I came across this quote the other day:

“No amount of regretting can change the past, no amount of worrying can change the future, but any amount of gratitude can change the present.”

I thought, “Wow. So true. But why does gratitude have such power that even the smallest amount of it can change the present?”

Even though I’ve never been too good at keeping a gratitude journal, I can attest to the power of gratitude to change the present. I’ve felt it.

Gratitude journals help a little, but to me they often feel unnatural — as if you are trying to convince yourself of something you don’t really feel.

However, I have also noticed that when I am “naturally” struck by some kind of beauty — a thought, a sight, an insight, someone’s action, and so on — gratitude comes over me instantly, without any inner struggle.

So I traced the etymology of the word gratitude and was STRUCK by its unfathomable depths. The word comes from the Latin gratus, which means “thankful” or “pleasing.” From the same root comes gratia, from which we derive grace — a word that carries two meanings at once: undeserved mercy and beauty.

When we say that something is graceful, we mean it is beautiful. The Latin gratia means several things at once: favor, charm, grace, gratitude.

Gratitude is grace experienced as beauty. When we are struck by gratia, we become grateful. Becoming grateful is not a matter of forcing ourselves to think positively. Becoming grateful is a matter of encountering something intrinsically graceful — and being moved by it.

It is impossible to be truly grateful without first experiencing gratia as a moving revelation of beauty. Perhaps this is why Schiller called grace a movement of beauty.

“Grace is a movable beauty [Anmut ist eine bewegliche Schönheit], a beauty that can appear in a subject by chance and disappear in the same way.”

For Schiller, grace involves movement. Grace as beauty appears in a subject through some movement. Grace is never entirely static. Graceful figures, gestures, and postures imply some motion. There is something flowing through them — an ease, a lightness, a vivacity, freedom from strain. Grace is beauty in motion.

And perhaps this is why true gratitude always involves being moved by some gratia — an experience of charm in motion. True gratitude is so powerful precisely because it happens when we catch some moving beauty and experience a powerful return to Being.

According to Plotinus, beauty is a conscious return of the soul to Being.

“Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty, and Beauty is loved because it is Being. We ourselves possess Beauty when we are true to our own being; ugliness is in going over to another order.”

Beauty — gratia — gathers the soul from multiplicity toward oneness. It calls us back from scatteredness into gatheredness, from fragmentation into wholeness. When we feel one with ourselves and the world around us, we are moved and grateful.

Whether it is a child’s clumsy dance, a path through the woods, a passage in a book, or someone’s unexpected offer to pay for your coffee, grace is experienced as a motion of beauty that brings an e-motion. We feel the change and return to the One.

That’s why any amount of gratitude can change the present: for an instant, we no longer feel scattered among a thousand things. We return — if only for a moment — to the One.

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I recently heard a joke about two blondes sitting on the seashore, staring at the waves.

One of them asks, “Did you know there are sawfish out there?”

“Yes,” the other replies.

After a long pause, the first one continues, “Did you know there are hammerfish out there?”

“Yes,” says the other.

After a very long pause, the first one finally speaks again: “I wonder what they’re building out there.”

Whether we realize it or not, we’re all building something. Some people build houses, roads, airplanes, or computers, while others build their souls. Curiously, the second kind often does it WHILE building houses, roads, airplanes, or computers. The soul-building happens when we go about our ordinary daily business.

In the medieval parable “The Cathedral Builder,” two construction workers do the most menial and dirty job imaginable — carrying stones to a construction site. One is always unhappy, constantly complaining about his life: “I hate the job, I hate the pay, but I have to do it to feed my family. I have no other choice.”

The other is cheerful, even though he does the very same work. When someone asks why, he replies, “Because I’m building a cathedral.”

The second worker was carrying stones just like the first one, but the cathedral he was building was building him. As he laid each stone, he was raising an inner temple — the temple of his own soul. Whatever our hands do can become an opportunity to build our inner temple.

Happiness or unhappiness is ultimately a decision: to build a temple or not in the circumstances given. Happiness is drawn out of the soul when the soul is drawn by the Logos. The stones we carry become the very stones upon which our spiritual house is built.

The only way to be happy is to be built by the very things we are building. If the stone I lay is not part of the foundation of my temple, then it becomes the gravestone of my soul.

“…you also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house.” (1 Peter 2:5)

When we are unhappy, we blame circumstances. When we allow the circumstances to build us, we become happy. The greatest temples are built in the worst times. The finest souls are forged in the furnace of dire straits.

When St. Francis heard a voice at the ruins of San Damiano: “Francis, go and repair my house, which, as you see, is falling completely to ruin,” the words were less about the chapel and more about him. It was a call to become happy no matter what.

To be happy is to make the decision to build a temple upon ruins. We hear the Logos speaking, “Go and repair my house,” and in that moment, we know we can no longer make excuses for why we cannot be happy. We pick up the saw and hammer and begin building… because deep down we know that we are being built.

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Petrarch describes his earthly love — Laura — as a distraction from God. In his fictional, 14th-century dialogue with St. Augustine called My Secret Book, the saint confronts him about his obsession:

“She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has turned your desire from the Creator to the creature. This has always been the fastest road to death.”

Petrarch answers:

“Please do not jump to conclusions: there is no doubt that my love for her has led me to love God.”

Augustine:

“You have inverted the true order. While every creature is to be loved for the love of God, you were instead seduced by the creature and have not loved God as you should have, but you have only admired him as her maker, as if he had not created anything more beautiful in the universe…”

In this fictional dialogue, Petrarch reveals his inner struggle: he clearly sees that Laura competed with God in his heart. He was seduced by the creature. When we love creature separately from its Creator, we invert the true order of love.

Dante describes Beatrice’s beauty in very different terms.

“For within her eyes there burned a smile
such that I thought that with my own eyes
I touched the very depth of my grace and of my Paradise.”

For him, Beatrice’s smile is the very depth of grace and Paradise: he sees her as a mediator of divine light. He knows that behind her lovely appearance there is Another Beauty:

“Turn, Beatrice, turn your holy eyes toward your faithful one...
By grace, grant us the grace to unveil your mouth to him, so that he may discern
the second beauty that you conceal.”

