"Dream Small" by Seth Lewis

Search for significance. Follow your passions. You’re the captain of your ship. You’re the author of your story. It’s all about you. 

The culture, and often even the church, constantly foster and reinforce these kinds of messages and belief systems. It’s no wonder we live in an increasingly atomized society of self-interested and (theoretically) self-sufficient individuals. These belief systems are reflected in our political parties, our schools, our literary and popular culture, and our traditional and social media. Our lives are, in effect saturated with these beliefs, and they’re so omnipresent that it’s difficult even to recognize them.

 

Seth Lewis has a suggestion: Dream small. 

 

“The world around you will constantly encourage you to follow your dreams,” he writes in Dream Small: The Power of the Ordinary Christian Life. “That’s not bad advice as fa as it goes, but I’m asking you to pause first, and take the time to ask an important question that often gets overlooked: just where, exactly, are your dreams leading you?” You need to aim your dreams, he says, and what consider what will you aim them at. His advice is to dream small.

 

Seth Lewis

His book is small, only 116 pages. But it packs a powerful wallop, because each succeeding chapter succinctly explains what it means to dream small. Size doesn’t matter. All of us, even the most famous and well-known, are a small part of a big story. That story is about life on an “upside-down ladder,” in which we’re tasked with helping. Small people (that’s all of us) dreaming small can result in a big effort, big value, and big success. Our significance lies not in what we accomplish but in who created us. That’s the story we’re a small part of.

 

Lewis, a native of the United States, lives with his family in southern Ireland, where he works with a number of Irish Baptist churches. He also blogs regularly at Seth Lewis.

 

It says something about us and our culture that a message that is the basic Christian message seems almost revolutionary. But these are times we live in. And the time is right – as it always is – to dream small.

“Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’” by Robert Crawford

After T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) published The Waste Land in 1922, it seemed that there might be a creative dry spell. As far as poetry was concerned, there was. He was struggling with his marriage and the declining mental health of his wife, Vivien; he was editing his literary magazine Criterion; and he was maintaining a full-time job in banking. The next year, he transitioned from banker to editor at Faber & Gwyer (eventually to become Faber & Faber), where he stayed for the next four decades. 

It is the second half of Eliot’s life, from 1923 to his death in 1965, that is the focus of Eliot After ‘The Waste Land’ by British poet and writer Robert Crawford. Crawford completed the first volume, The Young T.S. Eliot, in 2015. He’s completed the monumental biography seven years later, and, as he notes in the introduction, this biography has the benefit of the writer’s access to the extensive correspondence of Eliot and Emily Hale, his romantic interest for a considerable period of time. The letters were finally made available in 2020. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

"The Woman on the Island" by Ann Cleeves

After watching the Vera television series for years, it’s difficult to imagine Vera Stanhope looking any different from Brenda Blethyn’s portrayal – short, always wearing the same raincoat and hat, and somewhere in here 50s or 60s (Blethyn in in her 70s). But, once, Vera Stanhope was a young girl, before she was the rumpled police detective we’ve come to know. 

The Woman on the Island by Ann Cleeves is exactly that – Vera as a young girl. She travels with her widowed father to a tourist island (an island only at high tide). It’s a supposed holiday, but by this time Vera knows her father. Something else is up, and most likely it has to do with his poaching of eggs from highly valued bird species.

 

Ann Cleeves

It is that, but this time it also seems to be more. It’s mid-week, and her father tells her to stay put in their room until he returns. Of course, she doesn’t. She discreetly follows him. What she learns will help propel her on the way to her chosen career of police detective work.

 

Cleeves has published eight mysteries in the Jimmy Perez / Shetland series, including Raven Black (2008), Red Bones (2009), White Nights (2010), Blue Lightning (2011), Dead Water (2014), Thin Air (2015), Cold Earth (2017), and Wild Fire (2019). She’s also published nine mystery novels in the Vera Stanhope series (also a television series), six Inspector Stephen Ramsay mysteries, and several others works and short stories. The Jimmy Perez novels are the basis for the BBC television series “Shetland.” Cleeves lives in northeastern England.

 

The Woman on the Island is a kind of prequel, but it’s not the same kind of detective story Cleeves is known for with her Vera, Jimmy Perez, and other series. It moves more in the direction of serious fiction, but with just enough mystery to keep it true to form.

 

Related:

 

My review of Wild Fire by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of Cold Earth by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of Red Bones by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of Raven Black by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of White Nights by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of Blue Lightning by Ann Cleeves. 

 

My review of Dead Water by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of Thin Air by Ann Cleeves.

 

My review of The Long Call by Ann Cleeves.

The birds

After Matthew 6:25-34 

They fly and flutter, chirp

and squawk, soar and sing,

land to find the wayward,

unsuspecting worm or mouse

or chipmunk or other, edible

delights. They build their nests

with grass and twigs and

whatever’s at hand, even mud

(where do they get mud from?).

They don’t have, or need,

therapists. They ignore Facebook

and Twitter, their own tweets

more to their liking. They go 

about their work and day, 

knowing what they’re

supposed to do, what they’re

called to do. They’re always

provided for.

 

And if we’re loved

more than the birds, 

won’t we also be cared for?

Doesn’t he care for what

he loves even more?

 

Photograph by Jeremy Hynes via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Saturday Good Reads - August 13, 2022

Just when you think American politics couldn’t possibly get any more bizarre, it happens. I am not adding my two cents on what happened with the FBI at Mar-A-Lago. But I do recommend reading two accounts that are better informed than anything I could say. Journalist and Rolling Stone contributing editor Matt Taibi says Welcome to the Third World, while N.S. Lyons at The Upheaval takes a somewhat larger view and says, “It’s not hypocrisy, you’re just powerless.”  

