it was warm enough this afternoon to do a little painting - green window trim for the shed. I haven’t decided how much of the other trim to paint.
the blue window is an old sample for millworkers, for custom door insets
It really was raining when I took my walk this morning—you need all the senses to completely capture the experience. The path I follow climbs through the woods, following a little stream, which is getting fuller and noisier as fall progresses. At one point there’s a pool whose edge becomes a waterfall when it fills up, and water was pouring over the edge this morning. Raindrops popped on my hat and shoulders, and also stirred up earthy smells under my feet. There are still leaves on a lot of the trees, and the yellow ones stand out in the rain, a muted glow. Sunny days are a great pleasure and always welcome, but when you live in Oregon there’s a definite feeling of rightness when the rain starts up again in the fall.
Oregon highway 126 on the way back to Eugene from Sisters
English “to bless” is as fearsome in its origin as Hebrew Barak. The Anglo-Saxon verb was bletsian, with an Old Northumbrian dialect form, bloedsia. These forms derive from a likely prehistoric Teutonic word, blodison, “to redden with blood,” from blod (“blood”).
“In heathen time,” wrote Anglo-Saxon scholar Henry Sweet, “to bless” was “primarily used in the sense of consecrating the altar with the blood of the sacrifice.” Blood was the symbol of flourishing life.The modern French verb, blesser (“to wound”). derives from a Frankish-Germanic word very similar to the Anglo-Saxon.
What we call “false cognates” often really are old cognates that have diverged in meaning over the years, as in this example from nowpublic.com
Kids today have no attention span, we are told—and then devour all seven of the Harry Potter books multiple times.
Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post, writing about the power of narrative, even in a quick-information world.
My plane into Denver arrived around sunrise this morning. The Rockies were so beautiful! Afterward I wished I had gotten out my camera and tried to take a picture. At least it made me think ahead to my landing in Portland later, and I had the camera ready to take this picture of Mt Hood.
new heavens and new earth
“…the future glimpse is already provided in Isaiah. In chapter 11, anticipating the “new creation” passage in chapters 65 and 66, the prophet declares that “the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea.” As it stands, that is a remarkable statement. How can the waters cover the sea? They are the sea. It looks as though God intends to flood the universe with himself, as though the universe, the entire cosmos, was designed as a receptacle for his love. We might even suggest, as part of a Christian aesthetic, that the world is beautiful not just because it hauntingly reminds us of its creator but also because it is pointing forward: it is designed to be filled, flooded, drenched in God, as a chalice is beautiful not least because of what we know it is designed to contain or as a violin is beautiful not least because we know the music of which it is capable.”
—N.T. Wright (2008), Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, p. 102)