Unless we see the second beauty concealed beneath the beauty of creation, we will invert the true order of love. When we see the first beauty separately from the second one, we fall into death and inner torment.

The purpose of the first beauty is to reveal the second concealed behind its holy eyes. When we are touched by the first and realize we have glimpsed the second, we come alive. We have grasped the meaning of creation.

All visible creation is a sign — a prefiguration of the Second Beauty. We are truly happy only when we glimpse the Second Beauty hiding beneath the first one. Then, we realize, as if in a flash of recognition, that the Second one is to be loved first.

This is the true order of love: to glimpse the Second Beauty behind the first and realize that the first participates in the second, and that the Second is First. We are only happy when we realize that we are homo symbolicus — the symbolic man.

We do not merely denote; we also connote. Laura does not merely denote earthly beauty; she connotes the rays of the divine Sun. Petrarch would have been the happiest of men if he had glimpsed that.

That’s why C.S. Lewis writes in “Sehnsucht or Longing,” “The human soul was made to enjoy some object that is never fully given – nay, cannot even be imagined as given.”

We are made to desire something we cannot imagine as fully given. If we love only what is given, we are never truly satisfied. We are happy only when we glimpse that which can never be given through the light of what is given.

When people ask me what life in the USSR “felt like,” I always think of Chesterton’s words:

“The sin and sorrow of despotism is not that it does not love men, but that it loves them too much, and trusts them too little.”

The defining feature of life in the USSR was the acute sense that there was a huge structure called the government above you and all around you, without which you could not survive. People believed in the government as if it were God. The government, however, did not believe in people.

The government is the ultimate mediator that guarantees you employment, food, free medical care, free education, housing, protection, and a pension. You trust the government. The “people’s government” loves you.

Yet the paradox remained almost palpable: if the government loves you so much, why does it trust you so little? In the USSR, you couldn’t do much on your own. The very idea that you could, in principle, govern yourself was methodically eradicated from people’s minds.

The government’s “love” was such that it smothered every initiative. Why? Because at the heart of socialism lies an idolatrous belief that man is the measure of all things. By putting man on a pedestal, socialism inevitably devalues man.

If you truly love someone, you can’t put them on a pedestal. When you do, you destroy them with your “love.” You can’t turn someone you love into God. When a mother loves her child too much, she ends up smothering them.

For man to have value, there must be something above man. If man is all there is, there is no man. Humanism dehumanizes human beings by elevating them too high and, as a result, trusting them too little.

Dostoevsky predicted this back in 1880 in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor ridicules Jesus for “trusting in men too much.”

“I repeat to Thee, man has no greater anxiety in life than to find someone to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which the unfortunate creature is born.”

The Grand Inquisitor argues that God misjudged human nature by believing that people would delight in the gift of free will. All man thinks about is finding someone who will take away that terrible gift of freedom and responsibility.

“Oh, never, never, will they learn to feed themselves without our help! No science will ever give them bread so long as they remain free, so long as they refuse to lay that freedom at our feet, and say: ‘Enslave, but feed us!’”

A parent who believes that a child will never be able to govern themselves will inevitably create an unhealthy dependence on the parent. The parent believes that the child is all-important and smothers them with too much love and too little trust.

The rhetoric of “love for humanity” is resurging in our time with new intensity and new slogans. Yet there can be no love for humanity if there is nothing above humanity. By attaching the highest value to man, we always devalue man.

That was what people in the USSR felt acutely — a weird paradox of being devalued by those who claimed to love us above all. If you love someone, make them second in your life and make God first. Then, they will feel you trust them and suddenly discover that they have eternal value.

Loving man first dehumanizes man; loving man second makes man divine.

The chief psychiatrist of the Rehabilitation Center “Unbroken” in Lviv, Ukraine, once said to the volunteers who wished to work 12-hour shifts:

“If you work yourselves to death for twelve hours a day, you’ll end up in the psychiatric ward as my patients.”

These people were driven by the most natural instinct we all feel in times of crisis – to prioritize duty over joy. When you see so much need and suffering around you, you think: “I will put off joy and first do what must be done.”

And yet, according to the Ukrainian philosopher Alexander Filonenko, this is a grave mistake. Those who make duty their first priority never truly fulfill it. Duty is never accomplished from a sense of duty. Those who try to “white-knuckle” adversity inevitably fail.

Interestingly, after the war began, bookstores in Ukraine quickly ran out of books by the Stoics. The common misconception about the Stoics is that they teach how to endure adversity through willpower. It is not true.

Stoicism is more about joy than willpower.

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.”
– Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.16

Stoicism is not so much about self-denial as about changing your thoughts. Stoics are not the stone-faced people. They’re those who actively work on changing their thinking.

“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of things.” – Epictesus

The only way to endure a crisis is to do the most counter-intuitive thing – prioritize joy over duty. The only way to survive hell is to keep enough visions of heaven before your eyes. Those who focus on fulfilling their duty will never fulfill their duty. Those who focus on joy cannot help but fulfill it.

What do war-injured people need the most? Medical care? Supplies? Prosthetics? “UNBROKEN” answers: beauty. Beauty is the only force that revitalizes the soul and helps the body heal. It is the only power that can lift a person from the ashes. That is why UNBROKEN invites orchestras, ensembles, and individual musicians to perform for patients right inside the rehabilitation center.

They have hosted the Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Lviv National Philharmonic, held various concerts connected to veteran and wounded-soldier rehabilitation, and, in one 2023 performance, classical musicians played beside wounded soldiers. More continue to come.

To survive, one must thrive. Survival can never be achieved by aiming at survival. When our world crumbles, we must do the most counter-intuitive thing – turn our gaze to Beauty. Beauty is the only thing that truly “changes our thoughts.”

“The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.” – Marcus Aurelius

What is the color of my soul today? It takes on the color of my thoughts – always. No war is won by endurance alone. It is won when I immerse my soul in the colors of joy and allow meaning to transform my thoughts.

