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As an outspoken psychologist and best-selling author, Jordan Peterson become a lightning rod for debate on culture, gender, and the meaning of life itself. His newest book, We Who Wrestle With God, attempts to reinterpret the Bible through a psychological lens. Yet, some critics question whether his explorations of scripture offer revelation or revisionism.
Since I'm the bloke who needs the out-of-doors. With our language made physical in gardens, those marvellous pink barred clouds and angled rays can be nothing more than merely genuine.
From just up here, on the lip of mountain mileage, that pooling river mouth below, half salt but also hill-fresh, could seem a lagoon. On its low point, surmounting asphalt and breaking waters, sits the verandaed pub, a focus once of holiday shorescape.
Staring toward the stringy picture through a linguistic lens I have begun to see that the elderly magic, deplored by most religions, was a daughter of coincidence mathematically robed in some downright glorious colours.
When I was a kid, I certainly knew, that a cassowary in Tinbuctoo, was able to eat a missionary, cassock, bands and hymn-book, too. Because it rhymed, it had to be true. But what on earth were those bands doing? Nothing musical, I'll be bound, And a cassock, what sort of jigger was that?
Brunette or shocking white, these wallabies have their own special nook nearby, under that blackwood. Why just there, I ask myself: no particular foliage has given a meaning to the spot. Something about bone-dry shadow under those boughs appears to murmur clan or family. Yes, I know that sounds kind of patronising, but when these animals go through their routines we can see a social order clear as day.
Big daisies bulge on their bush, the lurid cyclamens are crouched in squeals of shocking pink, but raggedy scarlet geraniums have been out all winter and don’t give a stuff.
Many deaths of course are not small deaths. They evoke distinction, achievement, leadership, innovation, creativity or, in some cases notoriety, quixoticism or eccentricity. Yet placing some names above many, some in a class of their own, others in a ruck of the scarcely memorable, one indispensable criterion unites all the characters and places them beyond our imaginative, intellectual or descriptive reach: they are dead.
The diggers' catchcry, liberty, saw fascism a'yawning/ enfranchisement followed suit, with racism adorning/ its streamlined passions for the cause — White Australia Policy a'borning.
For what, I ask you, was somebody called our saviour in the turbulent middle-east (still in trouble, of course it must be) two long Ks ago? Light flickered on dwellers in death's dark shadow yet those turbulent sandy nations truckle on, just where their ancestors ambled out of Africa toward the hideogram of history.
'Monday is Day Oncology, where the dark burses arrive by courier, and we're glad to see them stripped for action, hooked in the air, lucent against fear.' Maybe only Steele could see these bags of chemo as Christological signs. As with the zoo once, so now the oncology ward offers hints of that other eden.
At sleep's near edge I busily ask myself — redundantly, rather — where soul might have its home: Like the golden tumbling apricots right next door attending on Christmas, my body has attained what another age would have called a certain age.