You'd never know we had four inches of snow yesterday. It's like Spring out there today. It was real sad driving into town this morning, seeing yard after yard with fallen and crumbling snow men, melting sentries in the sun.

I haven't listed the book, but I'm reading The Monsters and the Critics by Tolkien these days (I must be so uncool not to hyperlink that title, sorry). Anyway, at one point in his defence of Grendel and the Dragon (in Beowulf), he says, speaking of myth, "It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography..." It seems like one the central problems with 'Christian' stories, music, or just the arts in general, is that we don't present our themes incarnate. We plaster what we consider to be 'the point' to everything we can get our hands on, and then we wonder why no one cares. We need to learn to tell parables. Bury the point and patiently wait for it to grow.

I bid you farewell as I do my students, "Shalom Ocheem."