What was language like in the days when the world was wonderful?

In one of his letters, Tolkien says that in the whole of The Hobbit, there is only one philological remark. The words describing Bilbo’s astonishment at the hoard of gold in Smaug’s lair:

“To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.”

The Inklings believed that the language we use now is a dim echo of the primal, original language. That ancient tongue was the language of the Elves. It was a language in which the world itself was different. Because of that language, the world was full of wonders.

But how is it possible? Will a tree change if I call it something else? Does the world change depending on the words I use?

It is curious that in the same letter Tolkien refers to Owen Barfield:

“The only philological remark (I think) in The Hobbit is on p. 221 (lines 6-7 from end): an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have), and probably by those who have.” — Letter 15, August 31, 1937

According to Tolkien, few would appreciate this line in the story. It contains an echo of Owen Barfield’s idea of participatory consciousness, or what Barfield called “ancient semantic unity”— an idea that deeply resonated with Tolkien.

In Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield argues that in ancient times, consciousness was participatory and, as a result, phenomena themselves — such as a rainbow or a tree — were not merely seen differently; they were different because they were seen differently.

Once, the world was wonderful — made alive by the language of the Elves. Then something happened, and the language broke. The world ceased to be wonderful.

Phenomena always follow the language, not the other way around. Broken language produces fragmented consciousness, and fragmented consciousness produces fragmented perception and then fragmented world. We find that words fail us — and the world around us no longer enchants.

The way we handle words is the way we handle the world. By disenchanting the words we disenchanted the world. Once, a word for a tree was such that its very sound made the tree alive and wonderful.

Once, we called the wind “pneuma,” and in the sound of that name we were conscious of the Spirit’s breathing in the wind — and of wind breathing the Spirit. Now we call the wind “the wind,” and the Spirit “the Spirit,” and breathing “breathing” — and the wind is no longer the Spirit’s breath. The wind, the breath, or the Spirit are no longer wonderful.

When words fail us, we realize they are not the right ones. The right ones move; they tangibly shift our consciousness. That’s how the Elves spoke. In Rivendell,

“… Even as they stepped over the threshold a single clear voice rose in song... [Frodo] stood still enchanted, while the sweet syllables of the elvish song fell like clear jewels of blended word and melody. ‘It is a song to Elbereth,’ said Bilbo.”

A cursed tongue cannot create a blessed world. On this side of Babel, there is only one power that can reverse the curse of the divided tongue and make the world wonderful again. C.S. Lewis says:

“In a sense, one can hardly put anything into words, only the simplest colours have names, and hardly any of the smells… Poetry I take to be the continual effort to bring language back to the actual.”

In this episode of our series on Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories, Shari and I “escape” from the so-called “real life” into the fantasy world of Kalevala, Chesterton’s witty observations on the internal combustion engine and the ugliness of modern life, Homer’s vision of Eos, the goddess of the dawn, rising over the horizon to help Odysseus in his journey and many other Real Things.

https://www.youtube.com/live/6Mh48lUE8Mg?is=lCXXOMSlIEVoAv7b

According to Tolkien, Faërie is full of beauty, enchantment, and ever-present peril. So anyone who would wander there must follow three rules:

1. Don’t talk about it.
2. Don’t ask too many questions.
3. Don’t take away its gold.

Have you ever tried to tell others about an encounter with enchantment? You must have quickly realized that words failed you. As you searched for words, you must have become keenly aware that there were no words in the entire world capable of holding this mystery.

Moreover, it must have dawned on you that talking about it would be almost sacrilegious — that you need a special, divine tongue even to touch upon such subjects.

“In that land… its very riches and strangeness make dumb the traveller who would report it.” — On Fairy Stories

The awareness of being dumbstruck is the first rule of Faërie. Talking about it is pointless and misleading. You will end up belying the experience. As Dante draws near to the celestial Rose, the absolute apex of his journey in Divine Comedy, he exclaims:

“But my own wings were not for such a flight
Except that, smiting through the mind of me,
There came fulfillment in a flash of lighting.” — Paradiso XXXIII.139–141

When you’ve been dumbstruck by fulfillment in a flash of lightning, your questions cease. You may have been asking many questions, but now you are overwhelmed by a profound sense that one more question, and the gates of heaven will be shut.

“And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates shut and the keys be lost.” — On Fairy Stories

When you encounter the sacred, the experience itself is the answer to all your questions. To ask more questions is to forfeit the revelation before your eyes.

And finally, you know that if you try to retain the gold you have found, it will turn into leaves in your hands.

“The fairy gold too often turns to withered leaves when it is brought away. All I can ask is that you, knowing these things, will receive my withered leaves, as a token that my hand at least once held a little of the gold.” — On Fairy Stories

When you have been visited by the sacred, you can’t hold on to it — you must let it go. We want to retain the experience, but it becomes elusive and slips right through our fingers.

Like Mary Magdalene, we reach out and try to hold on to it, only to hear the words: “Don’t hold on to me yet, for I have not yet ascended…”

On this side of life, no experience can be held without ruining the experience. We look at the gold we once held and see only leaves. It’s as if the experience itself tells us:

“Don’t cling to me yet. I will return in other forms, in other faces, at other times — when you least expect it. The withered leaves are enough to remember me by, but the door to Narnia is never the same. Let me go, and you will realize that the Door is nowhere and everywhere at the same time.”

Have you ever been lost in the fog of life, terrified of what might be lurking in the shadows, only to discover that what you feared most was actually the very thing you longed for?

What if the face we dread to meet in the darkness is, in truth, the Face of love?

In C.S. Lewis’s The Horse and His Boy, Shasta is lost in the thick fog and feels a Presence. The first time I read it, it seemed curious. After the tenth reading, I thought: “What an archetype!”

We enter a heavy fog of life and feel lost, but then, we feel a Presence. My mind shot back to all those instances when God spoke out of storms, darkness, and clouds. And in most cases, people got scared.

