Incarnation. Set against other ancient religious texts (Near-Eastern or further afield, it matters not), the Hebrew canon, which forms the Old Testament in the Bible, is peculiar in its attention to detail. Granted that it is always dangerous to provide a summary account of what 'everyone else thought' and compare it to what 'the exceptions to the rule thought', comparisons still must be made to illustrate some intended meaning. So to illustrate: it was typical in most (if not all) ancient religious texts to treat the mundane details as if they were bearers, or were exemplar of, some 'higher' meaning, and so, in a final sense, inconsequential for the meaning of the text. Most contemporary examples of 'spiritual writings' that are to be found today, regardless whether the authors are Christian or not, exhibit this same sort of denial of the intrinsic value of the details. But the Hebrew canon is very concerned with the details: times and places, familial lineage, significance of names, etc, which, as I said above, sets its apart.

To illustrate what is meant, take the doctrine of the Incarnation. A 'spiritual' reflection of the doctrine, which would tend away from appreciating the Hebrew background against which the Incarnation is set--especially in the first three Gospels, but also in the fourth Gospel--would reflect on the significance of God become human, God sharing in human misery, the dignity imparted to the human person because of this divine condescension, the accomplishment of the reconciliation of humanity to its Creator, etc. None of these points are wrong per se. What is missing in each of them, however, is the essence of the Incarnation: at some point in the past, God was born to, and lived with, human parents in a backwater Roman province on the outskirts of Jewish society; God walked and talked with people like us and he looked much the same you and I walk and talk with each other. In other words, God-become-man is very specifically locatable to a time and a place. The Creator, who created all places and rules over all times, deigned to inhabit a single place at a single time. (St. Augustine makes the point that time itself is a creature of God, and so is 'created'. There are both theoretical and semantic issues, however, that lead me to distinguish between God's creation of places and his rule over all times.) The Word, by which everything was created, became flesh and tabernacled among us, according to the Apostle John. If God did not do these things, if these things did not actually happen in the past, we Christians should affirm with the Apostle Paul that our faith is in vain. For it amounts to saying that there is no Christ to follow. No amount of discourse on the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ Jesus can ever breathe life into those words unless God-become-man actually was incarnated, died, was raised from the grave, and ascended into heaven in some specific place on earth and at some point in the past. These things either happened, or they did not. If they did not, contemporary Christians will be full of hot air--but not much more.

Too many commentators I have run across treat the doctrine of the Incarnation as if it were a Greek addition to the Hebrew canon. It almost seems commonplace to assume that something of profound significance must of changed in a Jewish mindset for the Incarnation even to be considerably a remote possibility. My own sentiments are precisely the opposite: God's incarnation, conceived of as a unique occurrence that has universal consequences, with a positive regard to the particular circumstances under which the occurrence occurred, is perhaps the most Hebrew/Jewish of doctrines.

Come to think of it, too many commentators treat the Creeds of the Early Church as if they dressed the Gospel messages up in clothes of Greek categories. Most miss the fact that the creeds tend to pay close attention to the specificity of God's incarnation, which is very Hebrew/Jewish and not very Greek.

rich

How to be a Natural Philosopher; Or, On Being Human. Ours is a most unnatural age. A staunch refusal to say anything of substance is now a mark of intelligence. One’s learning is measured by the number of vantages from which one can view a given question. Someone else can always be cited as an authority. The measure of a person’s ability to teach has been reduced to wit. Does a teacher tickle the fancies of students? Is their discourse pleasurable to hear? Do we laugh? But this was not always the case.

Around about two centuries ago, the venerable old term ‘nature,’ eternally self-same even in this changeable world of time, underwent a transmutation into the Idea of History. The transmutation, which might otherwise be called an evolution, principally took place in German craniums. Wissenschaft was the name under which its many faces were joined into a single whole; all of time, past and present, was reduced to an empirical order. An inner tendency of being was sough, and a way to an unfettered transcendental future was plotted along a course of immanent necessity.

