gray matters

Gray matters, meaning all is not black and white, is it? Gray matters, as in all that stuff we associate with the brain and cognition (though neurologists tell us thinking and feeling really need each other and are not substantively different in a physiological terms). Gray matters, meaning the healthy person accepts, even embraces, doubt and ambiguity -- something that "originalists" and text-driven fundamentalists, literalists, have a hard time grasping.

So at lunch today my friend / mentor / brother /father /coach person handed me a small, well designed book, A Heart Full of Peace, by Joseph Goldstein, for Christmas 2010, with these words on page 91:

Love your crooked neighbor
with all your crooked heart.
-- W.H. Auden

Words that speak wisdom in today's climate of coarse discourse.

Poetry matters.

Gray.

Grey, too.

And black on white.