the daily asterisk

Let speeches fall silent and platitudes cease from hawkers of violence they brand as “peace.” Let people who suffer find places to speak, and holders of power give way to the weak. Let t...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/166214994500

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. L...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163635424665

Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live, a place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive. Built of hopes and dreams and visions, rock of faith an...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163522080920

Life is not possible without an opening toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent is lost, existence in the world ceases to be...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163484131580

We heard health care and we thought public option we thought reaching across the street across the lines across the aisle was the manifestation of not a red state not a blue state but these un...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163445075220

In belonging to a landscape, one feels a rightness, at-homeness, a knitting of self and world. This condition of clarity and focus, this being fully present, is akin to what the Buddhists call mi...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163405410255

The very design of the suburbs inhibited the gathering of citizens who might want to mount a protest. Instead of broad parks at the steps of city hall, there were four-lane streets without sidewa...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163364778255

Celebration is when we let joy make itself out of our love. We like to be together. We like to dance together. We like to make pretty and amusing things. We like to laugh at what we have made. We...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163249333105

There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would b...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163210958960

The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool. Touchstone in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163171626235

Knowing who we are and knowing where we are are intimately linked. Gary Snyder qtd. in Shaping the Sierra

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163132265160

The nation is a recent innovation. In the Middle Ages, allegiance was owed to the lord, or the city, or both, and by extension to territorial areas not very clearly defined. The sentiment we call...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/163092026920

There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of t...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162976530820

Accountability is the willingness to acknowledge that we have participated in creating, through commission or omission, the conditions that we wish to see changed. Without this capacity to see ou...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162937812745

To plant is to wait. To wonder. To patiently care for fragile plants. It’s often tiresome and tedious. It’s counter to most experiences in our modern society. How might this exercise of plan...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162898813620

To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural pa...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162861711150

We believe the one who has the power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must always ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so t...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162822601380

If I’ve learned nothing else, I’ve learned this: a question is a powerful thing, a mighty use of words. Questions elicit answers in their likeness. Answers mirror the questions they rise, or ...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162705719855

Among the great struggles of man—good/evil, reason/unreason, etc.—there is also this mighty conflict between the fantasy of Home and the fantasy of Away, the dream of roots and the mirage of ...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162666375535

I understand the story of my life in such a way that it is part of the history of my family or of this farm or of this university or of this countryside; and I understand the story of the lives o...

https://dailyasterisk.com/post/162627679520