The spread of an empirical scientific method called into question one of the basic suppositions of a natural philosophy, namely, that the human being was a composite being. Only a very few in the main stream of Western though from Aristotle to David Hume called this conception of human being into question. Yet today, few (if any) are willing affirm that the human being is a composite being, a composite unity of two sides, one inner and the other outer, that is, of soul and body.

To be a natural philosopher one must defend an understanding of the human being as a composite unity of body and soul. Taken as a basic assumption will be that the human being has always been, and has never ceased to be, a composite being—Hegel’s dialectical reconciliation of the inner and outer and the search for a non-dialectical Idea it inspired in generations of empirical thinkers be damned. The guiding question of the natural philosopher will not be a question of being. That unnatural privilege belongs to the discipline of ontology. The question of the natural philosopher is metaphysical: it is a question of our knowing of human being. If I am a composite being, how can I know I am composite being? The reasoning is circular, to be sure, but what of it? So is all reasoning. If nothing else, we can learn this lesson from Heidegger’s understanding of the hermeneutical circle.

If a person wants to be a natural philosopher, he or she must be willing to go it alone. It is perhaps the most intolerant of philosophical positions to take—or, it will be seen as such by the empirical (which is to say, unnatural) thinker. If a person proposes to expound a natural philosophy, that person proposes to expound a position that is universally binding on all persons. In other words, that person proposes to tell everyone how they do, in actuality, think, and hence, by extension, how they ought to think.

But at this most unnatural of times, when the term nature has fallen disrepute, and when history—the historicity, or historicality, the cultural-situatedness, or contextuality of human knowing—is taken as axiomatic, all-important, it is a strange twist of fate that only the natural philosopher should be equipped to ask questions about what it means to be in time. The empirical position forces the thinker out of time: the ‘self’ is beyond time, or supra-temporal. But a natural philosophy, which treats the ‘self’ as a composite unity of body and soul, places the thinker in time—which is where his or her being is to be found anyways. This is a question of our knowing of our being. I can know myself in two interdependent ways: via perception and via memory, the former through the bodily sense and the latter through the contents of the soul/consciousness/mind. The world I perceive is always present-at-hand while past perceptions are contained in memory. Who will disagree with me when I say that I do not see or hear what I or anyone else did and said yesterday or the day before, but only what is present-at-hand in the here and now? Who will disagree with me when I say that I can, and often do, remember what I saw and heard what I or someone else did or said yesterday, or the day before? If at some point in the future you remember reading this short reflection on natural philosophy, is your memory not a memory of reading, that is, a memory of some past perception? If it is, you have affirmed the basic tenet of a natural philosophy: you have a body endowed with senses capable of perceiving and a soul capable of remembering.

rich

Time and Secularity. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of a Christian graduate education at present is that the chief end of the Christian scholar is to find better ways to package the Christian faith in secular, post-Kantian, theoretical frameworks. Most seem preoccupied with the debate between the modern and the postmodern or the structuralist and the post-structuralist. If you are a secular thinker, of course, there will be no problem. You have a choice between Kant, Hegel, or Marx, on the one hand, and Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida, on the other. Or, if you are really creative, you can find ways of synthesizing the two groups into a complementary whole. But if you aren't a secular thinker, it would seem to follow that the transcendental problems, i.e. whether there is such a thing (which is not a thing) as a transcendental subject or not, of secular thought will not be your concern. (Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche would say yes, while Marx, Heidegger, Foucault, and Derrida would say no)

Alas, in my experience, this has not been the case. The draw of the secular, post-Kantian, Continental tradition quite easily drags Christian thinkers into its bottomless abyss. This is in part, I think, due to an innate susceptibility towards 'being in the world' but forgetting to 'not be of the world' that is derived from the doctrine of the Incarnation. God entered into the world, and the assumption is that so should we. Partly true; that is, but for the fact that we never entered the world. For in reality we were already there to begin with.

Still, the ease with which Christian scholars adopt the positions of secular thinkers who know neither God as Creator nor God as Redeemer, especially in the person of Christ, and so do not understand our world as God's creation, nor human beings as created in God's image, continues to astound me.

