It is one of the lines of the beatitudes that gets repeated so much we forget what it means.

Matthew 5:6 Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.

Wow, that sounds serious. We can just imagine what it feels like to strive for righteousness, to be that clean, pure, self-contained person, maybe sitting in their toga and insisting that everyone just try to do better, with a serene patience.

But see, that is where we lost the metaphor. Because have you ever been hungry? Really hungry? Maybe I haven't been, but I have certainly been hambre enough times. And also really thirsty. It doesn't take too long to be really thirsty. And you know what hunger does to you? Even mild anger? It makes you mad and irritable and impatient and really really wishing that dumb shit would stop happening right now so you can get things done.

So what if Jesus wasn't speaking of a high-flown metaphor

About a week ago I had a rather strange computer problem where my laptop would connect to the WiFi and act like it had internet access but wouldn't load web pages. This was a problem with the laptop since the WiFi work fine with other devices and it was not specific to the browsers. It also went away for an inconsistent amount of time when I restarted said laptop which put me in this weird position of having to decide between attempting fixes and just restarting the silly thing. The average time till

I'm on my hands and knees, looking at the strange accretion of living growths that have begun to sprout from the ground in the shade around the base of a strange black boulder the size of my pickup truck. The boulder is the largest of several in a small clearing in what I think of as the jungle. The growths, almost like ferns but somehow plump and wet like fungus, are pinky-orange and sit entirely within the drip-line surrounding the tiny overhang of the boulder