January 30th 2010    Tim Candler

    After snow deep enough to shovel and a forecast of one degree Fahrenheit for later this evening, springtime feels so much further away.   And I can see exactly why a clockwork calendar becomes central to those ancestors who first chose to interpret the future without resort to sacrifice of innocence. 

     But in weather like this the assertion of punishment may be a more convincing description of relationships between 'being' and the real.   Easier to accept the commitment of those who call down nonsense as a necessary standard in the lives of men.   And this must be an awesome temptation for those amongst us who are selfish for power and anxious for disciples seeking solutions.

    This call for backwards often unnerves me.  Puts me in the framework of political.  Makes me long for argument before discussion, the sword before agreement.   Yet today it is necessary to make offerings to that primal element which once might have executed its first born. 

    Easy to think of this deed as tactile.  The feel of warm blood, and the cold touch of stone, procession and mourning, followed by a sense of accomplishment.  Harder to see this deed as it might apply to any definition of innocent, because more often it is the weak who are sacrificed by the powerful. 

    And I guess that's why chocolate chips and baking are a critical ingredient to a celebration of our own idea of purity.  Otherwise without them the season might not turn and we would be doomed to snow and ice into perpetuity.

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