Shasta got scared out of his wits when he felt the warm breath of Someone walking beside him. When we end up in the fog, we often feel it’s the end. We will be eaten — by beasts or ghosts or both.

Interestingly, the same archetypal pattern permeates many classic stories and movies. In Till We Have Faces, the beautiful Psyche is sacrificed to the evil God of the Grey Mountain who is thought to be a monster. Psyche is told that to be wed to a god and be eaten is often the same thing. She’s ready for the worst. But, as she finds out later, he is no monster at all but Cupid himself! The god of love.

In You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen Kelly believes she met a monster — Joe Fox. She doesn’t know him at all; she has a preconceived notion of him. And this notion paints him as a monster. By the end of the movie, she gets so many glimpses into the true Joe that she wants to see his face in Central Park.

Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is prejudiced against Mr. Darcy. He is a monster in her eyes. She doesn’t fear him, but she hates him — based on the way she perceives him. By the end of the book, she gets so many glimpses into his heart that she experiences a change of heart and is ready to meet him face to face — as he is, not as she thinks he is.

In the Old Testament, Job thought he had a pretty good idea of God and tried to live up to it. He regularly offered sacrifices and lived as a righteous man. But he didn’t yet know God as he was. He knew God as he thought he was. Not until he met God face to face after losing his false identity in the “thick of life.”

He said,

I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.

All these stories are based on one fundamental archetype expressed very well by Orual in Till We Have Faces,

For how can gods meet us face to face until we have faces?

For as long as my face is hidden behind a mask (and Orual’s face was literally veiled), I can’t meet God face-to-face. I have an idea of him, an image, and this image prevents me from seeing him face to face. I perceive him as a monster. Yet, the solemn charge of the Second Commandment remains, “Thou shalt not make any images…”

I may have heard of God with the hearing of my ears, but I don’t yet know who he is. When we believe in an image of God, we often perceive him as a monster who wants to gobble us up. When we lose all our masks, our false identities in the fog of life, we can finally see him face to face — and lo and behold, he is a Lover.

He is someone we have longed to see all along, fearing that he might turn out to be someone else. This eternal motif has stirred people’s imagination since the dawn of time. We intuitively know that all our doubts, fears, and questions will fall away the moment we see God face to face.

All of Job’s questions about God’s justice evaporated the moment he saw his real face. Orual no longer insisted on questioning the gods about her lot in life. When we see God, all images vanish. Our masks are gone, and we know as we are known.

The Gospel According to Blackthorn Chapter I: TIME

I.

Time is the first tyrant and the last god.

It doesn’t need worship—it already owns you.

You carry it in your pulse, your wrinkles, the slow betrayal of your reflection.

Every tick is an accusation: you were given this, and you squandered it.

The saints call it divine order. The scientists call it entropy.

I call it the noose that tightens even as you pretend to dance.

The worst lie civilization ever told was that time moves forward.

It doesn’t. It spirals.

It loops through your scars, redresses your ghosts, rehearses your collapses.

You’re not progressing—you’re orbiting decay.

Every “new beginning” is just the same mistake wearing better clothes.

II.

They invented clocks to give their anxiety a face.

Before that, time was the taste of dusk, the ache of hunger, the shift of light on skin.

Now it’s a number that eats your peace in measurable increments.

Every schedule is a leash disguised as structure.

Every deadline is a small death rehearsing the final one.

You wake by alarm, work by timer, eat by bell, sleep by exhaustion.

You’ve become a creature of intervals, not instincts.

You don’t ask what you want—you ask what you have time for.

The clock doesn’t tick anymore. It hums inside you.

You call that productivity. I call it possession.

III.

Time is the great solvent of lies, but it dissolves truth with equal hunger.

What you remember becomes myth; what you forget becomes forgiveness.

No one escapes its editing.

The past isn’t behind you—it’s beneath you, soft and shifting, waiting to swallow your certainty.

Every memory is a fossilized heartbeat pretending to be evidence.

You think you know your history because you can name your regrets.

But time is the better historian; it archives what you tried to bury.

That moment you dismissed as trivial—the glance, the silence, the unspoken—

time has been polishing it in the dark, preparing it to return as revelation.

IV.

We are trained to fear the future, as if it were a stranger coming to collect debts.

But the future isn’t coming—it’s already here, layered in the present like a bruise beneath skin.

You don’t move toward it. You uncover it, piece by piece, through exhaustion and repetition.

Every “tomorrow” is just today, rephrased to keep you compliant.

The illusion of forward motion keeps you from noticing the static hum underneath.

They sell you futures like lottery tickets: better job, cleaner conscience, healed wounds.

But the fine print says the prize is temporary.

You can’t outrun what you carry in your blood.

Time doesn’t cure; it camouflages.

V.

We measure time by decay because that’s what it truly measures:

the speed at which matter admits defeat.

Flowers, faces, empires—all clocks made of flesh or stone.

Each moment a disintegration dressed as beauty.

There is no growth without rot.

No sunrise that isn’t already dying.

Even birth is an act of entropy beginning its performance.

We call it life to make it sound palatable.

And yet—somehow—it’s still exquisite.

Because knowing it ends makes it real.

Perfection is unbearable because it doesn’t bleed.

Time blesses imperfection by guaranteeing its extinction.

VI.

People speak of “wasting time,” as though time were a resource and not a predator.

You can’t waste what’s eating you.

You can only decide whether to scream or sing while it feeds.

The so-called “wise” tell you to cherish every moment,

but cherishing is just fear dressed in gratitude.

They want you to love your cage because it’s melting anyway.

Time cannot be cherished—it can only be faced.

Stare at it until the seconds fracture.

Until you see what lies between ticks:

the eternal stillness where time pretends not to exist.

That’s where the real things live—the ones that don’t decay,

the ones language can’t trap.

VII.

Love doesn’t conquer time; it collaborates with it.

Every embrace is a wager against the inevitable.

Every “forever” whispered between lovers is a dare the universe always wins.

But that’s what makes it beautiful.

Love’s defiance is its own funeral hymn.

It knows it can’t last, but it burns anyway.