One of my more profound thoughts is that secularity, or a secular culture, can be identified and explained away if we pay close attention to how time and human history is understood. A secular person understands themselves to live at the end of history, at a time when the whole of human history can finally be understood (as it was meant to be understood). But a secular person cannot understand themselves to live in history; that is, they must always be escaping history--escaping the past and looking to the future.

Thankfully, I am not alone in thinking these thoughts, nor are these thoughts unique to me. Charles Taylor had this to say in his A Secular Age:

But the interesting issue is whether there could be unbelief without any sense of some religious view which is being negated. A condition of absence of religion which would no longer deserve the name unbelief. If so, it would be different from our present world in one crucial respect. Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition which can’t only be described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of “having overcome” the irrationality of unbelief…It is difficult to imagine a world in which this consciousness might have disappeared.

Christopher Dawson says, on very similar terms, in his Progress and Religion:

It is owing to this historical sense that the modern Western Europeans differs most profoundly from men of other ages and cultures. World history means infinitely more to him than it meant to the ancient Greek or Oriental thinkers, to the latter, Time, and consequently History, were without ultimate value or significance; to the modern European they are the very foundation of his conception of reality. Yet this sense of history found no adequate expression in the movement of scientific rationalism.

Why not? Presumably because time and human history, being a reality we presently live in, cannot be escaped, overcome, etc. Well, there is one way out: death, which comes to us all, each in our own time.

rich

Letters from Home 1.4. The early winter shows no sign of letting up, at least not for the next week. Where in the last few years, whether or not Christmas would be white was in question, this year the month of November was locked in the grips of the chilly colour. If the estimates are correct, approximately 40% of the corn in southern Ontario is still standing in the field waiting to be harvested. The heavy wet snow that has fallen over the last few weeks will hamper whatever efforts farmers make in the near future. And I can be thankful my father and uncle finished their harvest in the nick of time.

Family gathered from across North America this last week to say their final farewells to my grandfather. Only today did the last of the visitors return to their regular routines; my brother, who had taken up residence in Halifax, has begun his long journey home. Life on the farm is finally getting back to normal, though I have noticed for a few people, my mother and grandmother included, life is now experienced in more stark contrasts. The reality of human frailty, when one is forced to confront it directly in the death of a loved one, leaves nobody unscathed. What joy or comfort might be had in the knowledge that the loved one passed from this life in relative peace and without pain is always joined by feeling of emptiness and loss. The latter is, I suspect, a universal human experience. Death leaves no one person untouched. I was present in the hospital room about 12 hours before my grandfather's death when he addressed those surrounding him, saying, 'You will miss me when I am gone.' A few days after he had died, my grandmother remarked that he never once said he would miss us.

I had intended to blog with a relative frequency, but the funeral and the business that it brings interrupted that plan. We shall see if I can get myself back into the swing of things.

rich

Note from Home 1.3. My grandfather died earlier Saturday morning surrounded by family and friends. It was a blessing that in his final hours he had a better command of his mental faculties than he had been in for several months. He was fully conscious of the significance of that the time of his death was near at hand, and several times in the course of the day he voiced his wish that the end would come. The present life had become a burden to heavy for him to bear. His wish to be released from the burden was granted much sooner than the family anticipated.

Today, in the presence of family and friends, his body was committed to the ground. A farmer in life, my Aunt Wilma scattered seeds on his coffin before the cement case surrounding the coffin was lowered into the ground. The pastor recalled that according to the testimonies of the Scriptures, seeds were a sign of resurrection and new life.

rich

Sidebar Additions.

Joel Haas - At the Crossroads

Dave Beldman - tolle lege

Letters from Home 1.2. Snow has been falling for five days. The trees, which had formerly been bare, are now covered with their winter foliage. Instead of a contrast between some shade of green and a variegated, pock-marked brown, white clings to the up-turned side of the trunk and branches. It is a tasteless icing that, lacking the sweetness of icing on a cake, is marked instead by a sharp chill unpleasant to taste and touch even if pleasing to sight. The fieldwork undone when the snow first started to fall remains undone. And if the weather gods decide winter is here to stay, the fields will remain unworked until spring. Having had the winter to harden without being worked, the ground will be difficult to break. But that is the way things are here on the farm. You must play the hand that is dealt to you and complaining about it will not change a thing. Did I mention I saw my first sunrise in two years this morning?

