It's another sodden early-spring day: warmish, but wet. Here's some henbit, my favorite of the first wildflowers, flourishing by the kitchen garden. Henbit is edible and supposedly very good for you; you can make tea with it, or cook with it as a green. I tried making henbit pesto once and can report that it was not very tasty. Or I guess it tasted like health, which too often amounts to the same thing. I have not tried brewing it as a tea. I should, though; there's certainly plenty of it about at the moment, and who among us could not use more health than they already have?
More wet garden scenes:
Forsythia, transplanted when we made the kitchen garden last fall, blooming by the back wall.
I don't know what the following is. It's really in our neighbor's yard, though it's spread over into the back corner of ours. If I'm not looking, I miss it. It's not mock-orange, I don't think, and it's not apple blossom –– just some white early-blooming bush that is briefly beautiful.
It was surprisingly difficult to get a good shot of the blooms themselves.
Most of my daffodils are plain old fast-naturalizing yellow ones, but I do have some lovely white ones in bloom now:
I really should plant narcissi, of which I don't think I have any at all.
My little boy statue with daffodils ready to bloom around him:
I see a few more nascent bluebells as well.
I found my copy of Péguy's Portal of the Mystery of Hope: in the backyard, where I'd been working day before yesterday, and obviously dropped it on my way inside. It had gotten rained on, but not too badly, and after a night on the drying rack is readable today.
Here are some passages from the Preface, by Jean Bastaire, which I thought were noteworthy:
There is no authentic poet who is not also an adventurer of the spirit. Péguy exemplifies this definition, which excludes all hedonists of the pen and miasmic crooners. One does not come under his Portal, with its simple allure, without risking everything. Or rather, one is pushed there by the supreme threat of losing heart and falling into the void.
...
The theological poet, like the symbolic theologian, proceeds from a reading of Creation. For him, the world is another sacred Scripture, in which he finds recounted a sublime event. It is the same event as that recounted in that other Book, which the patriarchs, the prophets, and the evangelists have put into words. There are thus two pathways to Revelation. Far from being redundant, these two ways echo each other. It is as if, from the beginning, the divine Word, while taking form in the sacred texts, had also wished to become incarnate in a cosmic flesh.
This is something to chew on as I peck away at my little translation effort and get closer to seeing Éve in something like its wholeness. It's also an articulation of something I think I'm trying to do in my own work, though I didn't quite recognize that until I read Bastaire's paragraph. My interest in theology is intense –– it ought to be, since I married it. And I have thought of myself as a theological poet, though in the same thought I've often asked myself how, exactly, I thought that this was so, when so much of what I was writing wasn't overtly about God, and a secular reader might be forgiven for thinking it wasn't at all. That's less true of the writing I'm doing now than it was in earlier years –– the hermit, for starters, isn't exactly secular, except in the sense that he is in the world and, in his own inescapable way, of it –– but still, putting together for myself what exactly my project is, if that isn't glorifying things too much, is an ongoing process. Of course I hope it's a process bound up in the process of my own sanctification, which is always a bumpy road.
Meanwhile, and more mundanely what am I wearing today?
We're going out tonight to see a play at the Abbey, so I will be changing clothes later. But for the day, I thought I'd go for some items I haven't worn much: old (circa 2014) charcoal-gray ponte-knit skinny jeans, secondhand bamboo tunic top, purple Xero Oswegos. I like this silvery-gray top, which is soft and light and fluid, but I tend to forget to wear it. It's nice left loose as a tunic, but also tucks well into a waistband for more definition.
For a little more warmth and finish, I added a thrifted gray patterned cardigan I haven't worn in a long time:
As always, I like the tonality of a color layered on itself in different shades. Gray does this beautifully, and I always feel good in it. Even though this outfit is very simple and casual, its understatedness makes it feel elegant. The line of this cardigan always seems to flatter, too, while the pattern adds interest. I'll probably opt for a dress for the evening, but really I could just change my shoes and be dressed to go out. As it is, I feel dressed for the work I need to do today, and I hope that this will motivate me to do it.