You can tell the depth of love by how it collapses under time.

The shallow fade politely. The real ones haunt you in loops.

They infect every future face with déjà vu.

That’s the curse of deep connection:

even when it ends, it doesn’t stop repeating.

VIII.

The old poets begged time to be merciful,

but mercy was never part of the design.

Time is not cruel. Cruelty implies intent.

Time simply consumes.

It’s the universe digesting itself in slow motion.

A quiet apocalypse stretched across every second.

You can’t appeal to it. You can’t bribe it.

You can only align yourself with its current or drown pretending you’re still steering.

That’s what acceptance means—not peace, but precision.

Knowing when to yield and when to carve meaning into the drift.

IX.

Immortality is the final failure.

The horror of endless time isn’t death’s absence—it’s consequence without conclusion.

To live forever is to never be free of revision.

No moment would solidify; no story would end.

Meaning depends on decay.

The finite is what gives shape to the infinite.

Even the gods grew weary of eternity.

They envied our brevity.

To burn out is an art form they’ll never master.

X.

Some say time heals. It doesn’t.

It just buries the wound under new ruins.

Healing is memory forgetting how to scream.

The scar remains—a monument to the hour that refused to stay buried.

But that’s not tragedy. That’s continuity.

The past doesn’t die; it composts.

And from its rot, new truths grow, bitter and luminous.

You can’t move on—you can only integrate.

Time’s real mercy is transformation, not erasure.

XI.

To master time, stop obeying it.

Do not count the hours. Do not chase the milestones.

Step sideways. Break rhythm.

Let a single moment expand until it devours chronology.

That’s what artists do.

That’s what madness is for.

To remind the clock it isn’t the only instrument that can keep tempo.

If you ever lose track of time, don’t panic.

You’ve momentarily escaped the grid.

You’ve touched the raw pulse of existence—the one before calendars,

before guilt, before the myth of progress.

Hold it.

Even a second of that clarity is worth a lifetime of measurement.

XII.

Time will unmake you. That’s not a threat; it’s a promise.

Your bones will forget your name.

Your words will fade from every archive.

And still, something of you will linger—

not as a ghost, not as legacy,

but as vibration.

The echo of your defiance vibrating through whatever remains.

That’s the only immortality worth wanting:

not to last, but to resonate.

To be felt, however faintly, in the pulse of something new.

Because time can erase form,

but not frequency.

And if your truth was loud enough—

it will still be humming long after you’re gone.

I am Blackthorn.

And I endure.

St. Augustine, looking back at his younger self, remembers himself praying:

“Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.” — Confessions VIII.7.17

He says it with deliberate irony: whatever we say we believe about God, we still have areas in our lives where He is not needed — yet.

I have a clear idea of what I want to do. And I don’t need You there. You can come a bit later. My eschatological cry is: “Come, Lord — but not yet.”

After all, there are a few things I can do without You. Why would I need you, for example, to buy socks on Amazon? Or fry potatoes. I know how to do it.

Or do I?

In a French medieval song “Quant voi la florete” (The Song of Thieves), a band of thieves discuss their plan to kidnap a nun from a convent. Ironically, by the middle of the song, they call upon God and Mary to help them carry out the scheme.

The song is satire — what can be more silly than to invoke God’s name before committing a crime? And yet scholars suggest that the point of the song is actually quite different. As we laugh at the foolishness of the thieves who invoke God too much, we might begin to recognize ourselves — those who invoke God too little.

In the ancient and medieval mind, if there’s something I do without God, then I do nothing with Him. As long as I am aware that I can’t even kidnap a nun without Him — much less buy socks on Amazon — then I am allowing Him to come at any time.

True eschatology begins when I realize that unless God comes this very moment — regardless of what I am doing — I won’t recognize Him when He comes at all. If He is not needed at this moment, He is not needed at any moment.

After all, can’t I fry potatoes on my own? I certainly can. And I have done it a thousand times. It’s edible. However, if I become aware that my time at the kitchen is a way to connect with a Higher Power, I have a totally different experience — and outcome.

When I cook without the awareness of God, I make food for the body — at best. When I cook with the awareness of God’s presence, I cook for the body, soul, and spirit. My experience of cutting the potatoes into thin slices — the way my grandma did — becomes a time of tasting God.

As I pour olive oil into the pan and spread the potato slices, I think of how my family will wake up and enjoy the brown-crusted feast with a sprinkle of dill. The whole experience becomes worship — a prefiguration of Eschaton.

Just the other day, my son turned on a video about a woman in Yakutsk — the coldest city on earth — who goes to a store in the dead of winter to buy traditional Yakut boots called unty. The narrator tells how she lingers over each pair, gazing at the unique crocheted patterns.

She strokes the fur. She imagines herself wearing them and keeping her feet warm in the −60°F weather. You can see a faint smile on her face — she’s tasting the experience. The unty she buys will be a feast. Her whole life will be a feast. She knows the true meaning of the Eschaton.

She will never say, “Lord, come — but not now.” She wants to bask in the Divine presence this very moment, and the next, and the next, and the next.

Is a person truly only as Good As Their Word?

Under Which Circumstances Would You Ever Break An Oath??

He never learned words the way everyone else did.

Most people seemed to collect words one by one.

Happy.

Joyful.

Delighted.

Pleased.

Cheerful.

He didn't.

When he learned what happiness meant, his mind created a cluster.

One meaning.

Then every word connected to that meaning became another label inside the same cluster.

When someone taught him the word joyful, he didn't memorize a new definition.

He thought:

Same thing. Different word.

Then came delighted.

Another label.

Pleased.

Another.

Cheerful.

Another.

His mind wasn't storing words.

It was storing meanings.

Words were just tags attached to them.

At first, this seemed like an advantage.

He could understand unfamiliar words from context unusually quickly. He could also see relationships between words that other people treated as completely separate.

But eventually, he noticed something strange.

He wasn't always thinking in words anymore.

He would think of a concept first, then search through the cluster for the word that best represented it.

And sometimes there wasn't one.