David Murray, editor of Vital Speeches of the Day, dug out a gem from the archives. It’s a speech by an advertising executive, talking about the attitudes of young job seekers coming into the workforce, as in, “What can you do for me?” The speech was given in – 1962.

 

Right before the recent Missouri primary, I checked the Voter’s Guide, published by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I noticed that, for a number of Republican candidates in a variety of races, there was this: “Information not received at press time.” Danielle Kurtsleben, a reporter at NPR, was covering the primary in Wisconsin, and she discovered the same thing: Republican candidates wouldn’t talk to her or respond to emails or phone calls. She asked around and learned this wasn’t limited to Wisconsin. My only comment: why was the reporter so surprised?

 

More Good Reads

 

Ukraine

 

The documents the Russians are leaving behind – Lauren Wolfe at Chills.

 

"As Russians approach his town, 'the cat must still be fed'" – Gregory Warner at NPR.

 

When Stories Aren’t Enough: How Do You Write About the War in Ukraine? – Katya Cengel at Literary Hub.

 

Russia claims Ukraine used US arms to kill jailed POWs. Evidence tells a different story – CNN. 

 

Faith

 

True Life: I’m a Father in a Blended Family – Allen Reynolds at Urban Faith.

 

Hating the Culture Is Not a Strategy: Revulsion against the elites does not a Christian church build – Samuel James at Digital Liturgies.

 

News Media

 

The Decline and Fall of Newspapers – Charles Lipson at Real Clear Politics.

 

Man or Machine: Many Americans are unaware of the tole AI plays in the news they consume – University of Missouri.

 

Unabridged: Contrasting reactions to George Soros’ column in The Wall Street Journal to Tom Cotton’s in The New York Times – Heather Mac Donald at CityJournal.

 

Life and Culture

 

The West needs to grow up – Paul Kingsnorth at UnHerd. 

 

Shame and Exceptionalism: Livy’s Subversive History for Liberty – Paul Krause at Front Porch Republic.

 

The great unrest: How 2020 changed the economy in ways we can’t understand yet – Matt Rosoff at CNBC.

 

Knowing History and Knowing Who We Are – David McCullough at Imprimis (April 2005).

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Last Battle: The End of Narnia’s Beginning – Anthony Pagliarini at Church Life Journal.

 

The Five Great Novels of Dashiell Hammett – Larry Beinhart at CrimeReads. 

 

When Should I write? Brief Reflections on the Relationship Between Writing and Expertise – Ronni Kurtz at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Poetry

 

On Quarantine Dreams – Karen An-hwei Lee at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin).

 

Niche – Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

The Mirage – Charles Simic at Literary Hub. 

 

Be Unto Me – Brian and Katie Torwalt

 Painting: The Convalescent, oil on canvas (1918-1919) by Gwen John (1876-1939).

Age of anxiety

After Matthew 6:25-34 

You see the ads on television,

momentary flashes across the screen,

the ones for the new car, the vacation,

the diet soda, the prescription drug

(fine print mentioned breathlessly),

all aimed at desire, at parting you

from your money or your vote.

You nod or shrug or smile or frown

and the vision gives way to desire,

meets the reality of what’s in the bank,

gives way to a new burst of desire, and

you see the wife and kids sigh over

the promise of a vacation and reality

gives way to the slight sense of anxiety

over what might happen if you don’t

get that vacation, new car, diet soda, 

or prescription (with its fire-hose

description of the fine print), and how

the lives of your family will constrict,

and so you wonder if you can afford

a loan (interest rates are low, after all)

on top of the car payment and

the mortgage and the rise in the price

of groceries and everything else,

that electric bill just took a hefty jump,

and you really need to make

that credit card payment but, oh man,

that vacation would be fantastic, and

then you hear your son say, “Dad,

can we go throw the football?”

 

Photograph by Kasper Rasmussen via Unsplash. Used with permission.

 

"Death at Eden's End" by Jo Allen

Eden's End is a nursing home filled with elderly residents. Death is a normal if not common occurrence. A woman who’s 100 years old is found dead in her chair. The expression on her face suggests she’s angry that she’s been cheated of a few more years. It looks like a natural death, except a visiting home nurse has questions. She thinks that the lady might have been helped along. 

The nurse happens to be the ex of Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Jude Satterthwaite of the Cumbria Police. She tells him her suspicions, and he convinces her to call it anonymously in to the National Health Service. That they’re talking civilly to each other at all is something of a miracle, but she knows he’s almost a puritan when it comes to crime, law, and order, and he’s telling her to do what she herself wanted to do anyway. He just gave her the needed push.

 

Jo Allen

As it turns out, the woman died of suffocation. She was smothered. Suspects are plentiful – the Polish care worker, the director of the home, a niece waiting for her aunt to die, and possibly even person or persons unknown.

 

For DCI Satterthwaite and his team, leads are few. Slowly, they begin to unravel what looks to be a very clever plot, one with its seeds in decades long since passed.

 

Death at Eden’s End is the second of the DCI Satterthwaite mysteries by British author Jo Allen. Allen mixes together a charismatic DCI, an ex-wife, a growing love interest on the police team, and a host of motives to roduce a fast-paced, satisfying mystery story.

 

Allen is a native of Wolverhampton, England, and has graduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and earth science. After a career as an economic consultant, she began writing short stories, romance, and romantic suspense under the pen name of Jennifer Young. She began writing the DCI Satterthwaite crime novels in 2017. 

 

Related:

 

Death by Dark Waters by Jo Allen.