For whatever reason, I find I have more energy in the winter. This may be due to the fact that in the cold air a person always has to stay moving to keep warm. It is a form of incentive, you might say. Regardless whether I have more energy or not, I discovered (once again) how dependent I am on my glasses and how disorienting the world is without them. The pair I currently own broke in my hands while I was cleaning the dust from the lenses on Monday whilst eating lunch. Snapping at the weld between the lens frame and the nose bridge, the right lens popped out. Only a couple of pieces of well placed tape could keep the lens secure in place, but the tape had to be placed on the lens like shutters beside a window or blinders on a horse. Immediately I went to the local optometrist to see if I could get the frames replaced where I received the worst possible news: the glasses were no longer under warranty and the specific frame I have was no longer being produced. Usually this will mean that I would need to get a whole new pair of glasses, including new lens, all at my own cost. The receptionist, however, made a heroic effort to locate a pair of my old frames. The prospective bill of a couple hundred dollars happily whittled down to the size of $35. When I had walked up the front desk, the receptionist greeted me with the standard, How may I help you? I smiled at her and thought to myself, I've just walked into an optometrist office with two large pieces of tape on my glasses, so the answer is a little redundant. My response to her: 'I think you know.' That earned me a few laughs—and, I like to think, the heroic effort.

Money is always on my mind these days. In the past, I watched and listened as friends left undergraduate and graduate programs and stepped bravely into the work-a-day world bearing a substantial debt-load. None of them have committed suicide as yet, so I can only assume that there is hope at the end of the tunnel. The one money-making scheme with which I flirted briefly, which I wrote about last week, was to go to Northern Alberta for six or so months. But it appears now that this would have been a terrible idea. The price of oil has dropped from $150/barrel, the high of six months ago, to a mere $58/barrel. Large investments for future developments are pulling out of the tar sands and the existing production capacity, if I followed the CBC news report correctly, is being scaled back. I just may have found myself in Northern Alberta with a brand new $1000 coat, $500 boats, $200 gloves, and a pair of $50 thermal long underwear (specially designed to keep chestnuts roasting over the equivalent of an open fire in the dead of winter), freezing in -30 to -40 degree (C) temperature without the only job that could have justified the front-end investment. All that expenditure with the potential of no return: not exactly the sort of thing I want to be investing in at this point in time. At least at home I have the option of going back to my warm bed for a nap after breakfast. And even if there isn't as much work as there would have been in Fort McMurray or surrounding area, my cost of living continually (asymptotically, you might say) approaches absolute $0 thanks to the mom and pop.

Many other reasons could be conjured up to convince myself that I am content to be living at home with my parents once more. At some point, though, a person simply has to stop rationalizing and say that it is good to be home. By good I do not necessarily mean pleasant. In the last week, my mother's father—my grandfather—took a turn for the worse. Over the last two years, he has succumbed to mental illness, but that did not necessarily mean that the quality of his life was negatively affected. Now, however, he has been diagnosed were liver and lung cancer—and if the latter was not bad enough, the former is always terminal. My parent's house has become a way station for aunts and uncles, and I expect that more distant relatives will soon be making their way to Listowel, Ontario. After Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that had been forbidden them to eat, the Good Lord expelled them from the garden so they would not 'take also from the tree of life and eat, and life forever.' (Gen. 3.22) Somewhere in these words there is a bit of old Hebrew wisdom that addresses the folly of seeking to extend human life beyond a certain length, though I cannot find it today. Death will come to us all in our own time. And yet, despite all that might be affirmed about its 'naturalness,' or its inevitability, death is also a most unwelcome guest. May we find in the Risen Son the strength to see us through the coming days, and may he see to it that one day death will be no more,

rich

Ontology of Time. To provide a definition for the nature time is impossible, I suspect, because time is that which we are in. Say someone asks you, What is time? The best answer you can give is that time is that which joins what was to what will be. What time is, that is, what time is in its essence, is always pulled apart into three verbal tenses: the was, the is, and the will be. So whatever time is, it has, does, and will always evade an essential determination. The enquirer, in this case myself, is like a fish in water. Should I try to leave the water, I would very quickly die from lack of oxygen.

