Pointing to the Good stuff

Wood S Lot has a link on his page to some good writing by my favorite desert writer and the online magazine Killing the Buddha, new to me, with the properly irreverent, yet reverent attitude towards religious experience. Charles Bowden's Entrance Wound starts out just right:

Come with me and we will sink into our pleasures. No, we won’t do a line or have a toke or open that bottle. Those things are nice but they never go far enough. The nose goes, the weed takes too long and the liver must be considered, don’t you agree? This time we will get ripped and it will not be an idiom or a metaphor. This time we will take a harder drug, one denounced by the authorities.

Ah yes, the old drug awareness metaphor, livid and vivid for me and yes, I agree, Chuck. I'll let you figure out how Bowden gets from there to here:

The mesquite lives for centuries and we come and go with our cigarettes and coffee, and the mesquite rolls on and on as we pass through from womb to grave. The tree is stark, all bent and gnarly, and fails to make good wood for lumber. There is no straight to it, just this twisting and turning as it roasts under the sun. The grain is close and dark and runs to rich reds that rouge our eyes and make us envy. When burnt, the smoke is acrid, yet sweet, and hangs over our lives as incense for a church we cannot name and a faith we cannot fathom.

But you probably have to have a warm fuzzy feeling for spiny pleasures of the spirit. I do.

The site is good, too. An article about the spirituality of hopelessness, as expressed in a church newsletter contribution called My Kitty, is superb. And the magazine focuses on cooking, too!

Thanks, Terry!