Welcome back

---

I realize I have been lax on updating my blog recently. I apologize for that: I hope to add more details on what my life has been like for the past month or so.

But I wanted to share a passage that I came across today while reading. In the sunlit room of our office, I passed some afternoon moments reading Manfred Max-Neef's "Barefoot Economics." It's overdue at the library, so I felt a special calling to finish the book today. I'm close to the end, but came across this passage and found that it resonated well with my understanding of the world. In order to truly work for our communities and ourselves, our churches, and our families, I think we must understand that capacity each individual has to uncover undiscovered mysteries of this world. Max-Neef describes this realization well.

I strongly believe that all the mysteries of the world are within reach of my hand, of my sensibility or of my inquisitive powers. They are right here, inside my house, in the surrounding pathways and in the corners of my garden. I have my own piece of sky and my parcel of air. My quota of light and colours. I am surrounded by the soil, the air itself, the walls and barks, the flower buds and the roots, the anxieties of my daughters, the sorrows of my wife and my own sorrows, the food we share at our table, the birds that wake me in the morning, the habits of my dog and the skin of my dog, my books, the sounds of my piano, the voices and the silences of my friends, my dreams and the mosquito that curtails my dreams, the spider that I don't see but know is there and which distrubs me by its presence, the fragrance of coffee, the infallibility of the medicinal herbs that are in the pantry and the ants that always manage to find their way into the pantry, the raisons d'etre of the painter and the poet and the artisan who come to have a drink with us, the ideas for the construction of a better world that are discussed at night in my library, the letters and greetings which come from other homes. I am surrounded by all forms of life and death, of love and anguish, of glory and decay, of humility and vanity, of despair and hope. The laws of Nature are here, or it is here where their inflexible effects reflect themselves. Human laws are here, or it is here where their fallacies reflect themselves. This infinitesimal grain of the Universe is, after all, a Universe. The universe--I discover--is threshed into infinite Universes within personal reach. To know the world means to know, first, the house where one lives, its pathways and its garden. Because if it is true that all the houses and all the pathways and all the gardens make up a world, it is also true that the world unfolds itself to find a total place in every house, in every pathway and in every garden. All the immensity is contained in the small. Smallness is nothing but immensity on the human scale.




I hope all is well.

Cheers,
AS

---

Comments

[anonymous]

Yo Aaron! xo