The great secular philosophies of history like that found Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Marx's Captial, or Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra all contain within them a moment of conflict, a dialectic in 'consciousness,' between 'consciousnesses,' or something similar, which precedes a moment when all differences are rendered equal, a universal equilibrium is achieved (in the cases of Hegel and Marx), the mundane is transcended (in the case of Nietzsche), and the human being finds themselves holding the key to the historical process. In other words, they find themselves, at long last, at the end of history. A feature of these narratives that is very rarely appreciated is that to conceptualize the final moment, the human being has to raise themselves out of time. Really? Is such a thing possible? Can at fish ever leave their watery home without starving themselves of the necessities of life?

A recurrent theme of philosophical investigation in the Continental tradition following Immanuel Kant's 'discovery' of the transcendental subject has been the 'ontology of time.' Hegel's Phenomenology and Heidegger's Being and Time are the two focal texts in the tradition. Philosophers discourse on the meaning of time, on the destiny of being in time, on the coherence of things in time, on the structure of time, etc., etc. It is all very profound and sublime, etc., etc. Philosophers approach questions concerning the ontology of time with awe and reverence and fear and trembling, etc., etc. But few, if any, seem to realize that an ontology of time is a contradiction in terms. One person who recognized that something had gone awry was Ernst Cassirer, a long time critic of Heidegger who had abandoned the ontological project in favor of a metaphysics.

Ontology is the study of being, which, in the form of a question, asks, What is? It follows that an ontology of time is the study of the being (nature) of time and asks, What is time? It is a good question, to be sure, but not one this fish proposes to answer without quickly affirming that time is my natural habitat, my watery home. Whatever it is, time has, does, and will always evade any attempt to determine its nature.

Who does the ontologist of time think they are to suppose themselves to be able to leave time and answer the question, What is time? God?

rich

Chance Sighting. My major project over the last five years has been to figure out how Christopher Dawson, a Catholic social historian and philosopher/theologian of history, tells the stories of human history. Like all good things, the project is an obsession. If you do something, they say, do it well or don't do it at all. And that takes a touch a madness.

Now I am not speaking necessarily of the madness that used to land you in a sanatorium. This madness might be termed a habituated response mechanism--which would appear odd to people who are not in the know. But now you are in the know, the comments that follow will have context..

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, has sat on a shelf in my parent's house for as long as I can remember, that is, approximately twenty-two years. The corner are frayed and the front cover is missing, but that's okay because all someone needs to identify the book is a legible title on the spine. Yesterday was the first time I decided to pick it up.

In 1959, Griffin had his appearance medically altered, with the end result that he, a white man, looked like a black man. Attitudes changed almost immediately after he made his reappearance in public. About a half a month into his new life, Griffin went looking for a place to change a travelers cheque at night, late enough that all the banks were closed. Places that would have quite readily served a person with a paler shade of pigment turned Griffin away. All expect one: a local Catholic book store. Griffin, who was at his wits end by this point, was so grateful that he purchased books by several notable authors: Jacques Maritain, Thomas Aquinas, and Christopher Dawson.

The qualified madness I referred to above kicks in at this point. My habituated-response is to wonder why Dawson's name would appear in this particular book. Certainly I was not expecting to run across Dawson's name, though the Catholic stance against racial discrimination and Dawson's life-work, a historical apology for the human being created in the image of God, do resonate with Griffin's message.

rich

Comment on Comment. David Greusel describes two strains of environmentalism--or, as the article is titled, 'Two Shades of Green'--in the latest issue Comment, only one of which is compatible with the Christian faith. There is nothing overtly objectionable in Greusel's article, to my mind. That is, if you ignore the implicit tendency in his statement 'our God is a god of abundance...for fresh air, fresh water, nutritious foods, and natural resources,' a message which may have some resonance among the affluent, commodity-rich citizens of the Western world, but which might fall on deaf ears in other parts of the world, there is nothing overtly objectionable. His argument did, however, strike me as a bit of a straw-man argument.