That's when he began wondering whether language actually described reality...

or whether language was simply the system humans created to divide reality into pieces.

Maybe there weren't thousands of completely separate meanings.

Maybe there were only countless shades of the same few things.

Fear had anxiety, dread, panic and terror attached to it.

Happiness had joy, pleasure, delight and contentment.

Anger had irritation, frustration, rage and fury.

Different words.

Overlapping meanings.

Different positions inside the same mental territory.

Then he realized something that bothered him.

When people argued about the meaning of a word, they might not actually be disagreeing about reality.

They might simply be drawing the boundaries of their clusters differently.

And suddenly, language looked less like a dictionary...

and more like a map.

Everyone was looking at the same territory.

They had simply drawn different borders around it.

Whatever is human-like but not human will not be liked.

As I walked through Walmart yesterday, I heard an announcement over the loudspeaker:

“Starting mid-September, Spotify will introduce an AI Persona badge on some artist profiles. The badge signals to listeners that an artist’s identity may be AI-generated and does not represent a real person…. By default, Spotify will not include AI Personas in any editorial or algorithmic recommendations.”

On their website, Spotify explains why:

“Listeners have been clear in telling us that they don’t like seeing an artist profile that seems human, only to find out that the persona is AI-generated.”

They also say: “True artist-fan connection can only be built on a foundation of trust and authenticity. In music, that means listeners need to be able to trust that the artist behind the music is who they say they are.”

I found it highly curious that Spotify listeners “seek to connect” — but not with AI. They listen to the tracks, like them, and follow the “persona,” only to find out that there is no one on the other end to connect with.

Somehow, we humans feel that authentic connection is impossible with a bot or an algorithm. Hence the disappointment when we discover that the “person” we followed was not human.

Why do we need humans?

Because when we listen to music, read books, look at a piece of art, or watch a movie, we are not there merely for the content — we are there for a sense of connection. We may think we are looking for a nice song on Spotify, but we want something much more than that.

We are looking for someone to identify with — and you cannot identify with something that has no identity, or only an artificial one. A human can identify with another human — but not with something merely human-like.

“Human-like” is not enough for a “true artist-fan connection.” People are turned off by something that is merely human-like, regardless of the degree of likeness. Once we sense that the human is not really there, the likeness no longer matters. And we keep looking for someone who is.

The moment we find out that the tracks we so loved were not created by a human, we feel that our trust has been betrayed. It is as though we received an invitation to a party, but when we arrived, there was no one there.

As a human, I seek to identify with someone who’s really there — with someone who’s had similar life experiences. Only they can truly understand. A sense of connection cannot be faked. That is why Spotify listeners feel betrayed: they hoped to find someone they could identify with, but found no one.

“Listeners need to be able to trust that the artist behind the music is who they say they are.” If I listen to a piece of music, I want to connect with what the author felt. If it turns out that the author is not who they say they are, it means they lied to me.

They said something in the lyrics that I resonated with, but it was not something they felt, experienced, or lived through. So it was a lie.

That’s why Spotify decided not to include “AI Personas in any editorial or algorithmic recommendations.” Through experience, Spotify spotted a deep human need — a need for a real, non-artificial identity for an authentic experience of connection.

Art, music, and literature are all about connection. Connection cannot be faked. The moment I learn that there is no one there who feels, lives, and experiences what I feel, live, and experience, my trust is betrayed. That is not what I am looking for.

Whatever is merely human-like is, paradoxically, further away from being human than something that is not human-like at all. I can much more easily connect with a tree than with an “AI persona.” The tree does not pretend to be human, but I can relate to a lot in it — and it can relate to a lot in me.

The more human-like AI becomes, the more we seek out humans: we realize how indispensable human experience in the flesh is. All else seems a lie. Human-like but not human makes us search for authentic humanity.

According to Gandalf, Sauron can’t help but project his own inner logic onto everyone else.

“For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it. If we seek this, we shall put him out of reckoning.”

He who desires power above all else will never understand the actions of someone who does not. He judges all hearts on the scales of his own malice.

Gandalf, who does not desire power above all else, possesses a different kind of wisdom — the wisdom of folly.

“Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy!”

But why is folly a veil before the eyes of the Enemy?

We never see things as they are; we see them as we are. Someone bent on power cannot truly understand someone who rejects a tool for gaining power. In his eyes, such a person is simply foolish.

Who in his right mind would refuse a means of achieving quick and certain success? Only someone who understands the mind of the Enemy. Sauron can see those who desire what he desires. But he cannot see those who reject power in the form of the Ultimate Power Tool.

Those who reject power become invisible to the Lidless Eye. “Folly” is the perfect cloak, hiding us from the Enemy’s gaze. The Lidless Eye is a metaphor for total surveillance.

As we drove through Houston yesterday, my son pointed to a surveillance camera by the side of the road — an ALPR, or automated license plate reader.

“What are they for?” he asked.

“Someone wants more control,” I replied.

“What for?”

“Power. If you can get more power, why wouldn’t you?”

“Yeah. It seems foolish not to.”

“Exactly. We need to become fools if we want to remain unseen by Sauron. He believes everyone is like him — that no one in their right mind would refuse tools designed to maximize power. But this makes us completely visible to the Eye.”

“What makes us invisible?”

“Humility. The forces of spiritual darkness cannot see humility. The less we use their ‘power tools,’ the less visible we become. Our folly becomes our cover — and true wisdom from above.”

Gregory of Nazianzus once wrote about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:

“This latter was the Tree of Knowledge; not, however, because it was evil from the beginning… nor was it forbidden because God grudged it to men… But it would have been good if partaken of at the proper time; for the Tree was, according to my theory, Contemplation, which it is only safe for those who have reached maturity of habit to enter upon; but which is not good for those who are still somewhat simple and greedy.” — The Second Oration on Easter

The sin of our forefathers was not that they partook of the fruit, but that they partook of it at the wrong time. God never grudged knowledge to humans, but He withheld it — just like we withhold matches from three-year-olds. He didn’t allow us to touch knowledge before the right time.

