June Bug Jollifications
...and I was rescued by a revelation so tiny
it would take a crazy and holy attention
to see it as such.
~Christian Wiman~
A happy July to you all!
I might as well start with the big news for anyone who hasn't already heard it. We didn't think it would happen as quickly as it did, but: Meghan and I are having a baby boy, due in December. We waited for the second trimester to make any announcement — and naturally, we used Jack to announce the tidings with his innate photogenicity.
In the last month, the baby has grown from the size of a June bug to a tree frog, or so one of my five pregnancy apps tells me.
Meghan is doing well. She has handled everything perfectly. And since her favorite things before the pregnancy were food and sleep, she is completely herself, only more so.
Jack continues to dream of gophers (and now ice cream), but his breathing exercises got a liiittle out of hand. Intervention did not work, so we've had to cut off all gopher hole olfactory spelunking activities. So far, his detox is going about as smoothly as can be expected under the circumstances. But while he's involuntarily taming his gopher ways, the gophers themselves have only increased their taunting. I'm sure he's taking the extra time to work on his master plan.
We may have some more big news next month, but the plan to move back to Maine is in full swing! Stay tuned.
Oh, and the zinnias are doing their thing.
Here are few a things worth reading or listening to:
- Sometimes, just choosing one word over another can change something substantially. "Disentangling" your faith vs. "deconstructing" it, for instance. I'm stealing that from this very pleasant interview with Kate Boyd about her new book An Untidy Faith.
- Alan Jacobs's winter essay on Albert Murray, and about Br'er Rabbit, is a must read. Having grown up on some of the Br'er Rabbit stories myself, I found it enlightening. You shouldn't need a subscription, but you can also swing by my parents' house and ask for the Spring issue of Comment. Turn to page 49. And when you're done reading, go subscribe :)
- And since it was the 4th of July when I intended to send this out, here's perhaps the best thing a person could say on Independence Day: A short post on "The Beloved Community" by David Dark. (I don't have any insight into the choice of artwork, but he does attribute it to the lead guitarist from Jars of Clay.)
- And on that very same note: Imagine a choir where the members literally sing the songs of their enemies... with each other. That's exactly what the Pontanima Choir does. This short video about them is very much worth your time. And this 2000 interview with Ivo Marković, the Bosnian Friar who founded the choir, is also very good.
That is the Stari Most ("Old Bridge") in Mostar, BiH. Originally commissioned in 1557, it was destroyed in 1993 during the Croat-Bosniak War, and rebuilt between 2001 and 2004. You might recognize it as the cover art for a number of printings of Rebecca West's 1941 Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. She visited Mostar in 1937:
[We] went on past an aerodrome with its hangars, past the barracks and the tobacco factory that stand in the outskirts of any considerable Herzegovinian town, and were in Mostar, ‘Stari most,’ old bridge. Presently we were looking at that bridge, which is falsely said to have been built by the Emperor Trajan, but is of medieval Turkish workmanship. It is one of the most beautiful bridges in the world. A slender arch lies between two round towers, its parapet bent in a shallow angle in the centre.
To look at it is good; to stand on it is as good. Over the grey-green river swoop hundreds of swallows, and on the banks mosques and white houses stand among glades of trees and bushes. The swallows and the glades know nothing of the mosques and houses. The river might be running through unvisited hills instead of a town of twenty thousand inhabitants.
You'll also recognize it from the beginning and the very end of the linked video about the Pontanima Choir—destroyed and rebuilt. And that's fitting, because Pontanima literally means "spiritual bridge," or "bridge with soul." As Enes Karić put it, "The Balkans provides powerful evidence that human history is not over but is under humanity's feet."
And here are a few things I wrote down in June:
- I took an email from a little over a year ago and turned it into an essay on Isabel Colegate's A Pelican in the Wilderness.
- We need to avoid our cultural extremes, but also to understand them.
- Let life surprise you.
- I originally intended to include a little blurb about my use of Google, but a note turned into a "roof nail" and, well, here's the link.
- I finally got around to hiking Sacagawea Peak, which I have stared at every single day for the last four months here in Bozeman. I think I should submit this picture to Nat Geo. What do you think?
That's all for June! I'll leave you with Richard Wilbur.
April 5, 1974
The air was soft, the ground still cold.
In the dull pasture where I strolled
Was something I could not believe.
Dead grass appeared to slide and heave,
Though still too frozen-flat to stir,
And rocks to twitch, and all to blur.
What was this rippling of the land?
Was matter getting out of hand
And making free with natural law?
I stopped and blinked, and then I saw
A fact as eerie as a dream,
There was a subtle flood of steam
Moving upon the face of things.
It came from standing pools and springs
And what of snow was still around;
It came of winter's giving ground
So that the freeze was coming out,
As when a set mind, blessed by doubt,
Relaxes into mother-wit.
Flowers, I said, will come of it.
Thanks for reading! For more commonplace stuff, you can go to tinyroofnail.micro.blog. Or you can email me at tinyroofnail@hey.com. Or you can just wait for next month's newsletter.