycles...

Reminded me of venerable Jorge:

[T]he work of our order and in particular the work of this monastery, a part—indeed, the substance—is study, and the preservation of knowledge. Preservation of, I say, not search for, because the property of knowledge, as a divine thing, is that it is complete and has been defined since the beginning, in the perfection of the Word which expresses itself to itself. 

Preservation, I say, and not search, because it is a property of knowledge, as a human thing, that it has been defined and completed over the course of the centuries, from the preaching of the prophets to the interpretation of the fathers of the church. There is no progress, no revolution of ages, in the history of knowledge, but at most a continuous and sublime recapitulation.

Human history proceeds with a motion that cannot be arrested, from the creation through the redemption, toward the return of Christ triumphant, who will appear seated on a cloud to judge the quick and the dead; but human and divine knowledge does not follow this path: steady as a fort that does not cede, it allows us, when we are humble and alert to its voice, to follow, to predict this path, but it is not touched by the path. 

I am He who is, said the God of the Jews. I am the way, the truth, and the life, said our Lord. There you have it: knowledge is nothing but the awed comment on these two truths. Everything else that has been said was uttered by the prophets, by the evangelists, by the fathers and the doctors, to make these two sayings clearer.

Nothing to add, I guess.  And there is no new thing under the sun...

I dreamed I saw the bomber jet planes

Riding shotgun in the sky, turning into butterflies above our nation.

Ἡ τελευταία μέρα

The Last Day:

The day was cloudy. No one could come to a decision;

a light wind was blowing. ‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ someone said.

A few slender cypresses nailed to the slope, and, beyond, the sea

grey with shining pools.

The soldiers presented arms as it began to drizzle.

‘Not a north-easter, the sirocco,’ was the only decision heard.

And yet we knew that by the following dawn

nothing would be left to us, neither the woman drinking sleep at our side

nor the memory that we were once men,

nothing at all by the following dawn.

‘This wind reminds me of spring,’ said my friend

as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, ‘the spring

that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea.

So unexpected. So many years have gone. How are we going to die?’

A funeral march meandered through the thin rain.

How does a man die? Strange no one’s thought about it.

And for those who thought about it, it was like a recollection from old chronicles

from the time of the Crusades or the battle of Salamis.

Yet death is something that happens: how does a man die?

Yet each of us earns his death, his own death, which belongs to no one else

and this game is life.

The light was fading from the clouded day, no one decided anything.

The following dawn nothing would be left to us, everything surrendered, even our hands,

and our women slaves at the springheads and our children in the quarries.

My friend, walking beside me, was singing a disjointed song:

‘In spring, in summer, slaves . . .’

One recalled old teachers who’d left us orphans.

A couple passed, talking:

‘I’m sick of the dusk, let’s go home,

let’s go home and turn on the light.’

George Seferis. 

I'll put a pebble in my shoe

And watch me walk.

θεὸς ἄγει πρὸς ἄταν

The Breathing, the Endless News:

Every god is lonely, an exile
composed of parts: elk horn,
cloven hoof. Receptacle

for wishes, each god is empty
without us, penitent,
raking our yards into windblown piles ...

Children know this; they are
the trailings of gods. Their eyes
hold nothing at birth then fill slowly

with the myth of ourselves. Not so the dolls,
out for the count, each toe pouting from
the slumped-over toddler clothes:

no blossoming there. So we
give our children dolls, and
they know just what to do ---

line them up and shoot them
With every execution
doll and god grow stronger.

Rita Dove.

Ora, ora pro nobis peccatoribus

Nunc et in hora mortis.

Things Will Go as They Will and There’s No Need to Hurry to Meet Them

The Sound of Trees:

I wonder about the trees.

Why do we wish to bear

Forever the noise of these

More than another noise

So close to our dwelling place?

We suffer them by the day

Till we lose all measure of pace,

And fixity in our joys,

And acquire a listening air.

They are that that talks of going

But never gets away;

And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,

That now it means to stay.

My feet tug at the floor

And my head sways to my shoulder

Sometimes when I watch trees sway,

From the window or the door.

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

Robert Frost.

#throwbackthursday

Many things have changed. (Mar 2022)

To yearn admits you're outside to me

Grow up.

To Disappear

Drizzle:

Baudelaire: "The dead, the poor dead, have their bad hours."

But the dead have no watches, no grief and no hours.

At first not smoking took all my time: I did it

a little by little and hour by hour.

   Per diem. Pro bono. Cui bono? Pro rata.

But the poor use English. Off and on. By the hour.

   "I'm sorry but we'll have to stop now." There tick but

fifty minutes in the psychoanalytic hour.

Vengeance is mine, yours, his or hers, ours, yours again

(you-all's this time), and then (yikes!) theirs. I prefer ours.

Twenty minutes fleeing phantoms at full tilt and then

the cat coils herself like a quoit and sleeps for hours.

William Matthews.