Doyle

September 28, 2025September 28, 2025

Precision

The recipe says set the oven to 450°.

I have baked a lot of bread, and I know that this oven lies. I could check it with a thermometer, but no need. I trust my experience. I set the oven to 420°, but I believe it’s closer to 450° inside, and that belief is based on experience.

Still, the oven’s bright digital display of numbers in an authoritative font makes me question myself every time–and that is the threat of science (or at least, technology). Trusting the abstract over your senses.

Rosemary bread, just out of the oven a few minutes ago….

If you want to make a missile, well, you’re going to have to trust the tech. If you want to make a decent loaf of bread, trust your hands.

January 5, 2025January 5, 2025

Perihelion, again

Just a few hours ago, we got as close to the center of our life force as we are going to get this year, three million (or so) miles closer than we will be in early summer.

That any of us are alive is beyond miraculous. The sun is the source of energy every thought you have, every twitch you make.

Some of us will not be here to see the sun the next time perihelion rolls around; some yet born will see the sun for the first time.

On New Year’s Day, “Pope Francis warned Christians against ‘imagining or inventing a God in the abstract’ during his Mass for the Solemnity of Mary, the Most Holy Mother of God,” as per the Vatican News.

I am not opposed to religion. It might even be innate. What destroys us is not religion per se but its abstract forms. The sun is real, its evidence seen daily, its power beyond comprehension. The Son, not so much.

Yesterday we passed as close to the sun as we will all year, a powerful “being” that drives all our motions, all our thoughts. The sun is real, The Son abstract.

Sol Invictus, mofos!

October 6, 2024October 6, 2024

Stealing the souls of children

“People pay for what they do,and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”

James Baldwin

In the end, it’s the ground that will save us, if we are, or even want, to be saved.

We’re of the mud, of the air, of the water, of the sun. We diminish the folks before us on this once fine land when we “honor” these as metaphors.

We diminish our ancestors from our homelands who spoke of the spirits and the blurring of the lines between the living and the dead as autumn darkness presses on our souls.

Cliffs of Moher, County Clare (Aaron Logan via Wikimedia)

These are not simply metaphors or myths or models. They are ways to understand the world, the world beyond the digital.

You cannot grasp a fistful of earth through a screen.
Our hands were made for more than pushing keys.

We are stripping the souls from our children.

We become who we deserve to become.
But we should let our children decide whether a soul is worth keeping.

Winter is coming, again.