Two for Augustine

The stillness of holy reality confounds one's thoughts because God is imagined as somehow living, and yet he is also considered to be frozen in permanent changelessness and eternity. It remains impossible for us to conceive of something living or alive without the processes of life as perceived in time, without motion or decision or change.

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In a dream last night: I have returned to my home town with some people. We are at a shitty half-destroyed restaurant that offers a choice of fried catfish or chinese food. People I knew from high school enter. I am happy to see them, but they snub me. The close friend I am traveling with points to the railroad tracks nearby and says, "Is there a place where we can get across those tracks?" I turn around and look. Just barely hidden from view, a very picturesque dirt road leads across them. "Yeah, right over there," I say. Then I look again. Deepening back on the other side of the tracks is a misty pastel morning to rival the most beautiful I have ever seen. It's as though not just childhood, but the era previous to even being born is seen in the hazy distance of hills and trees. I think to myself with wonder, Arkansas.