It goes something like this: There are two types of environmentalism, one concerned with the care of the environment and therefore compatible with the doctrine of creation, and the other the Malthusian time-bomb. The Malthusian time-bomb theory has been disproved time and again making it obviously wrong. Thus the choice should be obvious to Christians.

Poor Thomas Malthus! Such a bad reputation he has garnered for himself. Greusel seems to oppose Malthus' view of a limitation on natural resources with a view on the providential intervention of God to supply us with ever-more natural commodities: 'The message of global scarcity is a modern invention, and is not supported by what the Bible teaches.' Are we to suppose the opposite, then, and say that the Bible teaches the world's natural resources are limitless?

That is simply to make a small point. Now back to my main original train of thought.

It would seem to me that the Christian can make common cause with someone interested in what is recognizably the stewardship of God's creation, even if they speak about it on different terms. Thus far I agree with Greusel. Yet I do not believe that the Great Foe is to be found in a neo-Malthusian argument. More likely, they are to be praised by environmentalists everywhere for being overly cautious and for being overly quick to point out that the end of all life on earth is nigh at hand.

No, I suspect the real problems comes from people who defend the Gaia (Mother Earth) principle. When wedded to modern empirical science, the Gaia principle is transformed into a sort of god which is the soul of the world and all things in it, including human beings. This conception is of an immanent God, not a transcendent Creator. In fact, it precludes an understanding of a transcendent Creator, which means it also precludes an understanding of the human being as a responsive (religious/moral) creature. Instead, in Gaia, the human being is a being who has forgotten that he or she is one with everything--in other words, has forgotten that he or she is Gaia.

The well-known Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki advocates this sort of perspective in his The Sacred Balance: Rediscovering Our Place in Nature. He proposes to construct a new environmentally-friendly worldview based on modern science and ancient wisdom. The spiritual contribution of modern science is obvious. But it is telling what Suzuki looks for in the texts of ancient wisdom. Two things attract his attention: anything that indicates that human beings are of the earth and anything that shows that human beings are one with everything. The Book of Genesis is listed amount the texts of ancient wisdom, along with the Bhavagad Gita, the Upanishads, and Ancient Greek philosophy. When Suzuki reads Genesis, he immediately grabs hold of the human being formed from the dust of the ground: who is doing the forming, namely, the Creator God, is quietly set aside, almost as if he never existed in the first place. It is almost as if Suzuki did not read the Book of Genesis.

rich

Letters from Home 1.1. This week has seen the sky shed much of its watery weight on the welcoming ground. My father and uncle used the one dry day there was to harvest the last of the corn crop. Now the fields, picked of their fruits, lie mostly bare. All that remains is a few severed stalks on the ground in need of a plow to turn them under where they will return a small amount of nutrition to the soil. That will have to wait for the time being, though. In the morning, rain turned to snow, the skies are overcast, and what appears to be a southerly wind is driving the snow across the fields, which are accumulating a soggy blanket of white. Not the sort of weather a person wants to be outside in, any sane person would say to themselves. For myself, I am quite happy to be on the inside of a house looking out, rather than the other way around.

My parent's home, where I have taken up a semi-permanent residence after eight years of semi-permanent absence, can be found about a ten minute drive north of the largest urban center for about forty-five minutes drive in any direction. To call Listowel, Ontario, an urban center, however, is quite laughable. The town has boasted a population of 5500 souls on signs marking one's entry into its municipal limits for the last twenty or so years. Surely the numbers have changed, but the average person who passes through can have no knowledge of that. The nearest center that deserves the designation urban, Kitchener, Ontario, has steadily eroded the distinctiveness of the small town. It no longer seems to bother people that they have to take a forty-five minute to an hour drive to see a movie or shop in specialty shops. Several years ago the independent movie theater in the middle of town closed down and the locally-owned hardware store, grocery store, and drug store have all been replaced by chain stores. The McDonalds restaurant chain has erected a pair of golden arches at the one end of town and the Zellers department store chain built a rather large box-like building in which to pedal its imported Chinese wares at the other. An intimate sense of locality, of community, of civic pride in place that I see among neighbours, whose families have been living in Canada for five or six generations, has almost been exhausted. Listowel is now a place most young people will leave, but when they do they will find that the town is a carbon-copy of so many others towns. That is my impression, at least.