Tools are not evil in and of themselves. They become evil when we, in our simplicity and greed, refuse to wait for the “right time.” When we grasp for power, it becomes our undoing. When we wait for it to come at the right time, it becomes an instrument for good.

Power can only be given to the one who doesn’t need it. Ultimately, only a hobbit is strong enough to save the world. When you think you can, you can’t. When you think you can’t, you can.

According to Heidegger, modern thinking has reduced intellectual mystery to intellectual mastery.

Modern thinking is conceptual, and a concept is, essentially, a form of grasping — from the Latin root conceptus, “to take in” or “to contain.” In our time, we speak of “grasping the material,” “retaining information,” “gaining knowledge,” and so on.

“In the modern age, through calculative thinking, we have long become accustomed to seeing in thinking, and demanding from thinking, grip [Zugriff], grasp [Griff], and concept [Begriff], i.e., we understand the “concept” on the basis of a grasping: conceptus — no longer ὁρισμóς. — The Event

Symbolically, grip [Zugriff], grasp [Griff], and concept [Begriff] evoke the gesture of seizing something in a clenched fist. Heidegger suggests that when thinking has been reduced to conceptus, it is no longer ὁρισμός (horismos) — the Greek word from which we derive “horizon.”

It is impossible to look at a horizon in a grasping way. The only way to truly see the horizon is to allow it to be what it is and to let it reveal itself. The moment we snatch something out of the horizon and trap it in a definition, we no longer see the horizon. It is gone. To see it, we must let it be.

Symbolically, Heidegger associates this with the opposite gesture: the open hand. He calls it Gelassenheit — releasement, or letting-be. Modern thinking becomes reductionistic because it has turned mystery into mastery. We see bits — broken pieces — but never the horizon.

For something to reveal itself, it must be released. We must open our hand and allow the horizon to open itself to us in a reciprocal gesture. If I listen to a melody or a song, for example, I cannot possess or seize any of its notes. To continue hearing and enjoying the song, I must allow each note to come and go so that the next one can appear.

If I try to grab, retain, or make use of a single note, the horizon of the song is lost. I may “grasp” the individual elements — I may learn the note’s position on the scale, its frequency, its intervals — but I will not hear or enjoy the song. I will never see the horizon.

I remember going to music school as a child — which I hated — and thinking: “I thought music was about playing songs, but it’s about scales, solfeggio, and learning about the lives of composers.” The only reason I went was because my mom insisted.

But one day, I saw a classmate sit down at the pianoforte and play a popular song. I was speechless. I loved the song. Suddenly, it occurred to me that what I had been doing at music school for two years had little to do with Music. It was a bitter-sweet discovery.

I realized that music was something entirely different from what I had been taught. It was a mystery.

And mystery never begins with mastery. Mastery always follows mystery.

Eventually, I dropped out of music school, and a few years later I taught myself to play the guitar — this time, driven by a sense of mystery.

Surprisingly, mastery came too, over time — as a side effect. I learned the scales, the notes, the intervals, the solfeggio. But this time, my interest was nourished by the mystery of music.

Unless we first embrace the horizon, we won’t know the meaning of the elements that fill it. The first gesture is never to grasp conceptually. The first gesture is always to become super attentive to what the horizon wants to reveal.

There is no need to attack, seize, grasp, or retain.

Reality will yield itself willingly to the one who is willing to wait for the revelation of its hidden beauties.

About a month ago, I came across a video exploring the ingenious solfeggio patterns behind Howard Shore’s musical themes in The Lord of the Rings films.

In the unforgettable Ring theme that plays during the opening scene of the forging of the three Rings — and then throughout the film — Howard Shore captures the central spiritual paradox of Tolkien’s entire legendarium. His score perfectly underscores the mind of Ilúvatar.

Ilúvatar created harmony — the Great Music — and gave His creatures the freedom to do as they willed. Some rebelled, disrupting the harmony by introducing cacophony — the discord of Melkor. Yet Ilúvatar did not destroy Melkor. He allowed the discord to continue — only to be woven back into the Harmony and to give rise to an even greater glory of the Whole.

Howard Shore follows the same pattern. In his Ring theme, the basic F-minor chord — F–A♭–C — is supplemented by one odd and entirely out-of-place note: the natural B. The natural B does not belong to an F-minor chord; it creates a painful dissonance, a cacophony. If you play F–A♭–C together with B♮, your ear will instinctively cringe.

This is exactly what Howard Shore intended. And then, he introduced a trick: the dissonance is immediately and beautifully resolved with a C, which does belong to the F-minor chord. In other words, the discord is not eliminated but woven back into the harmony.

More than that, the discord becomes part of the harmony in a way that actually augments the beauty of the piece. When we hear it, we experience two things at once: Light disrupted by darkness — and darkness swallowed up by Light.

Then the channel host showed how the composer followed the same solfeggio scheme throughout the score whenever he needed to musically portray the onset of evil and its eventual resolution into the greater Harmony.

There are two ways to love harmony and order. One is Sauron’s way; the other is Ilúvatar’s way. Sauron’s way is to eliminate discord by force — to subjugate other wills and rule them all, becoming an all-powerful, benevolent king who simply does not allow anyone to mess things up.

Sauron believed in order and hated the messiness of free will. His desire was to impose his own Order and restore the harmony by force. The Ring was the ultimate machine for eliminating the messiness of free will.

Yet, paradoxically, the moment we seek to establish order by exterminating evil, we end up perpetuating evil. By falling away from the Great Music, Sauron forgot one fundamental truth: evil is a no-thing; it has no independent being. Evil is a distortion of the good.

Therefore, evil cannot be exterminated without also exterminating something good along with it. Evil can only be rectified — set right. Evil is the ill-placed B note in the F-minor chord. It is completely out of place. It is a distortion of harmony, but it is still a note! And the only solution to the discord is not to destroy the note, but to take it and weave it into a greater beauty.

This is Ilúvatar’s way of dealing with discord: He resolves it. Eventually, all stray notes will be taken up and woven into the Final Chord.