But you don't return home for any of these things, nor to complain about them. I haven't. It has been a couple of weeks now since I successfully defended a thesis to complete a MA degree in the study of philosophy. The horrid What's next? question that confronts every recent graduate would not allow me to show it disrespect for any longer than I already had, so returning to my parent's home is my way of offering what is hopefully a temporary answer. Debts pile up after eight years of post-secondary education, and with no real course of further study alt the graduate level open to me at the moment, which would incidentally have allowed me to stave off the inevitable debt repayment for another few years, I had to find work. Where I had been living, Hamilton, Ontario, there were a few $10/hr jobs at 40 hr/wk doing the sort of work that requires no accreditation or expertise available to me. Though none of these options would have worked. Not that I think myself above 'menial' labour. Ah heck! I grew up on a farm and have no qualms with getting dirty, even if that means getting covered with fecal matter (a.k.a 'shit'). More important to me is paying off a little school debt and put a little money aside so that I might get myself started somewhere else in the world next spring or summer. And I could not do that on $10/hr while paying for rent, food, and a government student loan, which has just come due.

Briefly I flirted with the option of going to northern Alberta. A job bank on the Government of Canada website says that is where the jobs are at. The flirtation was very brief. My aunt and uncle, who live just down the road from my parent’s place, are due to have another child, which means they can use all the help they can get around the farm for the winter and into the spring. They need the help, and I get a chance to regroup. Sign me up.

Home is where the heart is, they say. Who 'they' are, I cannot be sure. But their hoary catch-phrase does not necessarily fit in my case. I am not sure whether my heart is in fact at my parent's home. At this point, I am not sure where my heart is at all. On the other hand, I do know that home is where my head is. As a student of philosophy with an introspective bent, I fall into a habit of watching myself very closely. Whether the conclusions I draw about myself are on target or not remains to be seen, but I can say this about being home: I think better, more clearly, in my parent's house. That may have something to do with diet. My mother's cooking is wonderful. But I suspect it also has something to do with wide open spaces and hours on end with nothing to do but make sure the tractor follows a straight line, turn around when you reach the end of the field, and repeat over and over and over again. Did I mention the money is also good, at least, good for someone who is as unqualified for any sort of specialized work as I am?

This is the first of a series of 'Letters from Home.' The blogosphere seems to have reached its zenith and its population appears to be in a steady decline. I will be less leery than I once might have been at posting this sort of personal reflection. Until some time next week, may the Good Lord bless you and keep you warm in the coming winter,

rich

Introduction. So I have decided to take up blogging once again. A number of reasons could be offered. Blogging seems to have lost its appeal for many previous bloggers, which makes it shine with new light for me. I winnowed down my list of contacts (just to the right), separating the sheep from the goats, and the grain from the chaff. Those who qualified as sheep/grain--those who are still blogging--got to stay. But more than that, for the first time in a while I actually want to write. And a blog seems as good as any place to start.

The name of my blog had to change. A House at Pooh Corner no longer fit my temperament. You see, I am not looking for another metaphorical honey-pot anymore. Now I have found my honey-pot. Yes indeed. It was an unexpected find. It was unanticipated. I simply did what all bears do best: I followed my nose.

The name Down in La Mancha fits my present temperament better. Lost in limbo, I am. The problem is that it might just as well be a self-imposed exile to limbo. I can't really tell at the moment, but I have my suspicions. Cervantes' character Don Quixote will have to serve me as an inspiration, and perhaps I can find myself out of this merry conundrum.

Of course, all that was very vague. I do plan on spelling things out in a little more detail in the coming weeks.

rich