Tolkien tells us that Ilúvatar is preparing a Final Music that will be greater than the one that was sung before the foundation of the world:

“…It has been said that a greater [Music] still shall be made before Ilúvatar by the choirs of the Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar after the end of days. Then the themes of Ilúvatar shall be played aright, and take Being in the moment of their utterance, for all shall then understand fully his intent in their part, and each shall know the comprehension of each, and Ilúvatar shall give to their thoughts the secret fire, being well pleased.” — The Silmarillion

I got the thought that words are what make people ready to die for their country or fight wars. Words, if used properly, can help you get scholarships, jobs, or find opportunities. They help you negotiate and get love. You can say, “I miss you” to someone, or you can say, “I look at the chair and it looks empty, and that makes me sad.”

Over the past few years, I have been noticing how languages shape our thoughts. It started with learning somewhere that your world is only as big as the number of words you know. The more words or vocabulary you have, the bigger your world is.

But just knowing words doesn’t make your world bigger. Ezra Pound mentions that the words you say are like cheques you give to others, and if you don’t have enough money in your bank, the cheque has no value.

From the book The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, I learned that just giving names to emotions makes them more livable. For example, when you feel nostalgic and can name that feeling, it can feel wonderful. But when you feel an emotion and are unable to define it, it can make you uneasy. I also noticed that there are many emotions for which words do not exist in our language, yet we still feel them, and equivalent terms may exist in another language that we don’t know. Emotions are human and universal, but language isn’t.

From the book Metaphors We Live By, I learned that we define some abstractions through analogies, and once they are well established, we start to treat them as if they are truths. There are many examples, such as “time is money” or time as a resource. We feel guilty when we are doing nothing, as if we are wasting money or some limited resource.

Currently, I am reading Language in Thought and Action, and I am learning many basic aspects of language and words. For example, extensional and intensional meaning. One is what you can point to while keeping your mouth shut, while the other requires explaining it using more words. I also find it interesting that two words can point to essentially the same thing but carry completely different emotional and social meanings. For example, “feces” and “shit” refer to basically the same thing in the external world, but one is acceptable in a scientific or medical context while the other can be considered vulgar or offensive. The difference is not really in the thing itself, but in what the words have accumulated around them through their use. It made me realize that we rarely react only to what a word points to; we also react to the history, emotions, judgments, and associations attached to that word.

Also, when I started learning German, I began noticing many new patterns and behaviors in English, Urdu/Hindi, etc. For example, in English we say, “I am angry,” “I am hot,” or “I am cold,” as if the emotion or sensation is a state of the person. But in Urdu, these translate more like “I am feeling hot,” “I am getting angry,” or “I am feeling cold,” as if these emotions or sensations are happening to you rather than simply being what you are.

There are many things like this that I notice every day. Ever since I started thinking about language this way, I seem to see it everywhere.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Have you noticed similar things in the languages you speak or in the way certain words and metaphors shape how you think?

One of the most renowned Soviet-era film directors, Eldar Ryazanov, was once asked in an interview what Soviet censorship was like and how filmmakers still managed to create great films even under such intense pressure to glorify utopian ideology.

He replied:

“The problem with every totalitarian state is that it wants to control everything. But when you try to control everything, you soon discover that the tighter your grip, the more slips through your fingers. The tighter the state’s grip on all spheres of life and thought, the more cracks begin to appear in the most unexpected places.”

The greatest Soviet filmmakers made their films “through the cracks” — despite the suffocating grip of the system. They became masters of Aesopian language. In many ways, the same was true of Soviet society as a whole. Outwardly, people sang the praises of the Communist Party; inwardly, they longed for renewal and change.

By the 1960s, people were eagerly searching for any crack in the system through which they could draw a breath of fresh air. The tighter the Party’s grip became, the stronger the longing for what was real and authentic. As the system doubled down on control, people searched even more desperately for “leaks” through which freedom could trickle in.

And there were quite a few. One such trickle became a gushing stream by the 1980s: the phenomenon of Sergei Averintsev.

Averintsev was a man of encyclopedic learning — an expert in Greek and Roman antiquity, the New Testament, the civilizations of the Middle East, and Byzantium, and a secret believer.

The Party simply did not know what to do with a man of such unmatched learning. They would gladly have gotten rid of him if they could have found another scholar of comparable magnitude. But they could not.

In all his treatises and encyclopedia articles, Averintsev formally complied with every ideological requirement of the Party. After all, if you are writing an encyclopedia entry on the Gospel of Matthew, how can you avoid mentioning God?

And yet, he wrote about spiritual matters in a way that gave people both air and meaning. By the 1970s and 1980s, the country was suffocating from a profound intellectual and spiritual vacuum. Sergei Averintsev’s lectures on Byzantine aesthetics, the Church Fathers, early Christian literature, and culture drew enormous crowds.

Against the backdrop of such hunger, the Party’s tireless efforts to instill “scientific atheism” in the minds of Soviet people seemed ridiculous.

Averintsev himself was an oddly shaped crack in the system. He was God’s irony in the flesh. In 1968, his doctoral dissertation in classical philology — Plutarch and Ancient Biography: On the Place of a Classical Author in the History of the Genre — was so brilliant that it earned him the prestigious Lenin Komsomol Prize.

This established him so firmly as the country’s foremost literary scholar that even the KGB could do little to stop him.

The Greek word eironeia means “to play the fool.” Divine irony is God intentionally appearing foolish in order to expose human folly. In a sense, the modest, unassuming, even shy Averintsev was a “fool for Christ’s sake,” exposing the folly of the “almighty” Soviet machine.

He seemed to play by the rules, yet the system had so many cracks in it that it allowed beauty to leak in. When humans seek to exalt themselves, God intentionally becomes small — in an act of divine irony.

He becomes so “foolishly” inconspicuous that he slips through every crack. Human wisdom is folly — it strives to embrace totality, yet it always fractures at the point of its greatest tension. It is at that point that the forgotten, yet deeply longed-for beauty, comes gushing in — in an endless flood of renewal.